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“Porsche of E-Bikes” Stokes Greyp Expectations
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Topic Transportation Type News


“PORSCHE OF E-BIKES” STOKES GREYP EXPECTATIONS

LUXE TWO-WHEELER BOASTS GPS, TELEMETRY, REMOTE ANTI-THEFT TECH—AND A CERTAIN
GERMAN CARMAKER’S MAJORITY OWNERSHIP


Lawrence Ulrich
24 Dec 2021
4 min read
1


Greyp's G6 e-bike defines high-end in its category—and now Porsche has acquired
a majority stake in the Croatian company.

Greyp
e-bikes Porsche greyp


Even chip shortages and supply-chain snafus haven’t stopped the Pyrenees-worthy
ascent of e-bikes, whose sales are leaving traditional bikes in their dust. If
more evidence were needed that e-bikes and micromobility are a cool defense for
a toasting planet, consider this: Porsche, the venerable sports-car purveyor,
recently acquired a majority stake in Greyp. That’s the Croatian e-bike company
founded by 33-year-old Mate Rimac, the electric-car wunderkind and CEO of the
newly formed Bugatti Rimac, of which Porsche holds a 45-percent share.

Greyp (pronounced “grape”) isn’t looking to be the two-wheeled analog of the
$2.4 million, nearly 2,000-horsepower Rimac Nevera hypercar, according to
company CEO Krešimir Hlede. Yet the company’s high-end offerings, starting from
around $7,000, are similar technology flagships, designed to help Greyp sell its
digital know-how to other bike manufacturers; just as Rimac is supplying EV tech
to Aston Martin and Koenigsegg, and developing a high-performance EV for
Hyundai.

“We do have bikes in our name, but we’re not a bike company,” Hlede says of his
vertically integrated outfit. Among 50 employees in Greyp R&D, only four work on
the physical bikes themselves. And the company has sold only about 2,000 bikes
since 2019, nearly all in Europe, with about 1,200 pre-ordered for 2022.

Think of Greyps as smartphones or PlayStations with pedals, and Android/iOS apps
as their nerve centers.

“We’re never going to sell 100,000 bikes, because then we’d become a competitor
to our own customers,” Hlede says.

So what is the company up to in Sveta Nedelja, near Rimac’s factory on the
outskirts of Zagreb? Greyp touts its creations as the first fully connected
e-bikes. They’re designed to meld the digital and real worlds, and get people
huffing and puffing in the process.



Extravagantly styled models like the Greyp G6 (starting from about $8,000) are
stuffed with sensors, 4G eSim modules and GPS; dual 1080/30fps cameras,
telemetry and rider data; remote anti-theft features and real-time gamification.
Think of Greyps as smartphones or PlayStations with pedals, and Android/iOS apps
as their nerve centers.

That connected philosophy already gets on the nerves of some old-school riders,
who see biking as a blessed escape from screen time, and a way to tune into
one’s natural surroundings. But company execs and engineers instead see a
competitive edge.

Certainly, Greyp’s bikes don’t skimp on top hardware. The G6 is a
full-suspension mountain bike with such goodies as a T700 carbon frame, Formula
Selva fork, Formula Cura disc brakes, SRAM drivetrain and Schwalbe tires. A
mid-drive motor by MDF, updated with Greyp firmware, outputs a nominal 250 watts
of pedal-assisted power (450 watts peak), with a 700 watt-hour battery.

“If our bike puts a smile on your face, and our competitor doesn’t, we win.”
—Krešimir Hlede, CEO, Greyp

Yet Hlede says the world’s e-bike giants all draw from the same shelves of
familiar, largely interchangeable hardware—frames and forks, derailleurs,
batteries and motors—from suppliers such as Shimano and SRAM, Yamaha and Bosch.
Regulations limit maximum speed and power, and practical limitations in battery
mass make it hard to eke out a meaningful edge in range.

“In bikes, it’s difficult to be different,” Hlede says in a video interview.
“We’re not creating a bike for the next Olympic champ, or the most efficient
bike. You won’t hear a lot of discussion from us on range or Newton-meters,
because most people honestly don’t give a damn. But if our bike puts a smile on
your face, and our competitor doesn’t, we win.”

