Solar-Powered, Off-Grid Bike Can Bust Poachers Anywhere | Hacker News Reader

Solar-Powered, Off-Grid Bike Can Bust Poachers Anywhere

thedrive.com

79 pointssamizdis63 comments

Wow they are super expensive.

They will be poaching the bikes themselves if ever one gets there.

It looks like a buy two get one price. I think the standard version is $13,000.

For reference, a Specialized e-MTB (a mountain bike -- as in bicycle -- with pedal assist) is about $13k. And a very nice off-road -capable motorcycle (like a Triumph Scrambler, which can top 100mph on pavement, but has about 120? mile range) costs about the same.

Overly expensive.

No way parts cost anywhere near that.

The most expensive part on that thing is the battery. At an overly generous $200 per kwh (most are now closer to $150 with world leaders at $100) that battery would cost ~$500.

So where is the rest of that $30000 budget going to? The panels? The motors? Shipping? R&D (lol)

I wonder if someone got a contract to produce these things.

I clicked through to the article about the company. Apparently they found it necessary to custom-make all their parts, and aren't yet doing high volume production. They expect the price to come down eventually.

Not for small volume though, Li-ion is still $400-600/kWh unless you're Tesla or another huge company buying millions of them.

It’s the Juicero of anti-poaching technicals

> Every Kalk AP bike purchased by a Cake customer sends one directly to anti-poaching conservationists

The purchase seems to cover the cost of manufacture of the second and to support the anti poaching efforts.

> it's not really about the ultimate piece of equipment you're getting, but the opportunity to give anti-poachers what they need to do their very good work. Only 50 Kalk AP bikes will be made, all of which are numbered, so if you're feeling philanthropic...

The first thing I notice is the chain. Ars Technica had a story earlier this week about the Sondors Metacycle: similar power, similar weight, but no chain. Also, $25,000 cheaper.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/01/this-electric-bicycle-c...

Granted, that the Metacycle isn't an off-road bike, but I wonder which is better for reliability in an area so remote that you need solar charging: a chain, or a hub-mounted motor?

I don't know about bikes, but in electric bicycles engine in the back wheel is much worse for offroad because of weight distribution. The huge, heavy battery these bikes have might change this.

And unsprung weight is a much bigger deal when your vehicle actually has to use its suspension, weighs practically nothing, has 2" of sidewall, no contact patch to speak of, rims made out of toothpick, etc, etc. Hub motors just suck for bikes and motorcycles. You can kind of get away with them for driving on really nice surfaces but that all goes out the window for anything even mildly off road.

While there are definitely challenges to in-wheel motors, I do wonder if we’ll see more innovation over time on in-wheel suspension systems to compensate for the unsprung weight.

Here’s a neat example for one in a bike wheel [video]: https://youtu.be/DSKDH2NNmcA

Here’s a write-up: https://www.karmanhealthcare.com/acrobat-soft-wheels-shock-a...

I’m sure putting a motor in there will be problematic due to stresses on the shock absorbers, but it does seem like sock absorbing spokes in wheels could help gain space in vehicles by moving the motors to the wheel.

Edit: just to be clear I know little about the company and tech behind that wheel i linked to, I just find it to be an interesting area, and recently came across that.

Neat! But looks like maybe an inch or two of travel? Hard to imagine it would fare well in serious offroad conditions.

Every little bit helps but that "wind up" action is going to really suck under acceleration/braking.

Direct drive hub mounted motors are constrained by low rpm operation and power delivery is limited to how much brute amperage you can force through them. They're often designed with a large diameter to compensate for the low rpm issues, which increases weight.

Some bicycle-scale hub motors have built-in gear reduction, which reduces the available motor size and adds a barrier between the motor and air cooling. They're more efficient and lighter than direct drive motors, but heat retention limits constant power output.

Watt-for-watt of power output, frame mounted motors can be much smaller and lighter. They can have excellent cooling (including liquid coolant circulated to a front mounted radiator), gear reduction allows them to operate at efficient speeds, they can be designed to target only efficiency rather than compromising to match hub size, and can be scaled fairly arbitrarily.

