this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
586 points (98.5% liked)
LinkedinLunatics
5651 readers
1 users here now
A place to post ridiculous posts from linkedIn.com
(Full transparency.. a mod for this sub happens to work there.. but that doesn't influence his moderation or laughter at a lot of posts.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is dumb as shit ofc, but it gave me an idea that's probably nearly equally dumb as shit:
Regular bicycle, but with an extra gear that can selectively connect to the chain or wheel or w/e, that's connected to a coil torsion spring on a kind of ratchet release.
Basically you flip the switch when it's a good time to rob some energy like when you're on level ground or going down hill. That energy makes you a tad less efficient (but you don't care cuz it's level or downhill), and uses that energy to wind up the coil torsion spring up until a max amount of torque is stored.
Fast forward a bit: now you're approaching an incline, so you flip the switch the other direction and that torsion spring regurgitates that energy back into forward motion, giving you a nice forward burst when going up a hill.
Not free energy by any stretch, but a strategic use of what you're already spending.
Feel free to explain why this is a horrible idea - I'm about as far from a physicist as it gets.
Essentially regenerative braking. Should work, though the question is how coat effective.
Wrong question.
Right question: When the fully torqued spring inevitably fails, who is liable for the deaths of the rider and nearby pedestrians?
Wrong question. That one is answered with a EULA.
Right question: how often can we make that torque spring break, forcing the buyer to buy another one, without them realizing it's failure by design?
Wrong question.
Right question: How do we embed an LLM to decide when to break the spring so that we can score a 100B investment from OpenAI.
Bahaha!! You got me! That's actually a really good one hahahahah!
Wrong question.
Right question: What if we used a giant flywheel? That can't be dangerous, right?
F1 has been using this principle for years
That's just regenerative braking on a bike. Without batteries.
In theory that idea isn't actually bad although I suspect in practise the mechanism would be extremely complicated and would be liable to jamming it in opportune moments. That said doing this electronically is already a thing, although not really in e-bikes.
pretty sure hybrid cars have regenerative braking - the car uses the motion to recharge the battery when braking, going downhill, or coasting
Why flip a switch when you can just let the bike sense if it is going up or down hill?
Would make hilly terrain a much smoother ride.
Then again, if you do all that electrical, you already just have an electric bike. Which is even more versatile on flat ground.