People love ebikes not because of barely having to pedal, but because they can reach places with the bicycles that are out of their reach with a regular bike. It can be long weekend rides for some, but it can also be living/working on a hill. It's like owning a horse in olden times when all you had before were your own two legs.

No idea what the author means with "lacking a Toyota Corolla equivalent". (E-)Bikes come in wide range of price and range, often from the same manufacturer. It's the components that dictate the final price, barely the frame, motor or battery where less choice exists than with the other components.

Drive by wire will be exotic for a long time, I can see it taking over certain niches like recumbent bike where you have an extremely long drive train. Everybody else will run on cheap mechanical drive trains for a long time to come.

Never ever will we see electronic or even wireless braking, it's just madness and illegal everywhere. We will though see ABS from Bosch soon, not sure if that's such a good idea or even necessary at the low speeds of a <20mph ebike.

>> Most bikes are sold as toys or as overcomplicated hobbyist contraptions.

This is probably the US-centric view, but with a certain threshold of cyclists the wide middle of bike sales is practical bikes for short rides in the city with a hub dynamo a basket or rack for you shopping. Certainly not toys or sporty bikes.

The author shortly mentions removing batteries as optional, I must insist that removing and replacing a battery is a must-have to ensure the bike to be usable for a long time as many decent bikes do get ridden for 10, 20 or even 30 years.

Yes! That's what drove me towards the ebike. I live on top of a 10% slope and using a regular bike was simply impossible (for me). Having an ebike changed my life completely. I now never use my motorbike anymore (at all) and the car, extremely rarely.

"a Toyota Corolla equivalent" implies to me a budget-friendly bike with impeccable build-quality, that appeals to both the mainstream & the hacker/modder/racer types.

Perhaps the author is asking at least one top e-bike manufacturer to standardize on just a couple models, and focus on making them the best bang for buck.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdgq9/mechanics-ask-walmart...

The situation with 'cheap' bikes is the same as it was almost 20 years ago when I worked at a shop; If you spend less than X$ on a bike, it's almost certain to require repairs down the road and there's a good chance (i.e. if it's a 'full suspension' cheapie) you won't even be able to find the parts to do it.

If you spend more than X$ (while still using common sense and realizing cheapies exist at higher dollar amounts,) you're probably going to get something between a Corolla and an Elantra. (Elantras -have- gotten better over the years and do last -longer, but do often need more TLC and perhaps wear a bit harder.)

Many bike shops, at least the ones in seasonal parts of the US barely make money on their cheapest bikes (When you factor in free tune ups, etc,) and will at best make money on accessories.

The shop I worked at, sometimes we'd take someones broken wal-mart bike on a trade-in for one of our base models. Nine times out of ten though we would just part out what was good after a month or so (cool-off in case the bike was hot, but I never recalled seeing a hot wal-mart bike, let alone a broken one.)

It's sad that you have to get up into the few hundred dollar range to get a usable bike, because around here that's actual (very used) corolla money. I don't want to have to be an enthusiast (and spend enthusiast money) to get a bike I can reliably commute on.

Realistically the most common form of total brake failure, I reckon, is when the pads overheat or simply wear out. The most common braking mistake would be over-application of the front brake. The most common cause of diminished performance is a poorly adjusted setup. I feel like smart electronic brakes could help improve all of these problems, although I guess it's possible to have smart electronic brakes that use a long cable as a "button" so what it really comes down to is whether you can make a wifi system more reliable than a metal cable or mineral oil hose.

First off, you'd need to either have a a battery to the brake lever. If you're going to power it off the main battery, you're going to have to run a wire to then, and if you're routing 2, then you may as well route another 2 for signalling. Otherwise you're throwing out the main advantage of wireless. But that means now you've got an additional battery to monitor.

Second is that the comms systems need to have pretty heavy duty filtering and need to do it fast. 100 milliseconds delay in signalling means at 30kph you're going to add almost a meter of stopping distance. That's a lot of processing power and a lot of power consumption to ensure the near microsecond performance that you're going to get with hydraulic systems.

Third is the issue of tying your brakes to an electrical system. When your main battery dies, that more or less means that you have no brakes whatsoever.

Fourth is that now your components now also have to go through FCC certification, as does any piece of equipment that communicates on radio frequencies. Further increasing cost.

And you throw out all the advantages of hydraulic brakes; no power to use, redundancy between front and rear in the event one fails, ease of maintenance for hydraulic brakes, being able to feel the behavior of the brakes under your fingers, etc, easy to notice if there is a problem (leaks primarily will show up as decreasing fluid in the reservoir).

Honestly IMO it doesn't really seem worth the tradeoffs.

To me, there's a more complex issue, which is the braking feedback mechanism. You can't just have off/on - you need a gradient, and that needs to be communicated to the rider by feel. The same feel has to be perceived across every braking context, or it won't be predictable and people will crash.

Any sort of ABS or smart brake algorithm has to predictably augment the human control feedback and seamlessly integrate with motor controls.

Using nfmi would be preferable to wifi or bt, to reduce the possibility of interference.

Lastly, your system needs to fail gracefully. If the controller or mechanics of a brake fails, the motor controllers have to be aware of it, and limit speed or go into a limp-home mode.

So if you have a siloed power store, secure and reliable wireless networking, human compatible controls and brake behaviors, and graceful failure mode, and at least one layer of redundancy, you could have a feasible braking system.

Since brakes are almost always conveniently close to the frame, though, in not sure that wireless buys you anything compared to wired. Electronic braking has most of the same problems regardless of wireless, and wireless doesn't simplify or improve any problems (that I can think of? ) Maybe isolating each brake from the drive controller is desirable for reliability?

So with all that complexity, using regular old hand brakes seems like the best solution. Even if you want smarter braking, using a system that works with hand brakes is probably better than a wireless or purely electronic overhaul.

The sensorial feedback using analog hand brakes is the peak of UI - interfering with it requires some advantage that exceeds the loss of feedback and reliability.

I can see wireless controls allowing for novel form factors where brake cabling isn't possible or becomes complicated, but for most regular bikes, it seems unnecessary.

Potentially (and I say this with skepticism) it could simplify the hydraulic lines since if it's full brake by wire then you could only run one system to control the master cylinder rather then the multiple required for ABS. Then you could run something like an armored ethernet cable to the brake lever itself (just using armored ethernet as an example, I've got no idea if it's a good idea or not). Assuming you've got some mechanism to sense what's going on in the hydraulic lines and transmit it back to the to the lever and the hands of the rider, it means that potentially that brake feel can be adjusted on the fly.

That said, I don't really view it as a big enough advantage to loose ability to control the brakes in a loss of power situation.

>I can see wireless controls allowing for novel form factors where brake cabling isn't possible or becomes complicated, but for most regular bikes, it seems unnecessary.

