Industrial design student builds Capella, the portable, unobtainable electric bike

Where most students only go so far as to render their designs, Truong Minh Nhat -- working on his senior project at the Ho Chi Minh City School of Architecture -- made a functional prototype, sourcing the parts from local manufacturers. Dubbed Capella, the lightweight vehicle folds down to a neat "backpack sized" package (well, maybe a large backpack), travels over 30 miles an hour, has a range of about 7.5 miles (on a two hour charge), and in its final, mass produced form it should weigh about 22 pounds. If you're looking for a wilder ride than most electric bike designs offer, and you happen to be reading this in Ho Chi Minh City, keep your eyes peeled.

[Via Core 77]

Update: This bike has a top speed of 30 km (roughly 18.6 miles) an hour.

[Nutsy @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:11AM]

Wow first :p
No seriously that is actually really cool :D I love the design work gone into this.
But it claims 7.5 miles on a single charge... Is that motor power alone? or peddle assisted?

I Imagen peddle assisted would take you even further and would work out better as the motor just helps when your tired or when your going up hills.

But again really nice design

[Techie @ Jan 3rd 2009 9:23AM]

You have to remember he's not rich since he's a student so he must buy standard equipments to suit his need. With a bigger pocket he can make that bike of his go 30 miles per charge.

[silverblackvoid @ Jan 3rd 2009 9:42AM]

WANT!!!

[Nutsy @ Jan 3rd 2009 6:38PM]

Who and why did you low rank my comment? i wasnt being negative about the bike at all. i simply asked if the 7.5 miles was peddle assisted or not...

[Chaos744 @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:15AM]

I concur!!!

[mattworldwide @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:21AM]

Great design! Is that weight correct? 22 lbs?? I'd like to know how he's going to achieve such a light weight because most bikes without an electric motor and a battery weigh more than that. This one weighs around 73lbs:

http://www.ultramotor.com/USA/Products/ProductDetails_USA.aspx?gProductId=57

[Wolfticket @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:53AM]

Since when did 30 kilometers per hour convert to over 30 miles per hour?

[Wolfticket @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:55AM]

That wasn't meant to be a reply btw.

[Patriks7 @ Jan 3rd 2009 9:12AM]

I was gonna ask the same thing.. My Colnago (street race bike) weighs a bit less than that, and its one of the lightest in its category.. :s

[DeoWulf @ Jan 3rd 2009 9:21AM]

Perhaps he gave it better structural engineering, allowing it to use lighter and weaker materials without losing integrity? Or maybe he just used lighter and weaker materials and it will break when you sit on it.

[Agent .25i @ Jan 3rd 2009 10:08AM]

@mattworldwide

Take a look at the guy who designed this bike... then take a look at the people he lives around. Do you really think he need to design a bike to handle 250+ pounds for the average user? No.
The link you provided has a proud "USA" right in the middle... that explains why his Electric bikes weigh so much. All the reinforcing to handle the fat assed overweight american, adds pounds.

Ho-chi-mihn sucks VC dick!!!! Ah-woooooo!!! - Platoon 1986

[Trevor @ Jan 3rd 2009 10:22AM]

Probably 22kg. Seeing as I ride a downhill bicycle that weighs 45lb, I just do not see an electric bike weighing in at 22lbs.

[Pete @ Jan 3rd 2009 11:08AM]

Patrik

A Colnago street race bike is one of the lightest in it's class and it's only a bit less in weight than that? What are you smoking? I ride a Kestrel and the frame + fork is less than 3lbs. The race bikes that are lightest in class weigh in at 14 or so lbs. And beyond that, there's a hardcore rider who's pared his racing bike down to 7lbs, fully functional, and rides around 100miles per week on it.

Get the right components on this thing, and it easily could fall under 30lbs.

[spirali @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:41AM]

Love the design and best of luck to the chap, but the image of him standing next to his bike looks like a photoshop. The bike is fully in profile view, not a degree rotated. The specs make it sound too good to be true imho.

[KilgoreTrout @ Jan 3rd 2009 10:31AM]

No, I don't think so, I agree that the specs of this bike are absolutely unrealistic particularly the weight, but if really the image is "shopped" then an incredible amount of work and time has gone in it.
Look at the background lines through the wheels, the way the fingers grip the saddle (which has no solution of continuity to the bike's frame). The perspective can seem a bit out of whack because the bike is white and the pic is taken with a flash, but this is consistent both for the bike and for the guy.
It could be a shop job, but then it's been made by a master pro.