That hub motor weighs probably 40+ lbs to be able to do a fairly measly 8kW though, low RPM motors by nature are very large and heavy compare to a small motor running through a chain or gears.

A chain should last a very long time, as long as it's not overloaded and lubrication is used every now and then.

A bike doesn't help you if the poachers shoot back or if they're buddy buddy with your boss's boss.

That said, I greatly look forward to electric OHVs because the Karens won't be able to get stuff shut down by complaining about noise. (What I don't look forward to is trails becoming "EV only" to keep the poors out of the sport.)

The obvious solution is to close all trails to vehicles which tend to destroy trails and vegetation.

That's... all vehicles, including feet.

They'd have to poach all the animals to accomplish that.

Who would? To accomplish... what?

Geofencing on vehicles could do that, but we're not there yet.

If you go full Sierra Club and shut down all but the "purest" forms of recreating in nature then basically nobody will recreate outdoors and there will be no opposition to destroying nature because so few people will have stake in the issue.

Indeed. The continued existence of wildlife parks in East Africa is largely supported by tourists doing sightseeing tours in vehicles. Close those trails down, you lower the income from tourism, and poaching and illegal land use return. (Just like now some of these wildlife conversation efforts are reportedly suffering from the COVID border closures.)

You take "close down" too literally. You can still allow tourists, if e.g. you check their cars to see if they didn't do anything illegal.

Please refer to the OP, who was talking about closing trails in order to prevent the wear-and-tear on the environment that vehicles exert.

I’m one of those Karens — fuck your bike’s noise, it should be illegal, at least in the city. Electric can’t get here soon enough so we can have fun and get some sleep too.

The funny part is, the people I see stuffed into "UTVs" illegally buzzing around on National Forest trails that are closed to motorized vehicles would be the dictionary exemplars of "Mrs. and Mr. Karen". "Why would you complain about us using the forest? We have rights too! Get your bicycle/horses/persons out of our way! Also we totally didn't tear down the 'private property' barrier that separates your property from NF property and that any hiker could have just stepped around..."

This is good, but I feel like it's solving the problem from the wrong angle.

The best way to reduce poaching is to reduce the demand. I know there are ongoing efforts to do exactly that, but it's a hard problem and obviously hasn't had 100% success so far.

I think the next best way to reduce poaching, though, is to meet the demand with a legal supply. License and regulate farms for the black rhino and any other animal that is a frequent victim of poaching. Obviously this is also hard, but it better aligns incentives. The farmers are, of course, going to care more about their animals than the wild ones, but they would also have a profit motive to reduce poaching of wild ones (because it will reduce their competition).

Farming rhinos sounds great but this is one of those ideas with a maybe an unobtanium answer. I'd like to see a "farm" strong enough to contain a single rhino let alone an entire herd, and one that is profitable. The answer is to go after poaching at all angles possible; supply, demand, funding, trade, advertising, etc. Also illegal is elephant poaching, and we're not about to start farming elephants.

Dig a pit and place the Rhino inside. Rhinos are strong, but they are terrible climbers.

That's a fair point, but it brings a few thoughts to mind:

1. What about putting a GPS tracker or similar on each animal and just let it roam. I'm not sure, but maybe it could work.

2. Zoo's can profitably contain Rhino's and Elephants. My local zoo lets people pay the zoo to feed some of the animals! So maybe a tourism angle could help move the needle on profitability.

3. What if it was a government-run operation with out the need to be profitable? Current anti-poaching operations don't bring in any profit, so maybe this angle of attack doesn't need to either.

> "farm" strong enough to contain a single rhino let alone an entire herd

One thought is to use a cattle grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_grid

These are very common for regular livestock when there needs to be a gap in the fence for a road. But if a fence can't contain rhinos, it might be possible to use cattle grid for the entire perimeter.

Do cattle grids work for rhinos? According to "The Cattle Grid Guru" (which bills itself as "The most extensive cattle grid guide on the web"), the answer is yes: https://www.cattlegridguru.co.uk/can-cattle-grids-be-used-wi...

