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Italian innovations incubator e-Novia is displaying six products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, two of them bike-related. Both have been seen on Pinarello bikes at Grand Tours in 2017, but have yet to be commercialised. One is a suspension system that is said to be operate via “artificial intelligence” and the other is an electronic anti-lock braking system.
The Milan-based e-Novia is at the world’s biggest tech show alongside Italy’s Ministry for Economic Development and the Italian Trade Agency.
CES opens tomorrow and has 4,000 exhibiting companies. It’s expected that 175,000 visitors will traipse throught the expo halls, and there will be 7,000 journalists at the show.
Hiride, the AI suspension system, and anti-lock Blubrake have both been in development for some years, and broke cover last spring but CES will be their first mainstream outing.
“Blubrake allows [you] to brake close to the friction physical limit of the road-wheel contact,” states Sixth Sense, the company spun out from a project started in 2013 at the Milan Polytechnic. The tech was later picked up by Pinarello. The product is an anti-lock braking system that uses a range of sensors to let riders know when the front wheel is about to lock.
The HiRide “AI” road bike suspension system – which uses six-axis accelerometer/gyroscope sensors to feel for changes in the road surface in order to auto-adjust front and rear shocks – was co-developed by Domenico Borgese, and his company has been working with Pinarello and Team Sky to perfect the technology.
“In 0.4 seconds it goes from completely locked out, for normal road surfaces, to completely soft, as when he first hits the cobbles,” Borgese told BikeRadar last year.
CES usually has a smattering of bike products. Last year there was the Coros helmet which played music to a user via bone-conduction technology, and there were a variety of “smart bikes,” such as the SpeedX Unicorn.