[Pradster @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:55AM]

Why does his bike look Photoshopped?

[spirali @ Jan 3rd 2009 9:06AM]

@pradster

I'm not sure if you're asking the question or making an observation, but if you enlarge the image the bike looks completely flat and there's something wrong with his posture.

[oakie @ Jan 3rd 2009 9:08AM]

build it and i will buy it. that thing is gorgeous!

[Mario @ Jan 3rd 2009 10:24AM]

That's a seriously nice design. Whether it will be a blessing for society depends on who uses it.

If it's used as a substitute for cars, energy consumption and cost-per-mile would go down = WIN

If it's used as a substitute for peddle-powered bicycles, energy consumption would go up, along with the cyclist's waist measurement = FAIL

Peddle-power is still best, IMO.

[Inane_Asylum @ Jan 3rd 2009 10:45AM]

And the amazing thing is...it's not butt-ugly.

[Horse @ Jan 3rd 2009 11:31AM]

Probably:
30 kph = 18.6 mph seems about right
22 lbs = 9.9 kg seems ultra light - which would drive cost up
22 kg = 48 lb would seem to be realistic
7.5 km = 4.6 miles would seem to be very poor, but possible if the weight is accurate
75 km = 46 miles would be extended, but possible due to the touted light weight
7.5 miles = 12.0 km Again, poor, but possibley realistic due to the light weight, which would also include a light battery.

I can't see the reality of 7.5 km (or miles) being functionally useful.... I've had an electric bike, and it had a much better range than this, but it also weighed close to 75 lbs.

[Another Geek @ Jan 3rd 2009 1:25PM]

For 7.5km, that is a lot of distance for my country (Vietnam). It is not like in the US where the road is super long. Our roads are very short distance and that 7.5km can cover almost any distance (short to medium).

[Lamnk @ Jan 3rd 2009 6:38PM]

@AnotherGeek: Saigon and Hanoi are not that tiny. FYI: my school is 10km away from home.

Btw, the second pic looks like photoshop'ed. I wonder if his prototype works at all.

PS: this is an original article in vietnamese: http://bit.ly/VBSE, it have a third picture of the bike and it doesn't look realistic to me. Anyway, nice design.

[Haha @ Jan 3rd 2009 11:45AM]

Looks amazing really compact

[rcappo @ Jan 3rd 2009 12:06PM]

It's not a bad design, but I would like to see the front wheel angled out a little more. Extending the frame by one or two inches would make it more comfortable to ride.

He should also look into shaft drive bikes to see if that style would work better.

[[e-mail] @ Jan 3rd 2009 12:09PM]

Holy crap! It runs on unobtainium?

[Californian @ Jan 3rd 2009 12:38PM]

It's "pealed" man. Not "peeled". You aren't ripping the cornea off of your eye when you look for something. Unless you look too closely, I suppose.

[thetansman @ Jan 3rd 2009 3:53PM]

Um, wrong. The only thing goofier than the idea of peeling your eyes (which merely means to keep your eyes open in the expression) is the idea of your eyes making loud noises.

I understand why people are stupid. I'm stupid about a lot of stuff. But I'll never get why people so often feel most confident about the things they're stupid about.

[Californian @ Jan 3rd 2009 5:50PM]

I waited five minutes before reposting, but it doesn't look as this is going to show up. If this is a double post, I apologize.

Oh wow. I really am a stupid idiot. I researched this once before, but I guess that only confused me more. I used to think it was "peeled" and then afterward, I had read so much on this that I must have jumbled it up. But when I looked in my bookmarks for a page I had read pertaining to this, I found this:
[Q] From Mark Kleiman: “Can you enlighten me on the origin of the expression keep your eyes peeled or pealed?”

[A] It’s spelt peeled, as in peeling an apple. It derives from an old verb pill, “to plunder”, which is the root of our modern word pillage. It came to us from the Latin root pilare, meaning “to take the hair off, pluck” (closely connected with our depilate), but which also had the figurative meaning of “plunder, cheat”, almost exactly the same as the figurative meaning of our modern verbs fleece or pluck. From about the 17th century on, pill was commonly spelt peel and took on the sense of “to remove or strip” in the weakened sense of removing an outer covering, such as a fruit. The figurative sense of keeping alert, by removing any covering of the eye that might impede vision, seems to have appeared in the US about 1850.