True globally, but if you're just a guy who happens to own a company making electric motorcycles, why not do what you can? (While also getting some PR, no reason to pretend that's not a factor)

PR nonsense, there's nothing about the bike that makes it optimised for solar powering compared to its competitors

Also, the Rhino stuff sounds like something a big corporate like LandRover would do as for a glossy National Geographic advert, its just weird coming from a startup

I imagine the $30,340 cost for each bike could be used more effectively to help these rhinos. I'm no expert though.

Ignoring the green part you could probably send them 15-30 gas motorbikes for that.

Maybe 10 low end Chinese bikes.

You can easily get a decent off-road Honda or Yamaha for 3k. If you shopped around you could easily get 15 at wholesale for $30k. And if you were donating them to a good cause, could probably find a reseller looking for some good PR and get 20.

A Honda CRF125F is MSRP $3200 which means invoice is below $3000.

I doubt you could get them for $2000 each. I don't think they have 30% margins.

Not if the greatest danger to the rhinos are poachers.

As far as I can tell, it's not actually 30k for each bike. You pay the money and get a bike for yourself, plus another bike to be sent to the anti-poachers, and also solar-charging units to be sent to them as well. See:

https://ridecake.com/en/shop/bikes/kalk/kalk-ap/

The bike can not bust poachers anywhere, the bike is simply a vehicle. Poachers are busted by other humans. So the challenge is getting the good guys to where the bad guys are, in time and in force. Does an extremely expensive bike achieve this cost-effectively? Why not use a fleet of drones to target your search and then use much cheaper gas-powered vehicles to head straight to the target? Why not spend the tens of thousands on lobbying governments to bust up marketplaces where the wares are sold: killing demand should kill the supply too.

From the article, they already use drones. They're not even making them pay for the bikes, they're sending them for free.

So its a marketing stunt then?

No, it's a buy one give one. There's only 50 of them.

> ...it's a €1,000 ($1,210) deposit to get in on the scheme.

A scheme is right. This is nothing but a PR puff piece.

If anyone wants to find out more about solar-powered, off-grid bicycles, the BEHEMOTH (big electronic human energized machine) solar-powered (recumbent) bicycle really inspired me as a kid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dItCJUuFY4U

The site here talks more about the overall project (it's slow already, so try to take it easy):

https://wildlifecollege.org.za/cake-launches-the-kalk-ap-an-...

That they have a local partner is at least better than not having a local partner. Don't know anything about the whole thing either way though.

Not sure why this is so expensive. EV dirt bikes with better performance than this are definitely a thing for 10% of the price [0].

[0] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Other-Motorcycle-Chin...

Poachers will just steal the bikes or ransom them.

https://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/38650/that-time-ari-vat...

Poaching is one of those things where if there's continued high demand from SE Asia -- and in particular China -- there's going to be poaching issues.

It's just the drug war. You must reduce the demand.

Solar powered meaning it has a battery? I don’t see panels on it

You might be better off giving the 30k to the poachers so they don't have to poach. I mean a lot of them are pretty poor.

How would one even go about that?

$500 of gas shipped overseas in a $1200 Yamaha that gets 70mpg would be a far better investment and far more reliable.

I'd love to see noisy two stroke dirt bikes a thing of the past. Maybe the future isn't so bad after all. :)

Funny I was specifically looking for an electric fat bike this morning to assist in hunting next fall.

Contact the makers. Perhaps they will do you a one-off scheme to offset your wildlife footprint.

The $30k price is interesting, given that it's multiples of what established manufacturers are charging for electric dirtbikes with multiples of power, kWh, performance, and design maturity. The time in the electric motorcycle market where this would succeed is passing. Established motorcycle manufacturers appear to have been watching all of the upstarts establish distribution and supply chain paths before they commit to the e-motorcycle market. A few are beginning to move in, mostly offroad, but some onroad as well. Harley comes to mind, plus a scattering of moped-level bikes. It'll be interesting to see how Sondors, Cake, Zero, and others play out when an 800 pound gorilla like Honda hits their market with serious intent.

$30k for a bike worth $10k. And yet people will buy it.

You won't find me riding around on a bike in an area with large predators (referring to the animals and the poachers). I'll insist on 4 wheels and a hard-shell cab... and a gun... a big gun.

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