The end of BionX?

Chalo said:
I can't help but think that their commitment to a closed system was partly what put them out of business. And in due course, it will be what makes the remaining kits disappear ahead of schedule.

Other closed systems from Bosch, Shimano, Yamaha and so on are VERY popular.

For one DIY e-Bike I assume there are now 100 Bosch e-bikes in Germany and this system is as closed as it gets.

700.000 Pedleec have been sold in Germany during 2017. In Europa around 2 million Pedelecs have been sold.

In Germany the rate for speed Pedleec (legal 45km/h) has stagnated around 1% (one percent), similar to 2016. In the Netherlands the rate for speed Pedelec was around 1.4%. I don't have the numver for Switzerland, maybe it is highest there.
Other European countries like UK, Italy, Austria or France do not have that option at all.

That's amazingly low.

On the other hand 3% of the electric bikes sold in Germany have been cargo e-bikes. Did'nt expect that and I think this is great.

So having a proprietary system is certainly not a problem for selling electric bikes in Europe which is the market to be if you want to earn money.
 
Cephalotus said:
Chalo said:
I can't help but think that their commitment to a closed system was partly what put them out of business. And in due course, it will be what makes the remaining kits disappear ahead of schedule.

Other closed systems from Bosch, Shimano, Yamaha and so on are VERY popular.

And then there's the whole history of Apple Computer.

I personally dislike closed systems and I try to avoid them when I have good alternatives. But the reality is that they can be very successful if designed and marketed well.
 
justin_le said:
Also, part of why this news stings a little bit for me is that I had just completed a pretty exhaustive study of Statorade as a motor cooling solution in both the BionX PL350 and 'D' series motors, and was hoping that we could have our first proper OEM customer for this after our 3 years testing and R&D. Have a read at the attached .pdf document and tell me this wouldn't have been a perfect pairing.
<snip>
It would have been a sweet little partnership, since it could increase the power and performance at thermal rollback of their motors by a substantial percentage with minimal additional cost to BionX and no change at all to their manufacturing process. And who knows if with the right marketing that might have resulted in a boost in interest and sales for the BionX system.

Justin, before you totallly relegate this to the dustbin of history, think of the remaining opportunities here: "GrinX"

Among other e-powered objects in my corral, one is a BionX powered RowBike. My future, in regards to that particular beast, at least, is in your very capable hands. I don't know Canadian law, but here in the US, receivers and bankruptcy trustees have a fiduciary duty to salvage whatever remaining value lies in the failing enterprise. You may have something to offer them.

It ain't over until the weight-challenged lady sings. And knowing you, even that's probably not the end.
 
If my BionX battery pack failed to charge I would pull it apart snip the BMS free and install a wifi BMS
 
Cephalotus said:
Chalo said:
I can't help but think that their commitment to a closed system was partly what put them out of business. And in due course, it will be what makes the remaining kits disappear ahead of schedule.

Other closed systems from Bosch, Shimano, Yamaha and so on are VERY popular.

Bully for them. But those companies have mostly other business (which is why they could afford the risk of entering such a questionable market), and they might very well decide to abandon e-bike equipment at any time. If they do, the consequences for buyers will be the same as it is for Bionx owners.

This isn't a new lesson to learn. Sanyo, SRAM, Wavecrest, and others have entered and left the e-bike market already with more or less proprietary systems. Approximately nobody is still using them. Some modular equipment from the same time periods is still in service. Some contemporary manufacturers of modular equipment that we knew then are still with us. But all the dedicated, intentionally incompatible systems are gone.

The manufacturers might or might not be able to pull a win out of a losing e-bike design strategy. But those who buy in will lose-- either with unsupported orphaned equipment, or with higher purchase and repair costs for the same or lesser functionality compared to modular equipment.
 
Cephalotus said:
B-side said:
The BMS is still OK but needs to be reprogrammed. Can be done using BBI if you have access to "recover" functions...

Recover function never worked for me in case of a deactivated BionX BMS.

BionX wants to kill their batteries when cells have been deeply discharged (sometime sin the life of the BMS). Sad ting is that this prevents DIY cell replacements.

This is understandable from the companies point of view (not anybody wants to see a picture of a burning battery with your companies name on it), but of course this is quite shitty for the DIYer, who wants to replace the aging cells.

It's worse because the BionX BMS fails more often than the cell packs, so there is a large demand for functional BionX BMS but no supply.

Yes its true that sometimes the BMS quit it's job even if the cells never got deep discharged.
The whole thing i would call PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE. It is a waste of materials and should be forbidded.

BMS should be built to prevent that cells become deep discharged, and not to bite the dust if that happends.
 
Chalo said:
I can't help but think that their commitment to a closed system was partly what put them out of business. And in due course, it will be what makes the remaining kits disappear ahead of schedule.



