Well spotted, Jim & Dan. That Gebla Rohbox looks like a solution to drop bars with a Rohloff. Any solution that requires a cyclist to take his hand off the grip to change gear seems to me contrary to the ethos of the Rohloff. Consider, the experienced derailleur rider changes gear well before the lower gear is required, but the Rohloff rider changes gear in the moment it dawns on him that he's pedaling harder, or will in a moment have to pedal harder than he wishes to.
Personally, I change gear only when my heart rate approaches my cardiologist's chosen limit (or falls away from it, for gearchanges in the other direction), which I trust because he's also a cyclist; also, my heart rate is how I've always controlled my output on the bike, even when I rode on derailleurs, so I was at ease with the method long before it became necessary.
It wouldn't surprise me to discover that some, perhaps many, erstwhile derailleur riders have been seduced by the forgiving nature of the Rohloff into the same slack style as those of us who were, so to speak, born to hub gears. I'm not just cracking a joke: when I switched from Shimano manually operated hub gears to Shimano fully automatic hub gears (otherwise exactly the same Nexus box in very similar bikes), over a ride I took probably 200 times a year, my average speed improved so much that in the same time span I added another, shorter, loop; that's all the result of substituting an optimum (automatic via sensors) gear changing regime for a lackadaisical (manual) gear changing regime; actually, even when, after I noticed the improvement, I was trying to make the best gear changes on the old manual bike, as expected the Cyber-Nexus autobox still beat me, if not by so much. Gazelle fitted that autobox to a top model for a few years, and owners of that series of bikes consistently reported finding their commute less stressful, in an environment, Dutch commuting, which does not encourage speeding. (I found the same thing in cars in a study I did for a client: from about two liters upwards, an autobox will give most drivers greater economy than manual shifting, and that was before all these electronically-controlled boxes came in; today it is very likely a slam-dunk in favour of the autobox, never mind the artificial government mileage numbers.)
If I were a fan of drop bars, I'd be looking into this Rohbox. It seems superior to the similarly pricey French solution with split bars in which the rotary control would often anyway require releasing the grip to change gear.
