Show HN: Long Range E-Bike | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

jacquesmattheij.com

876 pointsjacquesm615 comments

> I hope this article will inspire people to look at e-bikes as potentially commuter car replacement, to send Bosch and other e-bike technology manufacturers a message that if they won’t supply what people need that they are going to have to live with people hacking their stuff and to get people to comment on the way the thing works, what they would do with it and how it could be improved or how I could work better/safer on stuff like this.

i bought a Onewheel-XR+ a few months ago and then found a lot of reddit threads about how the mfg DRM'd the controllers to prevent people from adding longer range batteries and buildig their own apps to do diagnoatics over bluetooth. they sent cease/desists to several prominent modders.

it's super sad. the modding community was very vibrant until they kneecapped it via firmware updates.

their android app is bloated 42MB crap with social features that requires an internet connection and google's framework to connect over bluetooth to the board under your feet to read battery levels, change riding modes, control headlights, etc. previously there were third party apps < 1mb that could be used offline for this, until they crippled everything via firmware updates.

now they released their new GT boards a month ago with extended range (and much heavier). the new Pint GT looks really compelling, so really torn about giving these sh*theads more of my money :(

https://old.reddit.com/r/onewheel/comments/l2vhra/future_mot...

https://old.reddit.com/r/onewheel/comments/kcl816/4209_or_ne...

LOL I built the first version of their android app back in the day. Can't speak to why they've been going after modders, but it's likely from a liability / legal standpoint. At the end of the day I still love their products and currently own an XR (may upgrade to a GT next spring!).

At least for the earlier versions all the info was published as standard BLE descriptors, so building a third party lightweight app for that is fairly straight forward. Not sure what they're doing these days, but if you wanted to investigate LightBlue is a great app for digging into BLE devices ;)

> but it's likely from a liability / legal standpoint

sure. but also the same reason mfgs dont want their modded/refurbished/re-sold prev-gen products competing with their new products.

Which is stupid, since people who look for a cheap used option aren't going to buy a new product at full price anyway. They are going to buy a cheaper product from another company, and then you have lost them as a potential future customer.

People who buy your companies used products are much more likely to buy your companies new products at some point in the future.

Sonos is another one that never got the message, until the PR nightmare that ensued.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/30/21042871/sonos-recycle-m...

Is it really liability? Because I really doubt that. People modify vehicles all the time and it causes unsafe driving that can lead to collisions. The car manufacturer doesn't get sued because somebody made a stupid change. Maybe it could be a super minor thing they use as an excuse to prevent modding, but I think the actual answer is what the other commenter mentioned. They don't want their own product competing with their newer products.

Someone won't buy their new product if they can just mod their existing product to get the same capabilities their new product gives.

See the thing is; I think a genuine company would encourage a modding community rather than discourage it. This example may not apply, but take a videogame like Minecraft. They didn't have modding support built into the game but people hacked the game and built in their own modding support on top of it. This then allowed a huge amount of people to be able to much more easily mod the game using a modding framework. The game is hugely moddable on both the client side and server side. It was so successful that there are many companies that employ multiple people to run their Minecraft servers and code minigames for them. The game likely wouldn't have taken off as much as it did without these modding capabilities that Mojang let go on.

I feel like more companies need to take this approach where they allow or even encourage modding. It brings more people to the platform. Especially in such a new market, making anti-consumer business decisions just seems like a good way to start your companies slow death.

Safety and liability actually mean lack of revenue from data collection and service contracts. It's nothing to do with safety or liability.

You don't have to be literally sued for this kind of thing to be a liability. Companies don't like this because even if they don't get sued, it becomes a PR liability when they get a reputation. When the average buyer sees that a product gets a lot of accidents, they're not going to put on their detective hat and spend much time getting to the bottom of "is this reputation truly deserved? was it the customer's fault?"

> People modify vehicles all the time and it causes unsafe driving that can lead to collisions.

Yeah, and car companies don't support these mods. Also, mods that cause unsafe driving are often literally illegal: not only will you be unsupported, the government will punish you for using these mods. Because it's really dangerous and modern Western society generally agrees that it's not okay to let people fuck themselves that easily even if it was their own choice. How dangerous are Minecraft mods?

> it becomes a PR liability when they get a reputation

This would rather be positive for PR. The news will talk about it, about how dangerous this is, then they come out with the real story, where the customer did some modifications, that the product is 100% safe if it is left the way they sell it.

That only works for those who read all of the article, not just the headline. Even worse, the correction might be in another article...

That "real story" update often doesn't seem to happen, or is far less visible than the original not-the-whole-story story.

Just last night I was trying to establish a connection via a BLE handshake and it seems like with the newer boards you have to exchange tokens you get from their web service. A bit of a PITA especially when they ban your IP from making requests because you spammed them too much.

I think an open-source onewheel equivalent would be totally doable using VESCs.

It is. I built one.

Here is a writeup:

http://dammfine.com/projects/funwheel/

It's pretty insane how locked down their software is. I was looking into building a battery status app for the Garmin Fenix watches that connected directly to the board over bluetooth, but you need to fetch a key from their api with a carefully crafted request that is used to re-authenticate with the board every few seconds. If you mess up the API call they IP ban you and warn you of API abuse.

