Mostly I think I just wanted my sweet-spot gear and only had one above and below it. The gap between the ratios still annoyed me a bit.
I’ve ridden Sturmey-Archer 5 speed and it was pretty good. And the higher gear is when you want to overtake trucks and cars on the freeway. If you set the middle gear to be at your sweet point then both other gears are too far apart to be used much. There is a gear that’s too high and one that’s too low. But if you need gear then what are your choices? Ghosts shifts and the cantankerous rattle of half-tuned gears plagues my mountain bike unless I continuously feed it with my labour, expensive lubes and fresh parts. My other bikes are all single speeds and they’re happy with the bi-annual maintenance schedule I lavish on them. They mostly work okay but there is a fair bit of cleaning and tweaking required to keep them operating in a way that doesn’t shit me. I own a road bike (which I rode twice this year already) and a mountain bike (which I’ve ridden plenty and then some), both with gears.
I personally don’t mind having gears on the right bike. We’re starting to see 1 x 10 and 1 x 11 set-ups (at least in mountain bike circles I ride a 1 x 9 and have for years) but most road bikes still have a complex arrangement of front and back derailleurs. As in, more than the once yearly my SS gets. Even high end stuff needs a fair bit of fiddling to keep operating smoothly. Single speeds can be daunting for new riders and derailleur based gears can be a pain in the arse for old and new alike. For many people they’re the answer they’ve been looking for. I generally like the idea of hub based gears. Watching this video left me none the wiser. It’s a technology that has intrigued me since it arrived and won a design award some years back. The concept therefore is mature even if (some would argue) the technology is not.
According to the Nuvinci wiki page, the general idea for this continually variable transmission has been around since the 1800s.
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