Here’s Xiaomi’s $3,000 smart bike

The bike, in all its glory. Image by If World Design Guide

On Monday, reports broke that iRiding, a startup backed by Xiaomi, was set to release a smart bike this week. Nobody knew what it looked like; the only real detail available was its price: US$3,000.

The image above, found on the If World Design Guide website, depicts the elusive Xiaomi smart bike. The QiCycle R1, made by iRiding and Xiaomi, rife with sensors that pipe all sorts of fitness data to a user’s app. It’s built in Taiwan.

It will not, initial reports suggest, be equipped with a Xiaomi logo – just like Xiaomi’s hoverboard, which is made by another startup partner. That hoverboard costs just US$315.

Not first – but priciest

Xiaomi and iRiding are far from the first companies to venture into the world of smart bike tech – but the QiCycle R1 will be one of the most expensive.

Mockup of Xiaomi’s bike app. Image by If World Design Guide

Last August, Chinese streaming video compamy LeTV announced its own smart bike, the cheapest version of which ran for US$625. Baidu also jumped onto the bike wagon (although it still doesn’t have a device on the market), as did a number of Chinese startups like Basic Conception, which retails its device for US$613.

But those have largely stayed confined to the world of techy bike enthusiasts. And if Xiaomi was hoping to attract a more general audience, then its price tag certainly doesn’t show it.

We will learn more about the QiCycle when it officially launches later this week. But unless that launch comes with a pretty hefty discount, any cool techy features will likely be overshadowed by the fact that this device costs about 10 times as much as Xiaomi’s newest phone, the Mi5.