Crazy: https://github.com/ponewheel/android-ponewheel/issues/109#is...

I love my Onewheel - but why can't they just open up a read only API for stats so people can build 3rd party apps around them.

Agree! I was just trying to do this with my PintX and an ESP32. Insane how locked down this is.

I love my Pint and was excited to also pick up the XR replacement once it launches. But not anymore, Future Motion will never get another dime from me. Please don't support them.

Awesome project Jacques! I saw a comment of yours on an article a day or two ago and was hoping to see this pop up soon.

I've found the most difficult thing about riding an e-bike is the other motorists have no idea how to react to you. You're not really a regular bicycle anymore due to your speed, but you're also not a motorcycle that deserves its own lane. I have at least one car turn in front of me almost every trip out just because they're misjudging my speed. I get honked and yelled at when on the road because folks get frustrated when I'm using the left-hand side of the right-turn lane as a bike path.

Sidewalks/bike paths tend to be a lot less safe in residential areas as well, since cars coming out of their driveways really don't expect an e-bike to come rolling through. I've learned to dramatically reduce speed in areas like this.

Aside from those things, I love it! I ride the e-bike whenever I'm going somewhere in range (I live in Florida so things tend to be spread out) and the weather permits. My bike gets about 80km which is more than enough for anyplace I want to go on a bicycle anyway.

In the USA the situation is much more risky than here.

I don't like riding in traffic mostly because drivers tend to have a short fuse for anything that isn't exactly at the limit, but on bike paths everything works just fine. The problem is that s-pedelecs are technically lumped in with the scooters, even though there is no throttle and there is absolutely no way you are going to sustain 40 Kph+ for anything but a very short period. But they're still pretty new and little by little municipalities are adapting and allowing s-pedelecs to use the bike lanes. What helps is that s-pedelec riders are extremely defensive. In town I simply reduce the assist to 'eco' and cycle with the rest of the bikes, and on the intercity bike paths I go as fast I conditions allow, typically 35 to 38 or so. On a longer trip that averages out to 33 to 35 Kph, which means a 1 hour car trip turns into a 2 hour bike trip, which is acceptable (and never traffic jams, which can turn that 1 hour car trip into a three hour car trip!).

I have an e-bike and I disagree with your assertions. I'm a fat asthmatic and I have absolutely no problem maintaining 40kph for long stretches of time on my bike. The fastest I've done on it (on a large hill but still) is 42.7MPH (~68Kph). Average cruising speed on flat land can easily be 30-33mph(48-53kph). Not all e-bikes are capable of this, but they are certainly not some kind of rare expensive impossibility - mine was less than 3000 USD.

My point is that you should be more ingenuous with your assertions of what the capabilities of these bikes are when communicating with people about it. Nothing makes people more skeptical than reading things that are just plain false from an advocate.

I'm sure there are other e-bikes, but those are not available where I live. The fastest here are the Stromers, they are a little bit faster but not exceptionally so and they also cut out at 45 kph, just like mine.

At a guess your bike outputs more power than is legal here.

>At a guess your bike outputs more power than is legal here.

From a brief look - no. Belgium says "4000 W 45 km/h limited "speed pedelecs", which are classed as mopeds for all requirements."

Mine has a 750W nominal motor, but seems to output around 1050W at peak.

4000 W? That sounds a little excessive :)

A typical s-pedelec is somewhere between 350 and 750 W nominal and with peaks of maybe twice that.

Yeah it's totally excessive, lol. That's just what wikipedia says about your country's laws. No idea if it's accurate, haha.

Anything over 45kph or 750W is illegal unless registered as a moped in California at least (and much of the rest of the US as well). Enforcement is lax in most places though.

I'm not sure why you would assume the author is being disingenuous. Your bike is almost certainly very different from the author's, and a more powerful motor is going to get you faster.

Fun fact/side note - power requirements generally scale with the cube of speed due to rapidly increasing air drag, so going at 50km/h is much harder (and requires a much stronger motor) than going at 30km/h.

I specifically did not choose the word disingenuous. I asked him to be more ingenuous.

His assertion was "there is absolutely no way you are going to sustain 40 Kph+ for anything but a very short period". I disagree, and I think minimizing the capabilities of these machines in the rhetoric is counterproductive to converting skeptics.

In the US it's 100% legal to go 28MPH on them for as long as you can - which for me would be nearly forever on flat ground.

Depends on the jurisdiction. NYC only allows 25MPH: https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/ebikes.shtml

At some point, we do need to restrict faster vehicles from operating in the bike lanes and the sidewalks, because the speed differentials will probably end up killing someone.

They had this problem for years in Amsterdam and last time I've heard about it they decided to ban moped from bike lanes in the city. Electric moped were particularly problematic because of their speed, of their silence and weigh. I don't know what the rules are with regard to ebikes though.

The full sentence was: “ The problem is that s-pedelecs are technically lumped in with the scooters, even though there is no throttle and there is absolutely no way you are going to sustain 40 Kph+ for anything but a very short period.” He is explicitly talking about S-Pedelecs which are the fastest legal E-Bikes in most of Europe. He never said that you are generally not able to sustain 40+ MPH in general.

