Carl Fogel writes:

Anyone had any experience with these yet?

www.nupace.com

Anyone had a chance to see the innards?

Any opinions on reliability or efficiency?

There was some speculation and (I think) some links to patents in
this thread a few months ago:

http://tinyurl.com/4pzo5

At those prices, it may be quite a while before anyone finds
out about reliability.

Thanks for looking it up.

This subject comes you at intervals and this design has been done in
large scale, externally, on single chainwheels. It is not continuous
as you can see in the drawings that show fine stepped ratchets with
many pawls that trade off the load. These many ratchets articulate
under load by an amount proportional to their extended engagement
angle and the lowest angle. Only one pawl bears the load at any
moment and it speeds up the relative rotation of the ratchet ring with
respect to the core by the angle through which it changes due to the
eccentricity of the core.

The drawings are so crude that details are not visible other than the
concept. These seem to be manual sketches rather than CAD images. I
suspect that the hub would fail if a strong rider were sprint on it or
climb a grade.

The method has been offered a few times in response to the FAQ:

http://draco.acs.uci.edu/rbfaq/FAQ/8i.3.html

Jobst Brandt