That's really debatable. Mostly because even if you can move your brake lever where ever, it still needs to be within reach of your hands while on the bike's handle bars, and that inherently limits it's placement to where your hands are near. Maybe if you moved the controller to a glove on the hand itself, but then you'd have to think about preventing inadvertent activation on whatever glove you're wearing. And I really doubt anyone's silly enough to think that we should use an app on your smartphone to control your brakes.

Even motorized roller skates and skate boards use wired brakes and throttling, but a tricycle form factor or two person bike might benefit from wireless brakes.

Like I said, what is the real advantage here trying to go wireless here that makes it worth the cost of loosing advantages of a mechanical or hydraulic system? I could maybe see some advantage of a full brake by wire system over mechanical or hydraulic, but wireless? The weight savings aren't that significant.

Mechanical & hydro brakes tend to fail gracefully… mechanical wires will usually break a couple threads at a time (you feel this when pulling the lever), allowing riders to come to a stop well before total failure (severed cable). Similarly, you can repeatedly “pump” the levers of a leaky hydro brake to increase stopping power.

I did rides up to 180km long on regular bike without much problem. The reason I got eBike now is that while I have enough physical strength over the years my knees stopped liking sudden accelerations and steep heels. Ebike takes care of that part just fine. With ebike I still have proper fitness level, come back from my rides with the battery almost full and my knees intact ;) Sure I could do with wide gear range but it is just not the same. Much more fun on ebike.

An older metaphor for the same might be "The Model T Ford" of $product.

As in, the influential model that brought the product to the masses, because it was more affordable, had good reliability and sold in huge volume: "The Ford Model T Is generally regarded as the first affordable automobile, which made car travel available to middle-class Americans. The relatively low price ... The Ford Model T was named the most influential car of the 20th century"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T

I'd love to here more about this transition!

It might have saved me a broken arm. I had not long had my European spec e-bike and forgot the brakes were reversed when I arrived at a damp corner. I touched what I thought was the rear brake and went straight down.

They come out of the left side of the frame and one of them isn't quite long enough. I've got used to it now.

Compared to a motorcycle, I assume?

I bought my current bike from Walmart for about $150, and would be interested in updating to an ebike if they were in the $500 range.

Also, there are folks who expect a flood of used bikes to hit the market. As with conventional bikes, the pricing of cheap bikes is affected by the pricing and availability of used bikes. A new bike has to be priced cheaper than repairing an old one.

Actually just bought this one. It's obviously made to a price, but quite rideable and has gotten me out riding again and a little more excited to exercise.

Edit* full disclosure: I owned one of these and returned it because I decided I wanted something a bit more high performance, but only because I lucked into a free Bosch battery pack.

In fact, that's the best way to do it. Get a good bike and modify it into an electric. You get much better customization and quality for the price.

But that's not for everyone. Perhaps someone with access to funding can start a chain of conversion shops... but honestly, Swapfiets is cheaper.

I think this is referring to reliability and cost together. Although I would point the author at the Priority Current. That thing will probably ride until the wheels fall off. Belt drive and internally geared with a bottom bracket motor.

https://www.prioritybicycles.com/products/current

You are certainly right that in most of the US biking infrastructure is embarrassingly bad, hopefully if pedal-assist ebikes get more popular that will spur more investment in bike paths and separated infrastructure.

If I had to guess, It's that a lot of the US e-bikes seem to fall either into the category of being marketed to various existing known US rider segments. But those segments are people that care about the gear on the bike, they might care bout tweaking and playing with it, etc etc. Lets pretend those companies (like Specialized) are playing Buick and Lincoln in the E-Bike segment.

We also have all these really cheap e-bikes on Amazon. These are (at least, perception wise) typically playing in the 1990s PentaStar and 1990s Kia segment. In other words, they're cheaper, but there's this expectation that you'll have to fix things more often and there's definitely some annoying cheap-outs in places.

A Corolla e-bike, would basically be a boring piece of wonderbread. It would probably be best packaged as a 700c Wide tire hybrid or 26" with 1.5" city/gravel-worthy tires. It would have simple, reliable components. If it had shimano parts, I'd hope that most of them would have part numbers starting with a 3 (IIRC that would put it around Altus-ish level?) Double Wall rims (I don't think you'd even want to try otherwise on an american e-bike) and just say 'f it', go 36 spoke and 4 cross if you can manage.

In other words, Boring and reliable, marketed that way. Maybe it -does- exist but I haven't seen it yet in my searches (that's more or less what I'd want, frankly)

> We will though see ABS from Bosch soon, not sure if that's such a good idea or even necessary at the low speeds of a <20mph ebike.

If I had to guess, this is because lots of casual folks want disc brakes on a bike, but don't know how to use them properly, because unfortunately a lot of folks in this country remember trying to stop on their parent's Schwinns with worn out rubber, nearly frictionless chrome wheels, and turkey wing bar-levers; AKA their first reflex is to clench the brakes and they're very likely to endo.

Doesn't help that in the US we have a strange litigious relationship with Cycling, there have been some pretty interesting lawsuits over the decades due to safety complaints. Johnson v. Derby would be a specific one that comes to mind. The lawsuit that nearly bankrupted the shop I once worked at (effectively did cripple it to a slow death/change in ownership) is another.

> This is probably the US-centric view, but with a certain threshold of cyclists the wide middle of bike sales is practical bikes for short rides in the city with a hub dynamo a basket or rack for you shopping. Certainly not toys or sporty bikes.

Yeah, US Centric, somewhat because the majority our cities are designed around cars. This is why we talk a lot about things like 'food poverty,' because there are cities where the lack of a car makes it nearly impossible for folks to get food (Short of walking to the local 'convenience store' that charges markups and has limited selection.) Ironically, E-Bikes could help in some of these situations, but it still requires a bit of a paradigm shift.

Which is a shame. I got into riding in college, and I did at least as much riding for 'work/shopping/etc' as I did for pleasure. Heck of the thousands of miles my mountain bike has logged, probably 50 of it has been 'trails'. But I'm in a minority.

The latter is actually false. Having a high-voltage battery on board means you can get rid of most of the belts which normally power things too large for the 12V battery to handle, like the A/C compressor, power steering etc.

Same goes for the powertrain - no need for a typical gearbox when you can just replace that with a planetary gear.

Overall hybrids have less mechanical parts than regular ICE vehicles.

Early hybrids were a standard ICE with some help from an additional motor, later hybrids moved towards being a BEV with a smaller battery that gets topped up by a generator (which is roughly what a hydrogen Fuel cell car is too).

This is analogous to what the article suggests with the Schneider drive.

But I think emprically, even the earlier mild hybrids were more mechanically reliable than ICE equivalents. Makes sense as you'd be in the sweet spot for the engine more often.

In bike terms that is the equivalent of the amount of battery you need to get you over big hills and maybe help you get going from a standstill and maybe let you get away with a few internal gears.

Aren't these cars usually sold as BEV with a range extender instead of hybrids?

Nissan seems to brand theirs as "e-power" to avoid geting them confused with their actual EV range, but possibly the lack of plug is the key difference there.