He said KPH. That is about 25MPH. Legal in the US is 28MPH.

A side pedantry note, in the hopes that it's appreciated:

Usually "more ingenuous" would mean "more naive" or "more childlike" or "less capable of deceit", none of which seem to be what you intended.

Ah, I did not know of the naive/childlike connotation. I was simply using it as a synonym for something like candid, frank, truthful.

Thanks.

I'm curious - what ebike do you have that can easily cruise at 48-53 kph for extended periods?

In most countries that would be far above the legal limits imposed on ebikes. As a result, the ebikes available for purchase are all limited to 25-32 kph max and typically have power limits of 250-300 W. Since ebikes are a lot heavier, exceeding 32 kph for more than a few seconds is generally very difficult.

I don't think GP is being disingenuous with any of his assertions. In the US there might be ebikes with much higher top speeds, but jacquesm doesn't live in the US and neither do most of the other people on this planet. Most ebikes sold do exactly what he's describing.

I have a JuicedBikes CrossCurrent X. They only made my particular configuration for a short amount of time around early 2018 - it has a massive battery, a 52v system, a 750W Bafang hub motor, and location tracking within the battery (though I stopped paying for it since I moved out of the city). Their newer models are just as, or even more capable.

Yeah, that is the legal limit but I turned it off in the bios. When cycling on roads I want to be going as fast as possible to keep things safer for me by moving at roughly traffic speeds and disincentivizing dangerous maneuvers by motorists. On bike trails and such I keep to 20mph or so as safe.

I actually tried to get mine registered as a moped with a license plate and insurance coverage etc. but was essentially told to take a hike by the state and insurance companies. So I did.

"I disagree with your assertions about sustained speed because I turned off the assist limit."

Okay, you should have said that in the first post. If you're not using the class of vehicle the comment was talking about, your experience isn't really relevant.

These vehicles are capable of doing so - they simply have a limiter on them. It's like saying an NVidia card can't mine cryptocurrency because they added a limiter in their drivers or something. Or that a truck with a governor on it could not go faster than that with the governor removed and no functional changes to power output.

Even so, I can go at least 4MPH greater than OP's suggested maximum speed legally.

OK, so you disagree with assertions because you ride an illegal vehicle. And want...what? Your use case to be taken as standard? Or for people to understand there are lunatics on the road?

We know :)

(to be fair and charitable: I agree that moving with traffic is, everything else equal, safer than not moving with traffic. But everything else is NOT equal - I am not convinced you have the weight [i.e. centre of gravity, inertia, ability to absorb bumps, etc], maneuverability, traction, braking power, and as you point out insurance or license and possibly training, and possibly protective systems as other vehicles moving at the same speed)

No. I disagree with his assertion that one cannot go >~24MPH indefinitely. The legal limit here is 28MPH. I can certainly do so indefinitely.

1) That's a pretty high legal limit... And doesn't feel all that relevant, given that you report riding at such a ridiculously much higher speed.

2) "Moving with the speed of traffic for my safety" is a... "Nice" (that was sarcasm, I mean egocentric) attitude.

3) "The speed of traffic" may be higher for you now that you live in the countryside, but A) sounds like you rode / ride about as fast in the city, too?; and B) the typical use case relevant to the discussion is not yours but the city/suburban one.

It's bad enough that you can go so fast indefinitely; please don't.

I commuted by bike along Peachtree Street in Atlanta for 3 miles each way for just under a year. Going too slow ends up with motorists making aforementioned risky maneuvers. I don't think I would have done so for so long had I been riding a normal bicycle. There aren't too many people who commute by bike there, and for good reason.

The rules vary widely in the US.

Anything going faster than 25MPH (40 km/h) without cutting out in NYC is legally classified as a moped. https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/ebikes.shtml

Class 3 limits in the US (pedal assist only, no throttle allowed) are set at ~28 mph (~45 kph). Class 2 limit (throttle allowed) is ~25 mph (40 kph). I've also ridden some DIY'ed ebike conversions with unlocked controllers that'll happily hit 40 mph (65 kph) if you're feeling particularly suicidal that day.

I have a modified ebike with an unlocked controller.

Without commenting on safety, let me just say that 40mph is a fantasy, unless you're going down a VERY steep and long hill. It also requires you to be in a road racing bike position, or air resistance will flat out not let you go that fast (people are quite wide)

But my bike is otherwise stock. There is no extra power added to the stock Yamaha motor (250W rated, ~400W peak power). The only thing that is removed is the 28mph limiter.

The DIY conversions that let you go 40mph (I've seen the videos just as well) are more in the realm of electric mopeds and motorcycles than bikes, IMO.

> I'm curious - what ebike do you have that can easily cruise at 48-53 kph for extended periods?

Those speeds sound like bogus. I can maintain about 40kph on my ebike on a flat surface, but that requires pedaling in addition to the motor and is a fairly energetic exercise.

Also, pushing beyond 45kph, you really start to feel the air resistance and it becomes exponentially harder to go beyond 45kph for any long period of time, unless going downhill.

