This Hubless Bike Is Almost Real and Could be Everywhere in the Near Future

An industrial designer and dreamer by the name of Victor Tabares from Barcelona, Spain, has come up with a design I thought was too good to be true, until I saw the photographer's reflection in the rear hub. It’s called the OOH Bike and is an impressive design to say the least.

We’ve seen hubless bikes before, but 99% are just ideas. Few ever make it to the real thing. And even when they do, they tend to turn out quite rudimentary and only functionally close to the initial design.

The OOH is different in that there is at least one piece in existence with the entire system, fully functional, looking like the initial designs, and even being up to date with current tech. This is what we’re told, anyway.

Whether it is or isn’t true, we’re about to find out in the very near future. Until then we can still talk about the bike presented to us.

Now we can clearly see that the entire front tire is truly hubless. A short and stocky fork devoid of any suspension holds a wheel on which the tire rotates. Everything here seems according to plan. But, once we move our attention to the rear wheel, the story changes.

Like most other designs of this sort, people either haven’t figured out how to make the rear hubless, or the tech is simply too expensive to apply to bikes, at this point in history anyway. At the rear we just find a classic wheel with a hub, spokes, and a one-speed cassette. Pretty standard if you ask me, not that there’s anything wrong with this.

One nice thing about the OOH ,however, is that it’s electric. Most of the top tube, or rectangle in this case, is actually a battery pack. We don’t have any sort of specifics as to whether or not this battery is integrated into that top tube. But based on previous bike designs, we can say that it just might be detachable. An LED light strip shows battery levels in five stages.

Now, anytime you put a battery on a bike, you're probably not just powering a headlight. In the case of the OOH, what’s being powered is a motor. We can see this system built into cranks at the bottom of the frame. We don’t have a clear indication that this would be a motor, but why else would you need such a large space, huge screws, and all safely enclosed within the frame? Have a look at the Levo SL to see what a motor compartment looks like and tell me this isn’t a motor.

What we can also see on this hybrid hubless bike is a missing link. Well, not just link, but the whole chain. My guess it that Gates Drive systems could have also had a dabble in this project. But once again, this remains unconfirmed!

Even if we don’t ever end up seeing this bike on city streets, we are already starting to see similar if not even more true to hubless design bicycles. For instance, the Reevo is huge right now, and if the OOH really wants to leave the crowd saying OOH, it better hurry along and eliminate all this speculation.