All of this in exchange for adding over-current protection, some wire/connectors, and some kind of control mechanism (typically relay or IGBT).

Depending on the setup, the hybrid electric motor also acts a the starter, and generator for the ICE.

The hybrid drive may be used to move the vehicle in reverse direction (depending on how the hybrid system is implemented), removing the need for a reverse gear.

Electric power steering can powered directly from the hybrid battery, simplifying the steering rack.

So it does remove some complexity, but from an engineering point of view, I still think they are just too complex. Manufacturers just should give their customers the option to have full electric models, or fully ICE powered for those living in very remote areas.

After having driven some of the supposedly latest and greatest hybrid powered Lexus models (AFAIK Toyota is still king of hybrid drivetrains) I am not convinced. They drive nice, but would have been better if they were fully electric. I just cant believe how badly Toyota missed the EV market.

I also think some of these automakers are riding a fine line and trying not to cannibalize the final years of the ICE lineup. Notice how many sporty driving cars are being released the last 2 years. It’s very likely those cars will be illegal to sell in a decade. It makes sense for them to produce those cars now and get a sale while they keep working on battery and range in a lab behind the scenes.

The key to that balance though is to actually put in the R&D so when they do decide to pump out EVs, they’re competitive to the market. If Toyota and Honda are playing catch up releasing 200 mile range EVs while the early adopters are moving on to 350+, then that will be the beginning of their downfall similar to the big 3 in the 80s.

Actually, you do if you count the moving parts. A belt is always at least two pulleys and a belt. A motor is a motor. One moving part vs three.

In some cases you don't need anything at all - hybrids don't use alternators, some (like Toyota's HSD) don't even have a stepper motor for throttling and a dedicated starter motor - the two motor-generators perform this function.

And free bonus: they almost certainly have regenerative braking, so you probably won't find yourself with a car with a small engine and no engine braking worth talking about.

In teslas it’s even worse because it’s the rear wheels that brake the most. It’s like pulling the handbrake on the wet highway.

But it’s ok they have it as a warning in the manual “ Warning In snowy or icy conditions Model Y may experience traction loss during regenerative braking.”[1]

So no liability for the company. It’s now the driver’s fault.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_eu/GUID-3DFFB07...

Fast but small - capacitor

Medium - battery

Slow but large - fuel cell

Of course it would be quite expensive to build such a complicated car. Rather probably just a big battery will provide a good enough compromise. It might make sense for some very high use rate vehicles like buses or trucks. The capacitor could store energy for one accelaration from standstill to 30 m/s. (Or storing that braking energy). Batteries and capacitors get better every year too, so the tradeoff points are moving. For the fuel cell you could use power paste. It's much more expensive than electricity and requires special infrastructure, but it could be fast to fuel which could be a good tradeoff in some situations.

For many, being able to pedal, but not being required to pedal all the time, is one of the main reasons to use an e-bike in the first place. There are little cars and golf carts that could otherwise replace bikes.

And as far as the tires - get Kevlar tires. They have tremendous range and it's cheaper than the tires you save, even ignoring the time and hassle of switching tires on an ebike. It adds some drag, but nothing that you feel.

IMHO if you're not pedalling it is no longer a "bicycle", it is some other class of vehicle (e-scooter?). I have no problem with e-bikes providing a boost, but if you're not doing the work then it should be treated differently. EU 2002/24/EC sounds reasonable:

> Cycles with pedal assistance which are equipped with an auxiliary electric motor having a maximum continuous rated power of 0.25 kW, of which the output is progressively reduced and finally cut off as the vehicle reaches a speed of 25 km/h (16 mph) or if the cyclist stops pedaling.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_bicycle_laws#Europe

There are a lot "e-bikes" where I live where are token pedals on the machine to make it "self-propelled", but folks simply use the e-motor and zip along quite quickly. They require no licensing and no insurance AFAICT.

As someone who has a motorcycle license, and had to do a bunch of training and get insurance I see folks on these things as no different to my if I were on a 125cc or 250cc motorcycle/scooter.

I'm happy to have these types of vehicles enter the mix of transportation modes (and hopefully reduce automobile use), but I think the following are needed for e-scooters (née e-bikes):

* a drivers license (like in the EU, where a Category B car license also grants an AM (≤125cc; ≤11kW) license as well)

* some kind of insurance: an add-on rider/paragraph on one's existing car insurance, or a e-scooter policy

That's because the amount of damage a bicycle can do, even a powered one, is astoundingly small compared to the damage even a subcompact car traveling at typical urban speeds can do.

~40,000 people a year are killed in automotive crashes. That's one person every fifteen minutes, roughly.

A person on a bicycle killing someone in a collision is so rare I can tell you the two times it's happened in my state: once in the 90's when a bike courier hit a pedestrian who stepped out into the street without looking, and more recently when two cyclists collided on a bike path (which happens to be one of the most trafficked bike paths in the nation.)

> As someone who has a motorcycle license, and had to do a bunch of training and get insurance I see folks on these things as no different to my if I were on a 125cc or 250cc motorcycle/scooter.

Most 125CC scooters are capable of 50-60mph (even a 50cc scooter can usually easily hit 40mph); the majority of e-bikes in the US top out at 20-25mph.

A 125CC scooter weighs about 300lb; a typical e-bike is well under 50lb.

A 125CC scooter can carry a passenger; the majority of e-bikes cannot.

There is near universal experience from early childhood with learning to ride a bicycle. There is not near-universal experience with learning to ride a scooter or motorcycle.

Etc etc etc.

But what this post is describing is basically a cheap electric motorcycle.

They all have what I like to call vestigial pedals. You can barely see them tucked in near the rear tire. I have never seen someone using the pedals.

Also pretty common to call them DUI-cycles around here as well.

In the US many bikes have an off-road mode that delimits them, no real effort required.

E-scooter, at least in the US, generally means kick/push scooters.

"Moped" would probably be the right qualifier.

And for the ones that let you get a boost without pedalling, they can be classified as e-scooters.

Using speed limits to determine classification isn't sufficient alone.

Separating the cranks entirely from the drive seems like the exact opposite approach to me - without a direct physical connection between the cranks and the drive I imagine it'd feel spongy and unresponsive to a rider. I don't think people would enjoy riding a bike like that.

And the FreeDrive thing linked looks like a $1000+ component by itself, and bills itself as allowing new bicycle architectures. Most press about it is about high-end cargo bikes. I don't find its existence very compelling as support of the author's claims.

Also, one of the least enjoyable aspects of cheap stationary exercise bikes is the need to push the pedals over the dead spots. On real bikes most of the power comes from pushing down and inertia helps with the rest of the pedal rotation. Spinning bikes have heavy flywheels to work around the problem but I wouldn't expect them to work on an actual bike.

Though I guess with very sophisticated sensing and control algorithms you can in theory emulate inertia. I wonder if they try to do that? Would be a cool project.

Yes, I know that some people swear by elliptic chainrings. I had Biopace rings back in the day and didn't really like them even though the effect was quite small.