On Greyp bikes, front and rear mounted cameras constantly buffer action in
20-second bites, so riders can press a button and save footage for a social post
or posterity.

A front-mounted wide-angle camera joins a rear-mounted similar device in
providing Greyp e-bikes with action-capturing eyes fore and aft. Greyp

“When you see, say, a pink elephant cross the road and say, ‘I really should
have recorded that,’ you’ve already got it,” Hlede says.

Another in-the-works feature will let the bike recognize a jump or stunt in
progress, and automatically load that clip onto the user’s phone. Using their
apps and TMobile connections, riders can communicate with bikes remotely to snap
still images or manage functions.

“All of a sudden you have a bike you can take from point A to point B, but one
that will also create content, make decisions for you, provide a gaming platform
and communicate with other bikes or infrastructure.”
—Krešimir Hlede



If a rider tumbles into a ditch or encounters an emergency, the bike can
automatically dial for assistance, as with cell-connected services in cars.
Owners can be alerted if someone moves or makes off with their pricey bike, and
track or even disable the Greyp entirely. A battery charge takes about five
hours. But a hidden, secondary battery maintains a connection for up to six
months if the main battery is depleted or removed, according to company
engineers Robert Gotal and Saša Počuča.

Onboard sensors capture dozens of telemetry data sets, including hill gradients,
g-forces, rpm cadence, or a rider’s physical power output and heart rate. That
heart monitor can adjust the bike’s power-assist level accordingly, or to match
a preset workout schedule. As with auto racing software, users can analyze their
rides in granular detail to improve their skills or adjust training regimens.
Gamification features let riders compete with each other—and potentially
“players” in other locations—over GPS-linked courses, capturing flags or seeking
high scores in time, speed or physical output.

Greyp

“All of a sudden you have a bike you can take from point A to point B, but one
that will also create content, make decisions for you, provide a gaming platform
and communicate with other bikes or infrastructure,” Hlede says.

Several of Greyp’s digital features are on the sleek new Storck Cyklaer, an
innovative, lightweight e-bike made in a partnership between Greyp, Storck
Bicycles, Porsche Digital and Fazua, the German drive train maker. That bike
also lets riders remove both the battery and motor when they don’t care for
assistance, greatly lightening the load.

Hlede believes that linking bikes to the phone-and-internet world will only
boost the sport’s popularity; he cites an overall 40 percent rise in e-bike
sales in Europe in 2021, 140 percent in the United States, and the Far East’s
longtime practice of moving through cities on two wheels.

“This is absolutely something that can happen in the Western world. My mother is
70, and all of a sudden, this allows her to ride a bike,” Hlede says.

“My own traditional mountain bike has been collecting dust for five years,” he
continues. “Going up a hill is no longer a pleasure, but a punishment. Without
an e-bike, I wouldn’t go for a weekend ride, but now I will.”


e-bikes Porsche greyp

Lawrence Ulrich

Lawrence Ulrich is an award-winning auto writer and former chief auto critic at
The New York Times and The Detroit Free Press.

The Conversation (1)
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Topic Magazine Type Feature Robotics Special reports


A ROBOT FOR THE WORST JOB IN THE WAREHOUSE

BOSTON DYNAMICS’ STRETCH CAN MOVE 800 HEAVY BOXES PER HOUR


Evan Ackerman
12 hours ago
4 min read




Stretch can autonomously transfer boxes onto a roller conveyor fast enough to
keep up with an experienced human worker.

Bob O’Connor
Yellow

As COVID-19 stresses global supply chains, the logistics industry is looking to
automation to help keep workers safe and boost their efficiency. But there are
many warehouse operations that don’t lend themselves to traditional
automation—namely, tasks where the inputs and outputs of a process aren’t always
well defined and can’t be completely controlled. A new generation of robots with
the intelligence and flexibility to handle the kind of variation that people
take in stride is entering warehouse environments. A prime example is Stretch, a
new robot from Boston Dynamics that can move heavy boxes where they need to go
just as fast as an experienced warehouse worker.