Most ebikes don't really come with the chainring size to go up to high speeds, unless modified with a giant 50+ size, which is more apt for racing road bikes (non-electric)

> you really start to feel the air resistance and it becomes exponentially harder to go beyond 45kph

Nitpick: it becomes cubically harder. ;)

Nitpick to nitpick: cubically is a subset of exponentially.

You are both wrong. Air resistance increases quadratically with speed, not cubically. And you mixed up polynomial with exponential.

Quadratic: x^2

Cubic: x^3

Polynomial (eg. 3rd degree): a + b x + c x^2 + d x^3

Exponential: e^x

Drag force rises quadratically with speed. Power is force dot velocity; in this case force and velocity are in the same direction, so dot product becomes simple mulitiplication making drag power (exertion, formally: work per unit time) cubic with speed.

Oh, you are right! Sorry.

Power assist cuts out at different points, depending on design choice (and jurisdiction). Norwegian e-bikes, for instance, disconnect their power assist above 25kph and you need to pedal like crazy to go significantly faster than that.

Most if not all electric bikes here in EU won't get close to those speeds, regardless of your fitness. I don't think it's even allowed.

If it's capable of doing 50KPH it should be treated as a motorcycle, away from other cyclists and pedestrians and the rider should have the same knowledge as a motorcyclist wrt to how to behave in traffic.

Almost all ebikes are limited to 25km/h here, which is a reasonable speed in my opinion. It makes cycling accessible to everyone regardless of fitness level or hills, but it also ensures that ebikes go at a similar speed as most other riders (most riders on the cycle paths go between 20 and 30 km/h (12-19MPH)

There are some people who modded their ebikes to go faster, but I've only encountered them very rarely.

If something has that average speed capability, why is not licensed, registered, insured and held accountable as any vehicle would be? My 50cc scooter appears to have comparable speeds (maybe 10kph higher), and I wear proper armour & helmet, took the classes passed the test, am registered, licenses & insured.

That's my massive pet peeve & safety concern: I WANT to love e-Bikes, and all those sorts of things; and like a fellow poster, I've been riding both 500-650cc motorcycles and 50-125cc scooters for more than a decade so 2-wheelers are part of my life; but basically all the ads, shops, and salespeople over here are focusing on "You don't need license, you don't need insurance, you don't need to behave like a vehicle and obey the rules" as their main and primary sales point; and therefore the behaviour of riders is equally nonchalant. In the Toronto area (and it's important to be explicit because this is definitely different in different geographies), the relationship between cars and non-gas two-wheelers is charitably described as "strained" ("murderous/self-righteous hate" may be more accurate), and we all need to get better and understanding how we can co-exist and behave responsibly on the road.

I drive, walk, and bike often in San Francisco. I rode a 650cc motorcycle for 10 years when I was in my 20s.

In the Panhandle, for example, there is a mixed use bike / walking path. It is very dangerous for the walkers even with normal bikes, as the bikes are whizzing by the walkers at 20mph. However one day I was walking, and a HUGE mutant E-bike with massive fat tires & very heavy frame, flew by me at what seemed like 30-40mph -- and to me, it felt exactly like a near miss from a motorcycle.

There are other safety concerns with recent trends, with the Slow streets. Everyone walks in the middle of those streets & the pedestrians treat them as their exclusive domain: kids playing, etc. But the drivers long ago stopped respecting the "slow street" concept, and whiz around the traffic cones, and then go 30mph down the street. The city is still treating them as an experiment, which is a part of the problem.

I love both E-Bikes and the Slow Streets, and they should be a huge part of our future: * Cities should make the Slow Streets official and modify them to make them impractical to use for driving a car (perhaps making them have a single curving central lane). * Likewise the E-Bikes need a bit more regulation and limited strictly to bike only lanes, not the mixed biking / pedestrian paths.

As it is currently the progress of society and technology has created a bit of a dangerous situation.

a single curving central lane is one solution.

i also like the dutch solution, in which entrances into these slow zones are generally with a raised crosswalk that acts as a speed bump.

You get caught speeding in a slow street here it will put you in serious trouble, and rightly so.

One of the problems with SF streets (especially in Sunset where I live) is street width. With residential streets wide enough for six cars side by side, drivers feel like they can go faster without danger to themselves.

The solution is to make streets feel more dangerous to them: narrow streets, or at least obstacles like concrete planters that force drivers to go around them.

I’d love to see half of the width of Sunset’s streets reclaimed with wider sidewalks, planters with trees, and bike lanes. But I don’t see it happening to anywhere near the extent of Netherlands efforts, and simply narrowing the roads to Japanese or Korean neighbourhood width wouldn’t be realistic since they are already built.

I know here in Ontario, Canada we do have regulations for ebikes. They are not allowed to exceed 32km/h (or ~20 mph). This seems like a somewhat reasonable limit. They also impose other requirements like minimum wheel widths, having two independent braking systems with stopping distance requirements. You can't even ride them if you got a criminal conviction that prohibits driving (such as a DUI).

Reference: http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/driver/electric-bicycles-fa...

