Electric bikes aren’t cheap. They might even seem like a frivolous purchase, especially if you’ve already got a bicycle that cost an arm and a leg when you bought it a few years ago. While there are a lot of conversion kits available to “electric-fy” your bike, most of them make your bike look like an experiment or a work in progress.
Then along came Rubbee, a recently-launched project on Kickstarter that promises to turn your regular bike into an electric one in seconds.
The Rubbee is an electric motor drive, and all you’ll have to do is mount it on your bike, connect the throttle, and you’re good to go. A friction wheel is positioned at the back tire, which turns when the built-in electronic motor is powered on. When you want to switch back to a regular bicycle, just flick the switch and it’s done.
While the Rubbee is a bit cheaper than most electric bikes, it still comes with a pretty hefty price tag. You can get the full Rubbee electric drive package with a minimum pledge of £699 (that’s about $1,070.)
[ Rubbee on Kickstarter ] VIA [ C|NET ]