Stretch’s design is somewhat of a departure from the humanoid and quadrupedal
robots that Boston Dynamics is best known for, such as Atlas and Spot. With its
single massive arm, a gripper packed with sensors and an array of suction cups,
and an omnidirectional mobile base, Stretch can transfer boxes that weigh as
much as 50 pounds (23 kilograms) from the back of a truck to a conveyor belt at
a rate of 800 boxes per hour. An experienced human worker can move boxes at a
similar rate, but not all day long, whereas Stretch can go for 16 hours before
recharging. And this kind of work is punishing on the human body, especially
when heavy boxes have to be moved from near a trailer’s ceiling or floor.



“Truck unloading is one of the hardest jobs in a warehouse, and that's one of
the reasons we're starting there with Stretch,” says Kevin Blankespoor, senior
vice president of warehouse robotics at Boston Dynamics. Blankespoor explains
that Stretch isn’t meant to replace people entirely; the idea is that multiple
Stretch robots could make a human worker an order of magnitude more efficient.
“Typically, you’ll have two people unloading each truck. Where we want to get
with Stretch is to have one person unloading four or five trucks at the same
time, using Stretches as tools.”



All Stretch needs is to be shown the back of a trailer packed with boxes, and
it’ll autonomously go to work, placing each box on a conveyor belt one by one
until the trailer is empty. People are still there to make sure that everything
goes smoothly, and they can step in if Stretch runs into something that it can’t
handle, but their full-time job becomes robot supervision instead of lifting
heavy boxes all day.

“No one wants to do receiving.” —Matt Beane, UCSB

Achieving this level of reliable autonomy with Stretch has taken Boston Dynamics
years of work, building on decades of experience developing robots that are
strong, fast, and agile. Besides the challenge of building a high-performance
robotic arm, the company also had to solve some problems that people find
trivial but are difficult for robots, like looking at a wall of closely packed
brown boxes and being able to tell where one stops and another begins.

Safety is also a focus, says Blankespoor, explaining that Stretch follows the
standards for mobile industrial robots set by the American National Standards
Institute and the Robotics Industry Association. That the robot operates inside
a truck or trailer also helps to keep Stretch safely isolated from people
working nearby, and at least for now, the trailer opening is fenced off while
the robot is inside.

Stretch is optimized for moving boxes, a task that’s required throughout a
warehouse. Boston Dynamics hopes that over the longer term the robot will be
flexible enough to put its box-moving expertise to use wherever it’s needed. In
addition to unloading trucks, Stretch has the potential to unload boxes from
pallets, put boxes on shelves, build orders out of multiple boxes from different
places in a warehouse, and ultimately load boxes onto trucks, a much more
difficult problem than unloading due to the planning and precision required.

“Where we want to get with Stretch is to have one person unloading four or five
trucks at the same time.” —Kevin Blankespoor, Boston Dynamics

In the short term, unloading a trailer (part of a warehouse job called
“receiving”) is the best place for a robot like Stretch, agrees Matt Beane, who
studies work involving robotics and AI at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. “No one wants to do receiving,” he says. “It’s dangerous, tiring, and
monotonous.”



But Beane, who for the last two years has led a team of field researchers in a
nationwide study of automation in warehousing, points out that there may be
important nuances to the job that a robot such as Stretch will probably miss,
like interacting with the people who are working other parts of the receiving
process. “There's subtle, high-bandwidth information being exchanged about boxes
that humans down the line use as key inputs to do their job effectively, and I
will be singularly impressed if Stretch can match that.”

Boston Dynamics spent much of 2021 turning Stretch from a prototype, built
largely from pieces designed for Atlas and Spot, into a production-ready system
that will begin shipping to a select group of customers in 2022, with broader
sales expected in 2023. For Blankespoor, that milestone will represent just the
beginning. He feels that such robots are poised to have an enormous impact on
the logistics industry. “Despite the success of automation in manufacturing,
warehouses are still almost entirely manually operated—we’re just starting to
see a new generation of robots that can handle the variation you see in a
warehouse, and that’s what we’re excited about with Stretch.”

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