Well spotted, Dan.
With regard to the speculation about a "snubber" or a "tiny eccentric bottom bracket", a split belt would be a natural for Rohloff's own sliding block axle carrier design for their hub, for which they give the blueprints away free of charge. I don't see why an eccentric bottom bracket as on Thorn designs shouldn't work as well. After all, how much adjustment could you need? (Not a rhetorical question.)
GETTING THERE FROM WHERE WE HAVE ARRIVED
I'm not planning on being an unpaid (indeed paying, through the neck!) beta tester, though. The Hebie Chainglider does me brilliantly and I have my doubts about a belt with inclusions on the drive side being any cleaner than the smooth outside of the Chainglider.
It's possible that dried dirt could be easier to brush off the Gates Drive than from a chain, but the junction of the belt ends brings with it another place where dirt can gather. In addition, I view the much larger drive vanes of the Split Gates Drive with suspicion as dirt accumulators.
There is also the problem that the Rohloff is, by design, not a clean gearbox; if it were truly sealed, it would be atrociously heavy*. Seems obvious that the belt will carry oil "misted out" and expelled through its breather hole forward to your trousers or your legs, and right there you're back to daily or weekly cleaning. By comparison, I wipe my Chainglider down with a piece of kitchen tissue once a year when I change the gearbox oil and the chain, which I run for its entire life on the factory lube, and I cycle in street clothes, light coloured khakis in the summer, without any complaints from my wife about oil on my clothes.
So, in sum, the belt will probably be cleaner than a chain, but we already have a component, the Hebie Chainglider, which does the same job very well indeed, and most likely better. The Chainglider costs about 10% of the estimated price of the Split Gates Drive. You don't need a Scottish grandmother or a doctorate in economics to view that comparison leerily.
It is likely that the belt drive will look cool until everyone has one, but I'm not a fashion victim. And really, for that much money, it has to do better than outlast three chains (which is how far again? -- for me about 10k kilometres) or two Rohloff oil changes; they're not giving us a hard number because they want to keep open the option of discovering some masher who gets a thousand miles/1600km on a chain as I once did.
Someone has to take one for the team and, just in case I'm wrong, give this thing a thorough, extended test so we can decide if it is a high-functioning replacement for the Hebie Chainglider or merely bicycle bling to give the Cool Boys bragging rights... Yo, Energyman, are you still there?
Remember when shaft drive for bicycles was the next big thing? Except it wasn't.
Sorry to be a Jeremiah in the halls of the technofreaks, but I have decades of experience thinking about a minimum or zero maintenance bike, and testing components towards it.
*For those who don't know the history, the Rohloff was designed as a mud plugger along the lines of German agricultural machinery, intended to be passed on to your great-grandchildren. It was not designed as a luxury touring gearbox (and therefore permanently ultra-clean, no oil on the outside), or even as an offroad downhiller, but literally to survive racing in the mud, or even on a beach, because its inspiration was derailleur gruppos that died in the sand and wavelets on a beach near the hotel where the Rohloffs spent their honeymoon. The only reason it has even a niche market as a touring box is that back in the 1990's when the Rohloff was brand new, the iconoclastic German baukast (custom bike builder) Utopia tested the Rohloff and then fitted it to their aspirational touring bikes, including some famous circumnavigators, and later Andy Blance of Thorn fell in love with the Rohloff box as the answer to design problems in serious touring bikes. These are trendsetters, so in time others followed at first tentatively and then enthusiastically.