I agree with this for first principles basics.

The more situations and applications a thing is functional in, the lower chances of the thing becoming e-waste.

It also creates opportunities, as I'm sure it wouldn't be more than a weekend or two of intercepting it's own data COMs to reverse engineer it go an extent that let's an otherwise nice motor design go from paperweight to powering a commuter.
 
Cephalotus said:
In Germany the rate for speed Pedleec (legal 45km/h) has stagnated around 1% (one percent), similar to 2016. In the Netherlands the rate for speed Pedelec was around 1.4%. I don't have the numver for Switzerland, maybe it is highest there.
Other European countries like UK, Italy, Austria or France do not have that option at all.

Huh? Hmmm... Seen in ES Newz on March 9... "The easy thing to do would have been to sit on the fence when covering the speed pedelec segment, currently considered a niche of an albeit now exploding former niche."

February 19th:
The Bicycle Association of Great Britain (BAGB) is pushing for such an e-bike subsidy scheme as the UK government states that Low-emission vehicles are eligible for it. Belgium is also encouraging commuting by bicycle. Employers can reward staff for commuting by bike, paying them €0.23 for every kilometre they cycle. Hundreds of thousands of e-bike riders in Belgium are participating in this ‘cycle to work’ tax scheme. This program has been extended to speed-pedelecs recently.

February 15th:
Today, the Danish Road Safety Agency released a draft for a trial on letting so-called Speed Pedelecs use bike lanes in the country. Speed Pedelecs are able to reach a motor-assisted top speed of 45 km/h (28 mph) as opposed to standard Pedelec e-bikes that can go 25 km/h (15 mph).

... and etc...
 
Chalo
Wavecrest did NOT leave market because It is proprietary.
picking on Wavecrest.....
it is extremaly easy to hook up third party battery to Tadial Force ebike made by WAVECREST LABS.
you can check it on TF Google forum.
DIY is very small segment of ebiking ,
most want reliable ready to ride ebike not to thinker with China brand crap.
going into detail?
battery SOC for example.
BOSH shows you real capacity left , capacity metering based on Columb count - just one example why they charge $$$
 
Word from OHM Electric Bikes (BionX ebike makes) less than 3hrs. ago... "We are confident that Bionx will change owners soon and resume business within a few months. If they do not, we will be looking into other drive systems."
 
Chalo said:
This isn't a new lesson to learn. Sanyo, SRAM, Wavecrest, and others have entered and left the e-bike market already with more or less proprietary systems. Approximately nobody is still using them. Some modular equipment from the same time periods is still in service. Some contemporary manufacturers of modular equipment that we knew then are still with us. But all the dedicated, intentionally incompatible systems are gone.
I had both Wavecrest and EMS bikes. (I still have one as my backup.) Both used non-OEM batteries and Cycle Analysts.

Most people who buy ebikes want to buy an ebike with everything already integrated. They don't want to try to figure out whether to use a Phaserunner or an Infineon. They don't want to deal with Lunacycle shipping them a battery that doesn't quite fit. They don't want to have to buy hex keys. They want a bike they can plug in and use - and call the service number if anything goes wrong. These people PREFER dedicated, all in one systems with few options.

A very small percentage represent the people here - techies who like building things. These people don't care if the bike uses "dedicated, intentionally incompatible" equipment, because they will just cut the connectors off and do their own thing anyway.

The "it's proprietary so it will never sell!" argument just doesn't fly. Look at the car market. How many people refuse to buy a car because the CAN bus on that car is difficult to hack? Now how many people refuse to buy a car because it's the wrong color?
 
Concerning Wavecrest, I was under the impression they were pushing for military contracts, and that fact was reflected in the way they were spending R&D money. When those contracts didn't pan out, the civilian sales were too weak to keep it afloat.

It could be argued that Wavecrest didn't die because the bikes were too expensive, they died because of X,Y, and Z. However, if sales were robust, they would have had enough profits to survive X, Y, and Z.
 
billvon said:
Look at the car market. How many people refuse to buy a car because the CAN bus on that car is difficult to hack? Now how many people refuse to buy a car because it's the wrong color?

Car people exemplify the very worst and weakest things about us. Just get out on the street as a human being and see for yourself. To me, you might as well ask why serial killers do the things the way they do.
 
Chalo said:
Car people exemplify the very worst and weakest things about us. Just get out on the street as a human being and see for yourself. To me, you might as well ask why serial killers do the things the way they do.
Which is equivalent to saying "consumers exemplify the very worst and weakest things about us." So yes, if you don't want any plan to work with consumers, and work only for the technical people on this board, then your suggestion has merit.
 
eCue said:
If my BionX battery pack failed to charge I would pull it apart snip the BMS free and install a wifi BMS

This will work, sort of, but you won't have any battery status indication on the console, will have error codes, and if I had to guess, I'd say it would probably disable regen without any clue how full the battery is (to avoid overfilling a battery).