I think the only problem here is that some of these things can be hard to regulate with making random enforcement stops. And people typically aren't much of a fan of random stops which is understandable, I'm not either. So I guess you'd have to happen to catch them by LIDAR, but I don't even know how accurate such a reading would be against a small bike. Not sure it would be admissible in a court.

In the US my ebike stops giving assist at 20mph. (Class 1 I think) I can go faster just pedaling but not for very long.

My average speed on the ebike only increased by 3-5 mph over my regular bike, but my distance and usage has gone up.

In the EU, they are. Ebikes are hard-limited to 25 km/hr. If you have one which is capable of more than that (manufactured or modded), it is regarded as a motor vehicle and you need a license.

In part because regular bikes can go that fast with top athletes. The world record 1h speed is over 55kph on level ground, people can go significantly faster over shorter periods especially in sprints or down hill.

Should regular bicycles have to be licensed? When I studied in Vietnam I'd ride my bike amongst traffic in bursts of 55 KPH and cruise around 40kph (I had a Garmin mounted). Generally I can only do 30 kph in the countryside, but in the city & amongst traffic there is much less air resistance.

Additionally a bicycle can do Lane splitting much better than a motorcycle can.

I however don't ride my bike in the US because it's not safe to. There's not the proper infrastructure which just annoys drivers, but if there was I wouldn't have a problem sticking to riding 20kph in the city until I get to rural parts for training. Riding fast in bicycle lanes seems irresponsible if you're amongst commuters.

I suppose I just kinda answered this. There should be speed limits for bike lanes inside cities.

I hope you realize you're one pebble or pavement imperfection away from breaking every bone in your body at those speeds.

At those speeds bikes are incredibly stable. The only way a pebble of pavement imperfection will harm you is if the bicycle fails mechanically (e.g. a wheel folding in on itself).

I'm pretty sure that the risk of being hit by or hitting a vehicle is multiple orders of magnitudes higher. Which isn't exactly better, but let's at least worry about the correct sources of danger.

Cornering grip at speed and some gravel can really ruin your day, in spite of the bike itself being stable at speed.

Very cool project. I'm currently evaluating whether I could commute 75km per day on a pedelec. In Switzerland there is a small bike manufacturer that makes long range pedelec : https://www.speedped.com/ (German only). It's very expensive though but the battery pack can be updated to something quite impressive.

You definitely could, but .ch is a bit more mountainous than where I live to put it mildly so it's not the distance that I would worry about but the elevation change. If that's within bounds you likely would be fine in three seasons but winter would be problematic, if not downright dangerous.

Since they are registered and used as mopeds, why not get an electric moped instead? Then you don't have to pedal and can sit more comfortable, maybe even with a windscreen.

I don't really see the point of pedelecs, unless you disregard the law and just pretend they are less powerful e-bikes. But then you'll lose it if the police notice.

> You're not really a regular bicycle anymore due to your speed…

The top speed (with assist) for class 1 & 2 e-bikes is well within the speed range of a regular bicycle. 15 MPH is considered a reasonable average speed for beginners, and 18-22 MPG is not out of the question with training. I've ridden my own e-bike past 20 MPH with no assist on occasion, and being a foldable model designed for electric assist it has a higher mass, smaller (20") wheel radius, higher rolling resistance (due to low-pressure 3-4" tires), and lower gearing than your typical non-electric commuter bike.

> … but you're also not a motorcycle that deserves its own lane.

Bicycles should have their own lane, whether electric or not, regardless of speed. It's not safe to share the lane with another vehicle.

I've tried driving over the top of the motor on this bike and it is almost impossible. I'm a pretty strong cyclist and I never managed more than 48 kph and that only very briefly. The drag is insane.

Trying to exceed the 32 km/h limit on my ebike is similar. It's like hitting a brick wall when the assist drops out.

I assume it's a combination of the extra weight and the extra losses from pedalling the motor as well as the wheels (mostly the second part I think). Going faster on my non-electric mountain bike is significantly easier.

This is my biggest gripe with ebikes. On a regular bike, there's a nice curve where you can always push yourself a little more to get a little extra speed, tapering off a little as your speed becomes too high for your gears. On an ebike, you have the assist until you don't, and (especially in high power mode), the wall when exceeding the assist threshold is too extreme to be worth fighting.

I wish someone would make an ebike that gradually dials down the assist in the last 5-15kph (depending on max speed; my experience is mostly on a US class 3 bike that caps out at 45kph; I'd like it to gradually ease off starting at ~30kph).

22 mph = 35 kmh. The average speed of Tour de France is 40 kmh: https://www.procyclingstats.com/race/tour-de-france/2016/gc/...

I wasn't talking about a long-distance race like the Tour de France. This is average speeds over a one-hour period. If an ordinary cyclist can reach those speeds, even for just a few minutes at a time, then cars need to be equipped to deal with it. The fact that an e-bike can sustain such speeds over a longer interval doesn't fundamentally change anything.

> If an ordinary cyclist can reach those speeds, even for just a few minutes at a time, then cars need to be equipped to deal with it.

Cars per se have the technical equipment to deal with that; it's the drivers' brains -- experience / expectations, basically -- that need to catch up.

