Is there any reason I should do a front/rear hub road/gravel bike instead of a mid drive road bike or hybrid/mtb

If this is universally present on hubs, could it be used for a drive?

It is used on many Shimano hubs but not all of them.

But yes, it could be used for a drive. Skarper is a company that uses Centerlock for its left hand side drive:

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You can't even buy that yet and I wonder how much it isI ?
learned my lesson.
And it's more than I wish I could try it before I buy it.
My 1,100usd Cyc mid drive after 2yrs works. But I had to buy their new X6 controller for it to work for $60 plus $30 shipping. They just cranked up the b******* on me for 2 years . Do this do that . Now that it runs all I want to do is sell the mid drive and go back to a big hub.
Buffeting has a lot of success with his 350 500 w 750 w geared motors and their mid drives
But go try one first there's tons of bike stores out there selling e-bikes.
Tell us what you think afterwards. Plus how much money you want to put into this ? That's important.
 
It is used on many Shimano hubs but not all of them.

But yes, it could be used for a drive. Skarper is a company that uses Centerlock for its left hand side drive:

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Elegant idea, but it looks like the engineering got complicated real fast.
I guess you can not use a belt directly on those spline teeth, due to the force (=shear force on the belt teeth) required at that small radius to get reasonable O(50Nm) torque across. So they decided to build a geared drive into their replacement disk rotor, instead of going with a lightweight rotor large enough to be driven by a belt a la Aram's BikeOn solution. Which means in principle they could have kept the motor/gear unit quite compact, albeit heavy, but then they decided to put the battery into the same enclosure. Well, there goes the elegant solution out the window....

I understand why they want to keep the original brake caliper (so nobody has to mess around with reconnecting the hydraulic line), but the way they do it makes the rotor complicated: the inner part rotates driving the hub, the middle ring is stationary, and the outer ring serving as the brake rotor has to rotate again.

So, as far as removable drives go, there are two brake rotor replacement solutions, Bimotal, who are selling ($2k), and Skarper, still in preorder and aiming at $1800, and one cassette adapter solution, Bikeon, selling at $1250.

Not an upgrade solution for an existing bike, Fazua (sounds Chinese, but actually Bavarian for 'get going already, dammit!') had a removable motor/battery solution, but it needs a manufacturer-integrated bottom bracket bevel gear, and in the latest iteration they gave up on making the motor removable. (My guess is because they did increase the torque, and felt secondary/reaction moments would be too difficult to control. Online some people complain about motor screws working themselves loose even with the bolted solution.)
 
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I'll go over that above regarding power. Here's another question, will downtube batteries on the brazers mess up a carbon road frame compared to alu/steel/ti? I'm aware you don't want a mid drive for that unless it's build around it or has a good mounting arm thing so it doesn't knock the frame, but I mean, carbon is pretty strong overall, Will it tolerate a 12/20/24 ah downtube battery? Will a 20/40ah triangle battery bag strain the top tube? Would I want a lightweight rear rack instead? I guess with the HD I'd be using 750-1000w on flats and 1200-1500 uphill, but with a lighter bike I could use less and need a somewhat smaller battery. Or at least get longer range than the wussy 12ah internal specialized creo road bike batts.
 
What bike did you like the best ?
Definitely the HD. I was also interested a lot in the Bikee lightest as it has an interesting efficient mechanism (read their indiegogo) but it seems to be a bit beta. Luna cycles here in El Segundo also sells an HD engraved "750 watts" which helps a bit in making it look more street legal, maybe I could even get away with one of those hefty eMoto style 60ah battery frames with the big reinforced triangle. The guy I know here doesn't know much about programming a Ultra motor but he knows the HD well and has added some fake torque sensor stuff. I had also bandied about doing a dual hub motor buiild with a Changebike (iso rated full size folder) or brompton. For those sort of heavy alu bikes like stromer etc i felt 350-500w wasn't really adequate
 
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