All the e-bikes sold in Europe are pedelecs, they require you to pedal, there is no throttle.

2) Bikes are a very different prospect to small cars and golf carts - size, weight, functionality, cost, legal status, use-cases, etc. There’s a vast difference between an ebike optimised as the author proposes, and a small car - this is a really odd comparison!

3) I’m not aware of Kevlar being used in bike tyres other than a) replacing the steel bead, or b) offering additional puncture resistance underneath the rubber tread. Is there another use that offers the greater wear resistance?

They are proposing a complex electromechanical system with an entire second motor and geartrain to replace a chain and two cogs because they see that setup as "heavy".

They're completely unaware that generators (and especially accompanying gearset, and its power rectification/control circuitry) have substantial losses. Two cogs and a chain are over 95% efficient.

A generator/motor hybrid bicycle would be heavier, have less range, and both mechanically and electrically much more complex. It could not possibly be cheaper.

The blog post is what happens when someone who considers themselves very smart looks at something they know nothing about and says "I know how to fix this."

A few red flags stand out to me:

A) Brakes. Mechanical bicycle brakes can provide kW of power dissipation for short time periods. e-bike motors are rated for ~250W and even if one were rated for 1000W, they are not going to be able to dump that power into a battery. So if you want regenerative braking, it's either going to need mechanical or resistive braking as well. There's a reason virtually every e-bike design from low-end to high-end does not even have regenerative braking and only has mechanical brakes. Because physics dictates you need mechanical brakes, and regenerative braking barely helps you on a bike anyway. If you're going to go against this trade of of every e-bike that came before, you had better show some numbers or reasoning. This is a physics problem so it's really not something where you can say "in the future when technology is better" especially in the context of claiming that cost will be lower. I'm not aware of any vehicles (bikes or other) that use only dynamic braking. Even streetcars, which historically use resistive braking (with very large components to do it by the way), always have emergency mechanical brakes.

B) Mass. If you're going to claim removing the chain and brakes saves significant mass, you better show some numbers. A hub motor is like 2-3kg and I guess a matching generator should be a similar mass.

C) FreeDrive system linked by the author. The claim is 5% less efficient than a chain, but this is really hard to believe given that power must be converted from mechanical to electrical and back again. The image of FreeDrive looks like a premium product, not cheap and is controlled by a CAN interface and a human-machine-interface, according to its press release. This is not a component that's going to make your bike cheaper. And if it wasn't heavy, the mass would be in the press release. It's heavy, I'd guess also about 3kg from images. OK, you can think of something lighter but nothing will be able to approach a chain drive. After all, you have to support the same input and output loads in addition to extra components.

D) Software handwaves. Why would a bluetooth connection to your phone be preferable or cheaper than a wired display? Sure, you've eliminated 2 or 3 wires, but now you need an adjustable mount and ongoing software maintenance for Android and iOS? What does "<motors that> will hand more control off to software, allowing physical simplification" mean? BLDC motors are dead simple mechanically but basically cannot function without software. Fortunately such software is heavily optimized and available for practically nothing inside commodity motor controllers.

Now, all of the above is fine as speculation anyway, except for the fact that the premise of the article is making a cheap Corolla-like e-bike. It gets so close by saying "maybe one will come out of Asia." I would counter this whole article by saying "why aren't the base models of Panasonic and Bridgestone e-bikes sold worldwide?" They start at just over $1000, but are definitely the Corollas of the e-bike world. If they sold 10x as many they probably could be $500. I'm not sure why North America seems to have cheap junky bikes and high-end bikes in stores, with barely any decent commuter bikes (e or non-e) on the market.

A few thoughts back:

A) There are plenty of (heavy) bikes out there with a front caliper and a rear brake activated by reverse pedalling. Suspect a similar compromise would work, and a decent front caliper/brake level pair isn't heavy.

B) In theory, simplifying the drive-train doesn't just subtract the mass of the chain - there's also a freewheel mechanism, rear cassette, chain wheels (usually 2-3), front and rear derailleur, multiple cables, handlebar shifters... and of course, the cost/complexity of purchase and fitting for these items. This would be quite a considerable weight, especially when we're talking about bottom-end components.

C) Agree totally, but (for the sake of this discussion) the comparison isn't just the drive-train of a standard bike - it's a whole standard drive-train, plus a hub or bottom-bracket motor - as deployed in current e-bikes. Current Bosch BB motor assemblies seem to be ~6.3 - 7.1 lbs each. [1]

D) Agree - ideally, there's no need for a display at all - a simple e-bike could just work.

[1] https://www.bosch-ebike.com/us/products/drive-units

B) Potentially those other things are subtracted, but a lot of e-bikes get rid of a lot of those components too and keep either a single speed with motor assist, or use a 3 speed internal gear hub. Really, if you're making the argument for a cheap, decent bike, you have to compare against the single speed option. The article didn't go into this detail but as long as the battery has juice, single speed e-bikes with motor assist don't have a big disadvantage compared to multiple speeds.

C) And in this article a bottom bracket generator is required (about 2-3kg, more likely 3 for a "Corolla") plus a hub motor (also 2-3kg and more likely 3 for a "Corolla"). So it's "drivetrain plus motor" vs "generator plus motor" with some room for discussion about how many drivetrain components are involved. Until I read your reply I didn't even think about the fact that this proposed e-bike needs a hub motor instead of a BB motor, so it loses some more efficiency there automatically.

D) I think front/rear lights are probably required for many jurisdictions and ought to be permanently fixed to the bike in any decent design to take advantage of the battery and be harder to steal, and battery level indication is of course required. A speedometer and programmable speed limiter would be good things to include if you want to make an e-bike that can be sold in as many places as possible without changes.

It's because they use motors with magnets, which have noticable cogging losses (aka takes effort to spin), so they have one-way clutches installed so you can pedal freely without power. And if you have a one-way clutch, it, by definition, can't back-driven, do it can't do regen braking.

Also, mid-drive bikes are increasingly popular because wheel motors have a bunch of disadvantages. They're currently more expensive, but that may eventually change with time. Production cost reductions may be offset by the fetish manufactures are showing for proprietary mountings, and Bosch is DRMing the fuck out of their systems.

I think it is a very interesting thought.

"These bikes are DRM'd to the hilt and any attempt at hacking them will cause the bike to brick itself which you can only reset at the dealership. You can do that three times and then it's permanent." user jacquesm 71 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29201673

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29562842

There does seem to be a variation on the "give away the razors to sell the blades" business model here too. Batteries/chargers are much cheaper (like 30% of the cost) when bundled with tools than they are when bought individually. I suspect the bundles are to recruit new customers, after which they buy a few "bare tool" options because they're marginally cheaper, and then they find themselves needing to buy a battery at $90 instead of having paid an extra $30 for a bundle that includes the tool, a carrying case, a battery and a charger.

I know that there are some exceptions for dangerous goods shipping of lithium batteries if they're part of a device versus a standalone battery, but that can't be it, can it?