The average speed over the TdF is completely irrelevant, they cross the alpes. Generally on a race bike riding at 40kph if you have a slight tailwind is very doable over extended periods. If you are riding in a group of riders riding along at 40 is very straight forward, you can easily go over 50 (the fastest TdF stages are around 50 average over more than 180km distance. I can easily ride 30km/h on a regular commuting bike over extended periods (and I'm currently quite unfit).

30 is pretty easy to do, 35 is significantly harder and 40 is insanely much harder.

People saying regular bicyclists do 40-45 kph seldom have much experience on bikes. And someone going that in city traffic, like a lot of ebikes do, is just not a thing =/ too much stopping/starting and with dedicated lanes you still have to slow to traffic. O ly ebikes get up to those speeds in that encironment

I believe your speedometer is broken!

I've never seen an armchair with a speedometer.

You deserve your own lane, although the rules vary from state to state. Some states have FRAP (as far right as practicable), others (such as mine) say that a cyclist should take the lane. As a motorist, and cyclist, I cringe when I see a cyclist half-in and half-out of traffic. As a cyclist, I avoid streets with fast, congested car traffic altogether. Fortunately, my locale has a lot of alternatives for bikes, including some bike paths plus neighborhood streets.

When getting your motorcycle license here in Belgium they teach you to always take the lane. Ride 3/4 of the way in. If you give the car some space, they'll drive closer to you, try to pass and then get impatient & aggressive when they can't. If you take up all the space they'll usually just accept it.

Obviously rules for bicycles may be slightly different but more and more inner city roads here in EU are now clearly marked as bicycle friendly.

In the US, we have something called "sharrows" which are a picture of a bike, and an arrow, painted on the street. The arrow is supposed to show drivers the "line" that a cyclist can occupy. Coincident with sharrows, my locale has designated "bike boulevards," that are considered to be preferred for cyclists. I live on such a street, that is a favorite route for riding from a large residential area towards the center of town. So I get to eat my breakfast and watch the bikes go by every morning.

They exist here as well. As a cyclist they don't make me feel very safe - when driving a car I've noticed that cyclists are often hidden from view by the cars in front of you and only "appear" two cars ahead of you.

Every day I see drivers playing with their phone and that two car distance is short enough for them not to look up and read end the cyclist.

When my kids reach the age when they can cycle by themselves it will worry me even more.

Whatever you do in traffic, be very careful. I'm still driving a car and inner city traffic is basically slaloming between cyclists. If something goes wrong, only one of us will end up in hospital.

I do also ride my bike on weekends have have been riding a 650cc motorbike for 15+ years, so not at all against 2 wheels. It's just that most people on two wheels seem to have started very recently and they don't know how to behave.

As a cyclist I tend not to care so much about all the mistakes other people do. Realistically it's a very small percentage of people that are new in traffic, the problem is that you usually only see the mistakes people do. You will never see that cylist who changed their pace 20s ago to avoid you.

What has been shown is that people who travel by many different modes; cylists, pedestrian, motorcycle, car, bus etc, are usually much safer and better at navigating traffic. We are all still masters at judging people only based on feelings though that will probably never change.

I agree and provide examples.

As a cyclist I know that a road bike is faster than a car in a roundabout so when I drive my car I don't overtake bikes right before roundabouts: either they'll try to overtake me right where the road gets narrower (unsafe) or have to slow down behind me (and they don't have an engine). So I slow down a little and overtake them after the roundabout. Same thing when approaching a red traffic light. I'll have to stop anyway.

Some pedestrians keep the left on mixed bicycle / pedestrian roads (this is a drive on the right country) probably to defend against the occasional crazy cyclist. That's dangerous IMHO because as a cyclist I get surprised sometimes when I didn't realize they are walking or worse running towards me and I get suddenly closer to them than I foresaw.

And as a driver it's really difficult to see a bicycle with no lights at night (nearly all food deliveries here.) At least wear some reflecting clothes, but buy a rear light and charge it as you do with your phone. Front lights are important too. One of them nearly crashed into my left door on a rainy night because I didn't see him when I came out from a stop.

The second (to walk on the left) is actually the recommended way to walk when there is no footpath because you see the oncoming traffic and they see you. Which is much better than being hit in the back by something you never saw coming.

OP was referring to pedestrian/bike paths. I believe everyone should stay on the right. I agree, with car traffic, pedestrians should be on the left.

I realize: and that's why I wrote that, after all, bike paths also have faster traffic on them, notably scooters and those can be very quiet, especially e-scooters.

* You're not really a regular bicycle anymore due to your speed, but you're also not a motorcycle that deserves its own lane.*

If you’re traveling at normal road speeds, wouldn’t you be a (electric) motorcycle? And require lights, tags, and insurance like any other motorcycle?

That's how it is for S-Pedelecs in Germany.

In Finland you get heavy fines for going faster than 25km/h with motor-assisted ebike (if using motor). If you go faster, depending on the speed, you are fined based on taxes avoided on using this kind of vehicle, plus fines based on driving unlicensed vehicle, plus fines possibly driving without driver’s license and some other fines too.

E-bikes in the US require pressure on the pedals to avoid being classified as vehicles (they’re cycling assist devices). That said, many people have retrofitted those assist systems with garage modifications that remove the need to push the pedals or even add a digital “throttle”.

