Originally Posted by
Robert C
The new N360 & N380's are smaller and lighter than the old N171. They also has a wider gear range. I currently have two N360's and one N380; so far I have had no trouble with them.
from here
I started with a N171. It lost the lower half of its gear range one day, all of the sudden. In the lower half of the gear range, it would just freewheel. I made it home in high gear, then got it replaced. A little while later it happened again. That time they replaced it with an N360.
Right before that happened, a friend who knew I liked the Nuvinci hubs pointed out an eBay bike shop that was selling off their stock of N360s at a really good price, so I grabbed it as an upgrade. So I ended up with 2 N360s. One I built into a wheel for my LHT, which is where the N171 had been, and one I built into a wheel for my Raleigh Twenty.
The one on my Trucker started freewheeling maybe a year later. It wasn't the internals of the shifting mechanism this time, it was the actual freewheel assembly on the hub. The support guy admitted that the early batches on N360 were vulnerable to this kind of failure, and he sent me a replacement. That was the point at which I decided, rather than rebuilding my Trucker wheel with my 3rd replacement hub, maybe it was time to try something else.
The N360 in the Raleigh wheel did keep going until the bike died in a fire.
I still think they are good hubs, and that I just had some bad luck, but I've been very happy with the Alfine, so while I miss the continuous shifting, I haven't really been tempted to go back. Although with the Raleigh Twenty, I had ridiculously low gearing while still keeping the hub within manufacturer's specs. That had been an issue with LHT: the low gear was just a little higher than I wanted it, and lowering it would have voided the warrantee. So there is a temptation to try a Nuvinci in my small wheeled bike.