What I wound up doing (and what I see most folks do) was more or less following a rule; your first few tools you usually buy bundles anyway. It's not till you get to your 4th or 5th tool that you ask whether to get the battery or not. (e.x. If you need a snowblower, you can probably use the lawnmower batteries. P.S. don't let your batteries get cold, the snowblower hates that.)

No, the expensive batteries are because of the long game. In the long game, you're still screwed. Eventually, those batteries -will- start to suck. Especially if your garage is not climate controlled and gets really hot, and frankly even after regular usage I'm surprised at how warm they are. The ability to output usable voltage for your tools becomes a Joke, you can charge them but the lawnmower stalls on a single wet leaf.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29201673

There's an awful lot of DRM talk in this thread so that was my concern. The cells theoretically are the only parts that need to be replaced sans physical damage

Vendor lock-in has been done successfully in the past and brands like Apple don't get hurt by it. So why should e-bikes be different.

Of course not, batteries for electric cars, bikes etc. will be locked down as hard as possible and new ones will cost 2/3 of the new car price - sometimes replacement will not be available even from manufacturer which in effect will send perfectly good car to the junkyard - you can see this playbook in action right now with old Nissan Leaf.

Even if they are not allowed?

ilumn.com and 18650batterystore.com are legit as far as I know.

https://www.compliancegate.com/amazon-lithium-batteries-requ...

> Amazon prohibits the sales of the following products containing lithium batteries:

> Electronic cigarettes > Cylindrical lithium-ion cell battery types: 14500, 16340, 18650, 20700, 21700, and 26650

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia4xe_R0qgw

Interesting comment, but I think a better take is that 15-minute neighborhoods don’t force you to leave your neighborhood for short trips. Is it really American to be forced into traveling outside of your neighborhood to go to things? I think it’s more free (and therefore “American?”) to have more local options, which of course doesn’t preclude distant options if you desire.

* Several small shops and small-ish supermarkets in a 5 min walk, with bigger ones maybe 15 mins walk away * Doctors, dentists, even a hospital within 10 mins walk * Ditto for co-working spaces * Gyms, swimming pool, coffee shops, even some theatres and a cinema within 5 mins walk too

(LWB Recumbents and tandems are different, they’ll skid the front wheel before overturning)

It's also illegal in some(most?) EU countries, at least in Germany and the UK, AFAIK.

Independently of whether this is legal or illegal wherever you live, you should care about _why_ it is illegal in some places.

https://www.recumbent.news/2021/05/23/the-ultimate-tilting-s...

> The current bicycle supply chain optimizes for producing poor-quality bikes in small lots (<500). Our bikes need mass-produced automotive-grade parts that will last a lifetime instead.

That's absolutely not true. There are mass-produced bikes that are cheap and last a very long time. (Decathlon bikes for example.)

I have built a couple of e-bikes by fitting a Bafang engine on a regular bike; it's a wonderful solution, so much so that I don't use anything else (I used to ride a motorbike, but it's now rotting in my garage).

That said, the fact that e-bikes are currently too expensive is true. The Bafang solution still costs €750+, in addition to the cost of the bike itself (which may be zero if you already have a bike, or around 350-500 if not).

But the main cost is the battery; if there is a breakthrough that drives battery costs down then suddenly e-bikes will become super affordable.

I surely don't share the observation that the Corolla has been produced yet; it's basically the Gazella Orange (around these parts).

Costs me $4, less than food delivery. And a lot more fun. The best part about them imo is I don’t have to worry about stress. The worst part about using a bike or scooter is worrying that when you return, it won’t be there.

* Organic Transit ELF ( https://organictransit.com/ )

* Better Bikes Pebl ( https://www.better.bike/ )

These fast eBikes give a false sense of security to the rider because they look like bicycles. You can get hurt quite bad in an accident at 20mph, and I don't see any riders wanting to wear sturdier protection like motorcycle helmets.

If you lower the speed requirement to 10-15mph you can get a cheap asian eBike for around that much money (well, could, a couple of years ago, now everything is more expensive).

But an e-bike can make high speeds feel like a casual stroll, and get someone to that speed when they do not have the experience to control it. I love fast bikes, but I also am acutely (perhaps overly) aware of the safety implications of them, as I have taken a tumble off a bike at high speed. Broken bones, road rash, hospital stays, PT, and years of chronic pain as a result. I still love me fast e-bike, and still ride it (carefully), but I am under no illusion that it isn't fast.

I think the main problem is that with an e-bike your grandma could suddenly be cruising at that speed.

20mph is also where the dangerous speed starts for us cyclist because motor traffic isn't used to cyclists going that far and every crossing without lights will become a bit of a gamble for the cyclist.

I personally hope ebikes come to fill a space between cars and bikes. My dream ebike does 35mph+ for 40mi+ with 50-100w of human input and has some cargo capacity and probably an extra seat. My household has a car (prius-c) and a converted van for longer trips / cargo moving. For me, this would allow me to ditch my car which is primarily used in the city. Though a bike like this would be pretty competent on surface streets mixing with automotive traffic, I would still probably need _some_ infrastructure to make it work well. Secured ground-level storage & parking near stores and points of interest, and streets with appropriate speed limits (<45mph).

The climate where I live is mild costal, but I believe this is possible even in more extreme continental climates with spikes, etc. Clothing tech has made staying dry & warm not too hard.

I have looked at the Twike but it's just an impractical device. Way too expensive & trying too hard to be a car.

Some corrections: - Freewheels don't preclude regen - You'll always need brakes - Some folks need better than 15-20mph ;-)

15-20mph for a bicycle is plenty of speed, as a matter of fact, bikes with motor support above 25kmh (15.5mph) here in Europe it would be a S-Pedelec and need a license plates and other stuff just like a motor scooter. You wouldn't want to ride at 35mph, it's a scary speed even on a good road bike that's meant to be ridden faster.

Regarding winter: Start cycling in summer, cycling is fall and just upgrade your clothes as you go along. I cycle 20km on a work day, no matter how bad, cold or hot the weather is. It's just about getting used to it.

Which is fine—most of the energy efficiency advantages of a bike come from being light and (relatively) slow, not from being human-powered, and their small size helps with lane and parking space.

But at that point you need real safety gear, and definitely shouldn't be sharing infrastructure (at least at those kinds of speeds) with human-powered bikes.

(edit: this is more in reply to the comment the preceding comment replied to. I regret the error)

A human body travelling at 35mph is likely to suffer serious damage if it collides with the road surface. I hit the road going at about 15mph, and suffered concussion, a fractured jaw and the loss of two teeth. I needed 15 stitches in my lip. At twice the speed, it would have been much worse.

Motorcycles go much faster; but everyone knows motorcycles are dangerous, so motorcyclists wear leathers, gauntlets and a helmet. And they still get injured a lot.

I agree, we need a "people's" e-bike. Bare in mind it's not unreasonable to pick up a used human-powered bike for less than $100. It needs to be cheap, safe and serviceable.