Illegal? Sure. Are they going to get charged for it? Probably not.

>>Illegal? Sure. Are they going to get charged for it? Probably not.

Until they get into an accident and they discover that no insurance will cover them in any way because they were riding an illegaly modified vehicle. Also good way to find yourself 100% at fault in any collision.

No they don't. Federal class 2 ebikes are allowed throttle power without any assist.

I just discovered electric bikes lately, and started going to the office on an ebike instead of subway!! I then discovered how dangerous this can get especially at the end of the day when my brain is tired!

I thought of stop riding bikes, but then chose to have a life insurance instead

> I thought of stop riding bikes, but then chose to have a life insurance instead

This is how i treated cars, but it feels backwards. You're made right after the accident, but you're already dead.

> I then discovered how dangerous this can get

Presumably this has nothing to do with biking and everything to do with other motor vehicles?

> You're not really a regular bicycle anymore due to your speed

I don't understand, ebikes are regulated and the assistance will top at 25kmh in most EU countries, which is a very average speed for a bike without assistance.

Unless you're talking about speed bikes, that can ride faster but are regulated like a motorcycle with license plate and can't ride on cycle paths. So it's just an electric motorcycle that looks like a bicycle.

Electric moped that works like a bicycle.

Still, the "mo" in "moped" comes from "motor". It's a vehicle with a non-human power source, just like a car.

So I find it kind of weird that they're often allowed in bike lanes, especially where those are separated from pedestrians by just a painted line on a sidewalk (or sometimes even worse, explicitly mixed in with them!).

Because there are limited resources and e-bike cyclists will be much nicer to other cyclists than cars are to any kind of cyclist. Besides that if there is an accident it won't be a fatality right away.

> You're not really a regular bicycle anymore due to your speed, but you're also not a motorcycle that deserves its own lane.

Even human powered bicycles are entitled to their own lane. They are vehicles like anyone else.

Cars misjudging the speed of oncoming bicycles is a huge problem, even without pedal assist. I have added significant length to my bike commute to avoid places where cars turn across my path. I can take a 1% risk once in a while, but not twice a day.

This is rule #1 of bike safety: avoid risky situations.

> but you're also not a motorcycle that deserves its own lane. I have at least one car turn in front of me almost every trip out just because they're misjudging my speed. I get honked and yelled at when on the road because folks get frustrated when I'm using the left-hand side of the right-turn lane as a bike path.

Cycling is my primary mode of transportation, and I've found a couple things help with this:

1. Take the lane any time there's a chance of conflict such as a right hook, and when there is not enough space for a car to safely pass [1][2]

2. Use a headlight all the time, even during the day. This is what motorcyclists do, and when I made this change I noted a major drop in the number of drivers that turn without noticing me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_cycling#Lane_control

[2] This page has descriptions of several types of collision, with example videos and how to choose a lane position that avoids them: https://iamtraffic.org/engineering/behaviors-and-risk/

I totally agree with this. I also find it’s best to take the lane in urban traffic where you’re not impeding the flow of traffic. The people I see getting in trouble/hurt are those (curiously, largely boomers) who insist on weaving around cars or moving up on the right without room. Just get in with the cars and move predictably.

> the Bosch BMS is part of a DRM setup that pretty much prohibits using 3rd party batteries

Another good reason to fight DRM: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/.

Agreed, highly frustrating this. I found a way to make it work but it would have been a lot better if third party batteries could be supported by the system out-of-the-box without butchering a Bosch pack first.

You probably should add "Show HN:" in front of the title, since it's you who posted and did all this. Thank you for a great article!

Will do. But since it seems to have sunk without a trace I'm wondering if that's even worth it.

And you're welcome, that was a fun build.

> it seems to have sunk without a trace

Now, it's the top of this page: https://news.ycombinator.com/show

Yes, that's thanks to your comment. Was looking forward to some more tips on pack construction and safety, but fine.

Well thanks to both of you then! I browse by active when I have the time, and likely would have lost this article had it not still been at #1 when I woke up.

I love Jacques' posts, his lego sorting was legendary and I still share it often. As with another commenter, I had seen Jaques mention he was in the process of another article, and was waiting patiently.

The last few years have been really heavy, with some great creators dying of covid or just disappearing online one day.

Makes me extra grateful for the small rays of sunshine.

Joyner Lucas has a line in 'Will' that goes 'Ain’t nothing worse than losing your hero and couldn’t say bye, and we never know just when it’s our time, the legends are gone and we don’t know why, so before they go, look here go a toast so give ’em a rose while they still alive'

Thanks Jacques!

Wow, that means a lot. My silly projects usually just serve as me scratching some itch, the last couple have been out of the ball-park successful in the kind of response they generated and how people started using them as jump off point for their own stuff.

HN seems to be more for lawyers than for makers these days judging by the bulk of this thread (or fantasy cycling sports fans ;) ), I like to stick to the practical parts and I'm happy to see a couple of responses that don't do a deep dive into traffic rules and what I can or can not do legally to my bike.

So thank you for this.

My absolute pleasure- you, sir, are my hero and just wanted you to know some of us rely on you for inspiration in our own lives.