So yeah, I stand corrected. Thank you for that clarification!

[cong @ Jan 3rd 2009 2:10PM]

The old Saigon University would have sounded a lot better than that silly blasphemy name Ho Chi Minh City University.

[BB @ Jan 3rd 2009 3:11PM]

Mospeada !

[johnzilla @ Jan 3rd 2009 3:48PM]

Looks fishy to me.

In the pic with the designer/builder, his right hand looks monstrous for his body size. Photoshop job?

Also, I don't see how it could go from the folded configuration to the fully extended configuration without it coming apart into two pieces.

In the folded configuration picture, looks like the hinge point on the frame is the front sprocket. But in the fully extended configuration, there's nothing connected to the front sprocket at all.

In addition, it is coming out of North Vietnam. Sorry, but folks in North Vietnam are literally starving to death...I highly doubt a student was able to source high-tech components like this from nearby suppliers, let alone pay for them or even get them for free. My guess is all the people mentioned in the article that helped him out would be spending most of their time looking for food, not building uber-tech electric vehicles in students' living rooms.

[Another Geek @ Jan 3rd 2009 4:23PM]

I'm sorry for your prejudice but have you ever been to North Vietnam? Ever? I bet not.

I lived in Vietnam for 12 years so the following have much better background to support. Let me say that the North of Vietnam are much much cleaner than most other part of the country. Starve to death? No money? Hah. Oh the prejudice image and ignorance, it's pathetic.

And do you even know where is Ho Chi Minh City? It is in the freaking South. Learn your crap before you speak like that about my country, a country you only heard from other and never even know anything about.

[cmdwedge @ Jan 3rd 2009 4:49PM]

johnzilla: Congrats, you're officially the biggest douche to ever post on Engadget.

[vnPhantom @ Jan 3rd 2009 5:06PM]

The bike is some serious design. However, I'm not an engineer or anything but usually, bike's wheels are aligned in one straight line. How are they folded like that? Removable front wheel/fender or wheels with some offset?

Also, to add to this story, rush hour in Sai Gon is like a tangled mess of motorcycles, bicycles, cars and people. The student's original idea was to avoid the mess by folded up the bike and carry through a particular bottle neck.

However, Sai Gon is full of petty thieves. Something this pretty will be stolen in a heart beat!

[Johan S @ Jan 3rd 2009 5:07PM]

This is very very impressive. I hope he and his partners can manufacture it cheap so that it can be a real hit.

Even more impressive is he managed to do it in Vietnam.

Naysayers like johnzilla above should try to educate themselves about the ingenuity of the Vietnamese. And no, I'm not Vietnamese.

[Ran @ Jan 3rd 2009 6:05PM]

If it only does 7.5 miles on a charge, it's dead in the water.
If he can increase to at least double, it'll be a smash hit.
The end.

Ooops...if it really weighs 22 lbs, it'll be a DOUBLE smash hit, but I'm skeptical.

[design natin @ Jan 3rd 2009 6:11PM]

Needs a very good image and branding to sell the product.

[Rocketboy @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:28PM]

7.5 miles? So it'll save you a bit of walking. I work literally 3 minutes away from my house (by car), and this thing would just barely make it home on battery power. Talk about a fail-a-cycle. For 7.5 miles you might as well just pedal yourself (I usually do).

[ro @ Jan 3rd 2009 10:06PM]

Whilst I agree with the photoshopped comments, it's actually remarkably easy to have prototypes put together in VN. There's a skilled workforce and a surprising amount of technology floating around small one-man enterprises over here.

HCMC is a VERY affluent city in which to live, and you can get everything from a Bentley (if I could afford one...) to a New York bagel without any difficulty. Only problem is, the traffic is insane with SUV's blocking all the tiny roads, hence the interest in electric bikes as a simple/nonpolluting method of transport.

Currently there are around six main types of electric bikes running around HCMC's streets - all of Chinese manufacturer - and I'd estimate there are between 2,000-5,000 electric bikes in the city in total. Horribly for the west, they're quite well built. We're in great danger of falling behind them in the real-world application of electric bike technology, which pisses me off 'cos we should be building cool electric bikes out of carbon fiber or something as advanced....