I always thought the best way forwards for such a thing is to use existing mountain bikes, use the existing gearing, brakes and chain drive and add a motor/battery/control system to this. Do away with the pedals entirely, most e-bikes are far too heavy/hard to pedal to do any kind of serious cycling. If you have no intention of pedalling the thing, weight is not so much an issue.

> DC motors have fallen out of favor for "brushless DC motors." BLDC motors have a longer life, better low-end torque, and are easy to control electronically. These are a good solution, but improvements in motor technology driven by automotive R+D should trickle down.

I would still opt for a DC motor. Sure they are less efficient, have less torque, etc - but they are incredibly simple to drive. I imagine it might even be possible to build a reliable mechanical based controller.

> Bicycles are already absurdly efficient. E-bike battery packs are small as a result. Their small size means a less energy-dense battery might be better if it obviates the need for a more complex battery management system (BMS).

If you're not doing hills and rolling resistance is not so much an issue, lead acid batteries are cheap and pack a reasonable punch. They are incredibly easy to charge and have an excellent charge cycle life time.

Absolutely. For something worth several £1000 it's just not possible to secure outside in a city. Watch this as an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuxHYcP63DE

Until a ebike is cheap enough not to hurt if stolen, I won't be getting one (even if I love the concept).

E-Bikes are already too heavy and bulky.

And yet they are still the battery of choice by the automotive industry who are also weary of each of your concerns. There are very good reasons as to why cars do not have LiPos.

> [..] they don't like heat, [..]

In terms of thermals they far much better than LiPos (you don't need a heating/cooling system for your lead acid battery).

> [..] they don't provide as high currents, [..]

The starter motor in your car will sink hundreds of amps during initial turnover, something you will need just a fraction of for an e-bike. Assuming your 12V lead acid battery sags to 9V under load and you're powering a 1kW motor, you're looking at a draw of about 111A, compared to 600A+ from a start motor. Share this across multiple batteries and this also reduces sag.

> [..] they can't take as many cycles.

In terms of cycles, I've personally found that my car's battery takes 10 years or so to stop turning over the car or holding a decent charge. Given that lead acid batteries are significantly cheaper and can be maintained, exist all over, can be easily recycled and are about to be in massive surplus when we see mass adoption of EVs, they make a lot of sense for a cheap e-bike revolution.

> [..] Lead acid batteries are heavy, they are large, [..]

> E-Bikes are already too heavy and bulky.

As I said, the purpose would not be to cycle the thing. A motorbike for example would be a lot more heavy, yet nobody claims they are non-rideable.

Also bare in mind that we are not looking to build the carbon nano tube $100k e-bike of dreams. This is just meant to be a working horse.

Secondly, the mass of my bike is worrying huge. With a hub motor and a battery on the seat tube, it is very easy to injure oneself doing “normal bike stuff”. I’m very used to being able to just put the nose of the bike into a space and then lift the tail across to park the bike. I’ve done that a few times with the ebike and come very close to doing my back some serious damage.

Thirdly, in terms of social acceptability it feels like the transport equivalent of vaping. People seem openly interested in the bike but it’s always with a light undertone of something between skepticism and you’re an asshole. Maybe that will change when these become as affordable as push bikes. Until then, in a world where cyclists are already outsiders (the way you have to shut out the world in order to concentrate on the big road picture as a cyclist, while being so physically present in other people’s personal space, always seems to upset non-cyclists) ebike riders are the outsiders’ outsider.

Related to this point, 25km/h — the speed limit for ebikes in my jurisdiction — is too fast for mixed pedestrian/cyclist paths and too slow for roads. I would love to see that limit raised to 30km/h aka 20mph and have all urban routes limited to 20mph for all vehicles. Then I wouldn’t be constantly annoying road traffic for “not using the bike lane” when it’s clogged up with prams, people, and push bikes trundling uphill at walking pace.

I’ve always been the kind of cyclist who is quite comfortable bloody mindedly asserting their right to use anything a car is allowed to use, occupying the whole lane as a car would, much to the irritation of car drivers who 110% of the time would rather I didn’t. When I’m driving my car I also find this kind of “I’m a car too!” cyclist both within their rights and also somewhat selfish. With ebikes it feels you have to use the “fast” lane of share-with-cars rather than share-with-pedestrians, so maybe the upside is that this will nudge transport policy towards genuine bicycle lanes as opposed to these mixed bike/people abominations.

People are ultra lightweight vehicles unencumbered by metal frames and they are (and have the right to be) highly manoeuvrable. They can switch direction at any moment — they should be given dedicated lanes where they can be as chaotic as they want to be. Same for bikes, if slightly heavier. Same for cars, if quite a lot heavier.

Thanks for occupying the whole lane, that's how we should ride bicycles for our own safety.

In practice, the type of bike I ride (a Rad Runner Plus) is optimised for comfort under power rather than efficiency. Power will come almost entirely from the 250W motor with maybe no more than 50W from me. Once the motor tops the bike out at 25km/h, I'm not going to be going any faster without a major change of stance, gear, and expectation of exercise.

Athletic biking is for the weekends :)

"Taking the lane" is the safest approach in dense traffic. If that pisses of car-drivers, then you would appear to be cycling in a place that isn't safe for cycling. Trying to squeeze over to the kerb to leave more room for cars just makes it easier for car-drivers to ignore you, and runs the risk of you being "doored". Also, squeezing over makes it more likely you'll end up in some trucker's blind-spot, or unseated by a pothole.

A bicycle chain is very efficient [0].

Most generators, even in low power applications are about 96% efficient. So are motors. Roundtrip efficiencies of batteries are in the order of 80 - 90 % [1]

Combined efficiency of a motor-generator-battery system at best is 82%. Its a significant reduction in efficiency of the system.

This configuration has the convenience of constant pedal resistance, at the cost of increased weight, complexity and cost.

The future of e-Bikes, is, in my view, ditch the mechanical system, install fast recharging batteries (or have user swappable modules) and have a design that allows you to walk the bike in case the battery dies.

Toshiba manufactures SCiB cells, that they claim, have very fast recharging times and long lives. Perfect for eBikes. [2]

[0] - https://pages.jh.edu/news_info/news/home99/aug99/bike.html [1] - https://energymag.net/round-trip-efficiency/ [2] - https://www.global.toshiba/ww/products-solutions/battery/sci...

I got hooked on cycle commuting years ago, and although they were basically impractical at that point I vowed that if a job was out of range of my own power I would definitely get an e-bike rather than use a car. I never needed to, but that decision has only become easier as evokes have improved.

I looked at buying an e-bike recently, and for me and my needs, they still don't make sense. The extra cost, weight and complexity don't offer sufficient benefits over a cheap light, reliable non e-bike over the (short) distances I cycle.