Basically, all the 48V systems are soon to be scrap.
 
Syonyk said:
This will work, sort of, but you won't have any battery status indication on the console, will have error codes, and if I had to guess, I'd say it would probably disable regen without any clue how full the battery is (to avoid overfilling a battery).
So add a cycle analyst.
Basically, all the 48V systems are soon to be scrap.
48V (even 36V) provides plenty of power for most ebike applications.
 
billvon said:
So add a cycle analyst.

I mean, at some point, you could hack enough crap onto the system to make it sort of work, but the draw of BionX, at least in my experience, is the integrated system. Having one console over here, another one for monitoring the battery, no regen, etc... not going to be popular among the crowd that owns BionX.

48V (even 36V) provides plenty of power for most ebike applications.

That was specific to BionX... in, you know, a BionX thread... The 48V BionX packs are weak on the best of days in terms of robustness. They are constantly failing from some failure or other (failed output FETs, wearing out the cells, cell balance issues for no apparent reason, etc), and the supply of them will run short. Or people will run short on patience for their third $1000 pack in 5 years.
 
Syonyk said:
I mean, at some point, you could hack enough crap onto the system to make it sort of work, but the draw of BionX, at least in my experience, is the integrated system. Having one console over here, another one for monitoring the battery, no regen, etc... not going to be popular among the crowd that owns BionX.
Agreed there.
That was specific to BionX... in, you know, a BionX thread... The 48V BionX packs are weak on the best of days in terms of robustness. They are constantly failing from some failure or other (failed output FETs, wearing out the cells, cell balance issues for no apparent reason, etc), and the supply of them will run short. Or people will run short on patience for their third $1000 pack in 5 years.
OK. Sorry, I thought you were talking about the potential for replacement with another battery.
 
If you open up a BionX D-series, how hard is it to parse out the motor phase wires and run a cable to the outside so you can attach a standard 3-phase ebike controller?

I want BionX to survive, but...if there suddenly becomes a LOT of cheap used D-series hubs available, I want to know what it would take to get one running...
 
billvon said:
Chalo said:
Car people exemplify the very worst and weakest things about us. Just get out on the street as a human being and see for yourself. To me, you might as well ask why serial killers do the things the way they do.
Which is equivalent to saying "consumers exemplify the very worst and weakest things about us." So yes, if you don't want any plan to work with consumers, and work only for the technical people on this board, then your suggestion has merit.

I suggest that if you want to sell good e-bikes, the market composed of car-buying "consumers" is of no significant value to you. They'll buy a bike but not ride it, so the merits of the bike are irrelevant.

There are already lots of people selling useless e-BSOs to useless "consumers".
 
spinningmagnets said:
If you open up a BionX D-series, how hard is it to parse out the motor phase wires and run a cable to the outside so you can attach a standard 3-phase ebike controller?

I want BionX to survive, but...if there suddenly becomes a LOT of cheap used D-series hubs available, I want to know what it would take to get one running...

It's quite difficult to get their units apart, and not much easier to get them back together.

I assume if you trace the controller outputs you can find the three phase wires. That's the easy part...
 
Syonyk said:
eCue said:
If my BionX battery pack failed to charge I would pull it apart snip the BMS free and install a wifi BMS

This will work, sort of, but you won't have any battery status indication on the console, will have error codes, and if I had to guess, I'd say it would probably disable regen without any clue how full the battery is (to avoid overfilling a battery).

Basically, all the 48V systems are soon to be scrap.

You might of overthought this there is a good chance the controller uses the voltage state to know to engage regen and display the voltage.

Edit - I now realize they paired the bms to the controller - sneaky guys
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7813
 
eCue said:
You might of overthought this there is a good chance the controller uses the voltage state to know to engage regen and display the voltage.

Edit - I now realize they paired the bms to the controller - sneaky guys
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7813

Sadly, no. BionX took what should be a simple interface and overcomplicated it to the point of unreliability. The BMS board talks the console over either I2C (on the pre-2008-ish units) or Canbus, and communicates battery state of charge over that channel. The raw voltage is probably available to the console, but only over the data channel.

The battery won't remain powered on unless a particular register gets written to regularly, so you can't (easily) use the batteries for other systems.

They're comically complicated for something that should be straightforward, and pretty much entirely unlike the rest of the ebike world.
 
Stopped in my LBS yesterday to get a couple little washers and asked them what was going on with the Bionix situation, they said they're at least going to sell their remaining stock and see what happens with the company. I told them they should just get an account with Grintech started and ask Justin's advice on what stuff to sell for reliability and stuff they could actually fix right in the shop.
 
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