There's at least one existing hub drive ebike that uses this model.

It has a single gear, you can spin the pedals backwards to engage full regen, but the secret is that its usually doing a little regen which it stores and uses to help on hills and when accelerating from a standstill.

I am surprised automatic shifting technology doesn't exist. Wireless electronic shifters are readily available now, in addition to power meters. We have devices to shift and devices to tell us when to shift. All that is needed is to marry the two together.

It does exist, in the form of a CVT and controller invented by a company called NuVinci. I built a cruiser bike with the manual CVT version years ago. It worked but the hub was very heavy. If you were stopped in high gear and you pushed down on the pedal really hard to start going it would occasionally slip. Once you got going it was pleasant to use but don't expect to win any races.

They must not have sold very many of them because Fallbrook-NuVinci went into chapeter 11 and enviolo bought the tech.

https://enviolo.com/products/

The Vanmoof bikes have automatic shifters. I don’t like them because they are unpredictable, and you feel the difference. It’s jarring. The Cowboy is single speed, which works pretty well because of the motor. That’s my preferred configuration. But at high speeds it does feel like I’m at a spinning class, and it sounds like this system could fix that.

Lets be real, the selling point of this nonsense is that you can ride your electric motorcycle on a bike path and pretend it is a bike because it has pedals.

Personally, I don't get the hate over people using e-bikes on bike trails. While I am still fully pedal powered I have no problem with other people using e-bikes. Especially if the alternative is for that person to drive somewhere in a car.

Maybe in other areas people are doing 60kph on bike trails or something, but that's not what I see around me. They seem to top out around 20kph or so, which makes them basically just bikes as far as traffic flow is concerned. Sure they will zoom past you on the uphills, but who cares? It's not hurting me or anybody else.

There are lots of overpowered e-bikes with chain + gears, where the power going through the pedals is maybe 5 % of total power, and the rest is electric. This doesn't change or bring anything new to the table.