But I've been following the same developments as the author and think they're definitely going to change the world, and for the better. America will lag, but I'd look to places where 2 stroke engines are currently popular to see the future. E-mopeds and e-tuktuks are going to be built for non cyclists, and that's where the new transport ideas will arrive in mass manufactured form.

No they're not.

You have to take any type of innovation in context.

Hybrid-electric is actually better for the environment, if implemented correctly. Why? Because the average daily commute is between 25 and 40 miles (40 to 60 kilometers), depending on where you live; which means a good hybrid-electric could use just electric for most of its total mileage, and occasionally an ICE for longer trips (weekends). You would need much less battery capacity to enable a bigger eco-friendly fleet of cars.

It only feels better because of the contrast to the upward side of the hill. Bicycles are primarily about reducing friction to basically nothing so that the rider can go ridiculously fast for little effort. The downside is that the rider really notices hills and wind.

If you take away the agony you don't get to experience the ecstasy.

But I appreciate your point about the high efficiency of bikes. On flats or downhill even a casual peddler hardly needs an e-bike to cruise around at a 'much faster than walking' speed (say, 12-15 mph). It's the uphills (or, as you say, headwinds) where most people feel like they are going too slowly ('I could be walking!') and really appreciate the boost of an e-bike.

This has been the general pattern since I got the e-bike, my mileage has trippled over my road bike. I ride further and faster than I otherwise would.

The main question I get is: "When are you going to get an e-bike?"

I don't have a good justification for riding a human powered bike, other than just the fact that it's what I enjoy. I happen to live within cycling distance of most things that I need. I also play an alcohol powered musical instrument that was replaced by an electric version 70 years ago. Don't ask me why.

Of course since it takes me longer to get places, I have more time to think. About how e-bike technology could be improved. Making it ride "just like a bike" imposes a lot of subtle requirements on the controls -- exactly why my friends have stopped riding their early generation e-bikes. But what if that's not a requirement. The simplest thing I could think of is a motorized front wheel with a switch that applies a fixed amount of torque. You push the button when you want help. That would take care of any reason why I might want an e-bike, for instance when I get old.

In the future, conventional bikes might be seen as the exception to the rule, but I don't see them going away completely. For instance I don't expect the thousands of bikes parked around the nearby university campus being replaced by electrics in any practical way. I don't expect the homeless to ride e-bikes. Also, for people who are blessed with short distances and good legs, a conventional bike is still more convenient to manage.

- It's way more expensive so I'm worried about theft.

- You can't leave it out in the harsh weather, or shouldn't.

- It's much heavier (70lbs, though it is a beefcake of an e-bike). So I can't, say, just bring it up the stairs to an appartment.

- It has a $600 battery and a bunch of fancy electronics which are nice, but probably will require more of an investment to maintain/replace.

I think there will always be a place for conventional, unpowered bikes.

I don't disagree about the automotive electronics, I guess we'll have to see if any moisture can get into them ultimately.

An alcohol powered musical instrument? This I've gotta see!

Here is Europe Rad Power Bikes are everywhere. That's the closest to the people's e-bike I can see.

Firstly, I find it pretty surprising that the author would want to remove the drivetrain. I frequently do 75km (47 miles) in a weekend on a single charge on my bike, and I imagine that a lot of that range is due to the power that I’m providing to the bike rather than relying entirely on the inbuilt motor. The ability to go far is central to the goal of replacing as many car journeys as possible with sustainable transport such as bikes. In addition, bikes provide decent exercise with relatively little effort, built into day to day. Cycling makes us healthier. Also, if you run out of battery then you’ll just have to push the bike, rather than cycle a bike roughly the weight of a city-share bike back home, which isn’t a particularly difficult task for most. I do however see the benefit of this type of bike for some who use bikes as an accessibility tool, although maybe in those cases a scooter with a seat would be more convenient since it’s smaller.

The second idea in the article which made me double-take is the idea of removing direct mechanical brakes from the bike. As somebody who commutes around a busy city on a daily basis, this had me wondering if the writer actually cycles in a city or not. As a bike commuter I need to deal with drivers who want to kill me, pedestrians who jump out from behind obstructions with no warning, and other cyclists are too indifferent to their surroundings that they’re likely to injure the both of us. I need to fully trust that when I squeeze that brake lever that my bike will come to a stop in the exact way that I intend. Including if the electricals fail for some reason.

Finally, not bike related, the writer demonises the idea of making specific streets bike and pedestrian only, banning cars, and even seems to dislike the idea of the 15 minute city, where you aren’t required to leave your local neighbourhood on a day to day basis. This might be coming from the perspective of living in American city where the car is king, but it seems incomprehensible to me that somebody wouldn’t want to have all of their daily necessities easily accessible by foot, and be able to bike, or scoot, or take public transport to pretty much anything else they could need within a 15 minute window. There are both social and economic benefits to this, as it increases neighbourliness as people get to know each other, and also moves away from a small number of big box shops to a much greater number of local green grocers, butchers, book shops, and so on. Reduction of emissions is another huge benefit of course.

Overall I agree with the article directionally but think it gets a few pretty important things wrong.

The Author is arguing for replacing the chain with power wires, by generating power from pedaling and feeding it into the motor (with efficiency losses of 5%). So the power split from "human" power vs. battery power will barely change, with the benefit of less mechanical parts. It would thus also work just like a conventional E-Bike when the battery is empty (with 5% less efficiency).

> The second idea in the article which made me double-take is the idea of removing direct mechanical brakes from the bike

Many E-Scooters already use an electrical break (in addition to a mechanical one on the rear wheel), like the Ninebot E22. In my experience, I had less issues with using the front motor to break than many mechanical breaks on my previous bikes even though the communication seems kinda iffy (a bidirectional UART).

I wouldn't want to remove all mechanical breaks, but replacing the one on the rear wheel with an electric, primary one seems like a good idea.

My understanding is that the efficiency loss is strictly limited to delivering electrical power back to mechanical power via motor instead of via the chain drive. The problem with this design is that it completely eliminates the ability to deliver mechanical energy directly. The rider pedaling charges the battery which then powers the motor. Going from mechanical energy to stored electrical energy is going to introduce a much greater loss in efficiency than a mere 5%. In a more standard e-bike model, when the rider pedals, my understanding is that they are delivering mechanical energy directly, bypassing the conversion to electrical energy. I may be wrong as I am not very familiar with e-bikes, but, if this is the case, the 5% figure seems highly misleading.

See https://electrek.co/2021/08/31/radical-new-electric-bike-dri...

Real, especially cost reduced, systems could be a lot worse thougn.

Yeah, the whole business of dispensing with brakes is absurd. For one, the engine (usually) only powers the rear wheel; if you use only engine braking that means you don't have a brake on the front wheel, which is the one that does most of the job! And two, sometimes you need to brake super fast and I doubt any engine can react or go into reverse fast enough for that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDGvzy038Eo&t=59s <-- demonstrates it rather clearly. From 80kph, braking distances are:

Rear brake only: 40m (131 ft)

Front brake only: 17m ( 55 ft)

Combined: 13m ( 42 ft)

The issue that braking capability is a function of friction of the tires against the road surface, which is in turn a function of force pushing the tire into the ground. When you begin to decelerate there's a weight transfer to the front tires, increasing the weight on the front and decreasing the weight on the rear. In other words, increasing the effectiveness of the brakes in the front and decreasing the effectiveness of the brakes in the rear.