[Yoshi @ Jan 3rd 2009 11:20PM]

I'm not an outsider of the engineering product design. I've been thinking in a way if I were the designer of this project.
Such as where to put motor or battery, how about the folding mechanism etc--- After an hour, I still can't
configure how the folding trick works. And came to the conclusion, this must be a conceptual design model.
And the specs are the design target.
Folding and lock mechanism will be adding lots more weight, thus 22 pounds is even more unrealistic.
( By the way, Vietnam is not using imperial, yard-pound system )
At least, design and concept and model making is impressive. But, the rest seems a communist
propaganda, which rise the national pride.

[photoshopped @ Jan 4th 2009 12:55AM]

Image is definitely fake and photoshopped. If you get the .bmp of the guy with the bike off the original Vietnam site you can see pixels following along the underside of his right arm consistent with a photoshop mask job. The space under the guy's right arm and the right side of his shirt was masked too aggressively and is partially erased.

The fake shadow lines along the underside of the seat post, main bike body, and to the right of the handlebars is more of a drop shadow than a realistic shadow. The thing that makes his right hand look weird is the thumb has been faked. The lighting and angle of the "thumb" are completely wrong.

That's just a quick analysis, but this is definitely a fake. Too bad someone in Vietnam feels like they need to publish such a b.s. story.

[pfavaro @ Jan 4th 2009 9:01AM]

Hmmm. More than meets the eye.

[psugeek @ Jan 4th 2009 2:27PM]

So when do we get it here in the states! That's truely an incredible design, props to him. I hope he gets his funding to mass produce it.

[Juan @ Jan 5th 2009 2:03AM]

The bike is shape like the O.C. Chopper logo. The problem with electric bike ,is that it runs out of power fast . Someone needs to design a stronger battery to get this bike evolution to move forward.

[Danger mouse @ Jan 5th 2009 3:13AM]

Re: the folding mechanism - It looks to me like the pic of it folded is just a render, and I presume the prototype he built may not be capable of folding, just testing the concept & electrics.

Anyway from what I can figure, it folds by:
Pivot 1 on the back wheel axle, and pivot 2 on the circular thing below the saddle.
Fold down at pivot 1 until pivot 2 meets the chainring. Then continue to fold pivot 2 so the front end of the bike wraps all the way underneath. Pretty simple really.

The back wheel is likely a one-sided fixed axle much like the front wheel, with fork on one side only.
Also, the thing looks tiny. BMX sized wheels?

[nuocmam @ Jan 5th 2009 5:44PM]

It's always interesting to see ignorant people comment. I guess it's out of the necessity to feel smart.

First, an electric bike is not meant for the rider to sit on his ass all through the trip. It's electric so that it can assists the cyclist usually up hills or for period of time that the cyclist needs a rest.

Second, look at places where this bike can be useful. If you live in San Francisco where the terrain consists of a lot of hills, it can assists you to cycle to work maybe up hills. Then when you go home, it will be a downhill trip, so you don't need the electric assistance. If they can put in some regenerative braking mechanism, that will even extend the range. You can also recharge in between trips...that's an 8.5 hours charge assuming you have a job. If you live in NYC, one mile distance can take you really far. That's how far? About 10 city blocks? 7.5 mile range will take you about 70 city blocks in NYC! If you travel that far in NYC for work, then you don't even need to pedal that bike. You can be a lazy ass. Then, you can recharge during your time at work assuming building management lets you take the bike into the building. But hey, it's fold-able, right? So who knows. Maybe they will.

Third, the two of three images in the newspaper link are computer renderings of the prototype. He probably did them before building the prototypes. I'm sure some small scale model is sitting some where. That's why the images look like fake pictures because they are computer renderings.

Fourth, folding bikes are not something new. It's been done before. Search through GooglePatents or the USPTO or EPO websites.

What's so cool about this bike and this designer? It's because it's needed and it's being done in a region that needs it most. Vietnam has transformed from bicycles to motorcycles as the main form of transportation for the last 20 years. The next stage will be a transformation to cars. And if that happens, that would be an environmental disaster for that region considering it's a densely populated city. The last thing that Ho Chi Minh City wants to be is another Beijing with its congested car traffic, polluted skies, and high demand for gasoline. Four million electric bicycles is a lot better than four million gasoline cars. And before anyone argues that electricity needs to be produced somehow, electricity can be produced from clean and renewable energy.

To Johnzilla who speaks so highly of Vietnam, maybe if you get out of your parent's basement and turn off that computer and travel a little, you would know a little bit more than you do now.