With the added support, mountain bikers will surely love this piece. It will not be surprising to see most of them going to their store and asking about it. A good find for the people who love to travel a lot by bike.

Of course the fact that carbon fibre is completely unrecyclable has no mention in the article, nor the fact that composites like these are very susceptible to undetectable damage from simple knocks and shocks. Using advanced composites in bikes is a complete waste and a total gimmick.
if you want space age, get titanium and you'll leave it to your grand kids when you die - carbon fibre is unfixable, unsuitable and indefensible.

Tom,

Carbon fiber has upsides and downsides, like any material. It is not recyclable yet because we use so little of it that it's not worth investing in the technologies to do that, but at some point in the future, there's no doubt that it will be done (probably using a combination of new c-f and the recycling process itself).

As for the danger of failure, just a carbon-fiber tube would probably be dangerous, but a well designed system like this might actually be better than titanium.

Sorry... why is this on treehugger?

A 11,000 mountain bike made of non-recyclable very high energy content materials marketed to people who are more likely to drive their suv to lug their fancy toy the nearest trials than to commute by bike. This is just ridiculous.

the "why is this on treehugger" ppl should form a club.

This electric car is too expensive and you can't recycle its tires!

This bike is too expensive and you can recycle that part..

When the mud cakes inside the frame on a wet trail ride the bike will certainly weigh more... Lots of nooks and crannies to keep clean.

Damage resistant . . but what about the damage to my knee when it rubs against the top tube? Looks kind of cheese-graterish to me. Also, won't that isotruss structure fill with mud and debris?

In practice, few composite frames fail in the thin tube walls, even from damage. Where they commonly go south is at the joints, especially at metal-to-composite interfaces like the dropouts and bottom bracket. This design does nothing to address that.

Not to rain on their parade but it looks like a cool structure in the wrong application. Maybe a folding bike, like a next-gen Moulton space frame. Sequester my 2.75 lb of carbon somewhere else, please.

Anon
Full disclosure: I'm an engineering student studying, among other things, composites.

Composites using thermo-setting resins are totally un-recyclable and never will be recyclable, or even easy to dispose of.

They are already widely used in the aerospace and automotive industry, and are only used as a last resort when no other material will do, mainly because they have a bad name for reliability in fatigue and impact (very big concerns in both planes and bikes) and also are totally environmentally unfriendly (to which the aerospace industry is surprisingly sensitive).

As for why treehugger should avoid this type of article, these bikes are the sports car of the bike world - impractical for everyday use, the reserve of the super-rich or enthusiast. I'll probably be censored for saying this, but is it too much to ask that a website called treehugger not keep posting about things which are provably bad for the environment?

a 12,000 dollar bicycle?!?! I don't know what planet it's from but here in New York City it would last less than an hour before it was stolen. that would be more than 200 dollars a minute for transportation. I think some designer stopped hugging his tree and started hugging the crack pipe!

Yes, this is ridiculous - the worst part is that the 5K difference between frame and complete bike is well above retail for the parts they've hung on this bike.

And besides being non-news, this is old news. This thing has been out for months.

Still I'd like someone driving to work with this more than someone who spend $12000 on a car, which blindingly obvious will have produced waste, easily 10 fold the amount, and still polluting while going on.

To the eng. student: fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites can't be chopped up and recycled? Virgin fiber is expensive and airframers like Airbus and Boeing are figuring out how to recycle it. Your "never" will come soon, google "recycling carbon fiber composites".

And on dissing composites for impact resistance, it just ain't so. Almost 20 years ago I worked trying to make composite jet engine fan blades to survive a bird strike. Tall order then, but the GE90 on the Boeing 777 uses composite blades, with over a decade in service.

Browse Youtube for footage of F1 drivers surviving horrific high speed crashes courtesy of carbon fiber cockpits. See "Winning The Oil End Game" for the crash photo of VW Jetta vs. carbon McLaren-Mercedes. The M-M won hands down.

Fiber-reinforced composites are hardly environmentally unfriendly (with the exception of mil-spec stuff with chromium-laced primer). Lighter weight, higher strength, corrosion resistance and longer life means they often beat metal hands down by staying in service longer.

Check out this link for some of the science behind the idea :

http://cozybeehive.blogspot.com/2008/01/isotruss-open-lattice-structure-for.html