In the extremes with (im)proper body position, you can lift the rear tire clear off the ground: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BqCJgTpEf0

So someone suggesting that you remove your most powerful brakes seems... odd?

I take it you’ve never experienced mechanical brake failure. It can happen, and is probably more likely to happen than an electrical brake, because of the greater forces applied on the flimsier brake cable.

One of my sisters once was riding her bicycle to school, which had only one operable brake at the time—the other was ineffective for some reason and she hadn’t mentioned this to us, so it didn’t get fixed. Well, going down the final hill, the brake cable snapped; and when she reached the bottom of the hill where you turn onto the campus, she panicked and turned despite her speed, and so tumbled over a low brick wall at the gate and broke an arm, rather than just going up the other side of the hill until she stopped.

There is no periodical roadworthyness review for bicylces, if I look at the things people sometimes cycle on I shudder. Broken / not properly tensioned spokes, cracked rims, missing brake pads, brakes not working at all, fixies, broken ball bearings, skipping chains etc. Bikes need maintenance, like every other vehicle.

(a) it takes effort; (b) it’s working, right? so why would I spend $6 + my own labour, or probably $50 for someone else to do it, on a new cable?

You are quite right that bicycles need maintenance, but they work well enough for many people with limited to no maintenance, so that even when they experience what their bike is like when maintained, they often still won’t find it worth the bother. (I would be inclined to be like that if only using the bike for fairly short trips; as it stands, my standard trip is 40km each way, so such losses would become too galling.)

This preference not to maintain incidentally points to a way in which I think electric drive-trains have real potential: they should require much less maintenance, and generally retain higher efficiency. “5% less efficient than a chain”, perhaps, but that’s a maintained chain. Minimally-maintained chain drivetrains will probably have lost that 5%, and unmaintained ones can easily lose 20%.

I’ve always gotten that broken brake repaired within 48 hours (I live in somewhere that is pretty close to a 15 minute village, and it includes a bike shop, and there’s a bike shop a similar distance from my office), and not cycled in the meantime.

I’d find spontaneous electrical failure a much more likely occurrence than spontaneous failure of both independent brakes.

E-bikes are still road bikes, and the last thing you would want is the fundamental behavior of an e-bike to be drastically different from a normal road bike. Unexpected braking is just as dangerous as going fast.

Honestly, from this point alone it makes me think the author isn't very experienced with the mechanics of higher end road bicycles. This behavior is normal and expected for kids and big box store bikes, but on a road bike at speed, this would not be considered normal operation.

(To be clear, I don't see why we actually need to pedal backwards. Assuming we're otherwise comfortable with a bike-by-wire system as the author advocates, a a brake-by-wire lever should be super cheap and has none of the maintenance complexity of physical brakes.)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the future of E-Bikes technology wise is a smooth progression from what we have now. Rifle is fine. Mid-drive motor built into an Omafiets is fine.

Why? All the other parts are the same. There are factories all over the world making bike stuff. This is that, with a motor in place of the bottom bracket. They're already comfortable and bombproof, and designed to get you somewhere in the clothes you plan to wear when you arrive.

Feel free to use any combination of market, mixed market, and democratic-socialist methods to make this affordable, I'm open-minded.

The Schaeffler/Heinzmann design is one for ebikes though. How do you simplify a hybrid muscle power/electric drivetrain and make it more durable? Converting muscle power into electricity first makes a lot of sense in that case:

- does away with so many moving parts, including the chain

- can recycle so much more effort from automotive.

- more comfortable when cycling

- regenerates energy from braking/going downhill

[0] https://flevobike.nl/GreenMachine/greenmachine.html

(Depending on jurisdiction, they also have other advantages like not requiring a license, being able to travel in bike lanes / greenways and avoid traffic congestion, etc.)

https://www.fahrrad-xxl.de/fahrraeder/e-bike/

Additionally, maybe up that price for a proper quality e-bike.

E-Bikes also require maintenance by specialized shops and after a certain speed limit constraints similar to motorbikes anyway.

In cars you can get up to 5000 euro discounts on such offers.

I can't imagine owning ebike as a city daily driver though bikesharing sounds reasonable.

The issue is that shared bikes are often gruesome, broken, unhygienic or vandalized.

I believe it's time to abandon cars in cities but there is no viable alternative to many scenarios.

The best solution I can think of is abandoning traditional city designs where city centers are for shopping, work is highly concentrated either in mega administrative buildings or industrial areas on border of cities.

If we could build cities more like cells where everything we could need is within a walking distance and everything we could WANT is within (safe) biking distance, we could eliminate most motivations for travelling.

People bike in bad conditions all over the world — the difference is that their infrastructure allows that. The bike paths are top priority when plowing, for example. Here in North America, bike lanes seem to be rarely cleaned and maintained even in very bike friendly cities.

The last part of your comment is definitely true, and I hope this is explore more in America. It’s called the “fifteen minute neighborhood” in some places

All around Michigan bike lanes are being put in, especially around Detroit. They tend to be awful to ride in because they become a de facto gutter containing all the debris that gets blown/kicked off the car lanes: rubbish, glass, big pieces of gravel, occasional car parts.

Car lanes are fairly self cleaning... into the bike lane gutters. :(

Don’t all those things apply to a city like Amsterdam? Granted, there were still a decent number of cars on the road, but I was amazed how many people were doing their daily travels on bikes.

I’ve only been there once on vacation, and I didn’t pay attention enough to know whether the city design you mentioned is used.

I can get everywhere in Amsterdam much quicker by bike than driving or public transport. Cycling in the rain and snow [2] is no problem, you just need the right gear.

What non-Amsterdammers don't realise is the city never used to be a cyclist's paradise. In the 1960s, Amsterdam's car-obsessed urban planners had grand visions to drive motorways through the inner city, razing the historical buildings, and constructing Manhattan-like skyscraper clusters.

Here's a 3 minute video "Highways Almost Destroyed Amsterdam" [1] about those plans, the fightback in the 1970s, and the resulting bike culture that Amsterdam has today. Enjoy!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI5pbDFDZyI

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB1tgkOM6Bw

Disclosure: Daily human powered bike commuter in the US.

It's true that you can't take passengers, but I think over 95% of car rides are when there is only one person in the car (the driver).

In my world (upper midwest city), "winter" is defined by when the salt trucks come out, because wet salt is murder on bikes. In addition to studded tires, I have an entire dedicated winter bike, to keep the salt off my nice bikes. Winter ends when the first heavy spring rain washes the salt away.

The Organic Transit ELF doesn't come with a floor but owners have fitted their own: https://organictransit.com/