Love it, glad to see you keep doing nice stuff, Jacques.

Also glad to see there are still real makers in the world. Makers do, period.

Another type of person would've asked for 10M of seed funding for "a revolutionary way to commute to work, target market: the whole world" and would've delivered nothing after 2 years of "working really hard on it".

And then there are people like you and me who do neither and spend time talking shit on HN.

Well, kind of, ..., my 2021 has been one of my most productive years ever.

OK, people like him and me, then.

> Another type of person would've asked for 10M of seed funding for "a revolutionary way to commute to work, target market: the whole world" and would've delivered nothing after 2 years of "working really hard on it".

... and yet another person would've bootstrapped a company off it :-)

There are alternatives that don’t involve DRM or Bosch at all.

I built our ebikes around regular bikes using a TSDZ2 torque sensing motor and an em3ev 52V battery. Total cost around 600$ + bike + tools. The battery is already assembled so no risk of setting your house on fire. The torque sensing makes it really natural (like having bionic legs), the whole thing has an open source firmware if you want to replace the Chinese made one (https://github.com/OpenSourceEBike/Color_LCD) and you can use any battery with it. With a 850Wh battery we get around 100km range.

There is also the cyber bike for which you can buy plans and build from scratch but that one is more of a motorcycle and you’ll probably need certification + insurance to use it legally.

Where I live you can't legally cobble together your own s-pedelec, you need type approval.

Same here. The tsdz2 based bike is limited to 25 km/h so it’s a bicycle and not a s-pedelec.

The so called cyber bike is though and it wouldn’t be legal either where I live.

The EU is large. Did you or anyone else by any chance do any research on EU countries with a fairly flexible certificate of conformity approval procedure for L1e-B/speed pedelecs?

I'm starting to research my options for a twice weekly 2*65km commute. Most of it is ideally suited for speed pedelecs, along a canal and an old railway converted to cycle highway. The commercial offerings don't suit my needs. I wouldn't really want to pay a lot of money for a DRM offering either. That would be different for a DRM free version with serviceable battery packs.

A lot of the problem would go away if the Bosch DRM could be broken in some way, or at least convinced to accept non-Bosch batteries...

Stay tuned for that one.

We have a pretty good network of fire roads in the southern Los Padres National Forest.

Several times recently I have seen hunters and campers using E-Bikes to extend their range into the forest. From what I can tell they use a cargo trailer for gear as well as extra batteries.

It will be interesting to see what other uses being find for E-Bikes as ranges increase.

An added benefit for hunters is that deer aren't afraid of the sound of bikes. Similar to cars, they just don't care. It's much easier to approach a deer on bike than on foot.

These particular roads are also closed to normal vehicle traffic (autos and OHV).

I will be interested to see if E-Bikes end up being included in the motorized category in the future and therefore not allowed on these roads. There is some debate locally as to whether they should be allowed on normal trails which are already off-limits to motorized vehicles (but OK for standard bikes).

My father actually inquired on this to my local state agency. Technically an ebike is considered a motorized vehicle by the state and is not allowed on trails that prohibit motorized vehicles. I say technically, because I'm pretty damned sure no game warden is going to give you a ticket for riding an ebike. If it looks like a bike, and rides like a bike, and you're not riding above bike speeds, I think you're safe.

Mountain bikes are classified as motorized (WRT Wilderness access at least). If EV bikes are allowed where both pedal bikes and ATVs are not, something is wrong.

a friend does this for getting to fishing spots quicker from campsites. Sounds like an incredible idea if you've got the space for it, especially if you've got a large battery bank in your camper/vehicle for partial charges without having to turn an engine/generator on (I've got ~100amp hours of lithium battery in my truck camper, and I'd probably at least double that if I was gonna charge a bike every now and then)

> From what I can tell they use a cargo trailer for gear as well as extra batteries.

This is the main reason if you might ever buy multiple ebikes in your household, buy a drivetrain brand that has generic, swappable batteries that can work on all your ebikes. Buying batteries is expensive (~$1,000 for Bosch).

For example, some ebikes don't have swappable batteries (either they're integrated or are a no-name brand).

The Bosch Powerpack, on the other hand, is ubiquitous and swappable. If I'm going on a long trip, I steal the battery from my other ebike and bring it along (I have a Surly Big Easy cargo bike and a Trek Verve+ 2. My SO also has a Verve+ 2).

Another benefit on buying ebikes with the same powertrain manufacturer is the battery lock can be keyed alike. It simplifies a lot.

(Oh, one last thing! If you go with Bosch, you can get the battery locks keyed alike to Abus U locks.)

If you can charge your batteries up to 60% when you store them for a longer time rather than 100%, then charge to 100% just before you need them. That will keep them around that much longer. Better still if you can avoid discharging them below 15% soc.

Makes sense for seasonal and recreational riders. We both ride year round though almost daily for transportation.

As for discharging below 15%, Bosch's firmware is pretty smart about this. It keeps a reserve that's used for powering lights for a few hours after the assist cuts off.

Yes, that's at 5% state-of-charge, which is a bit low. If you charge up to 100% and discharge to that cut-off point you will get 300 to 400 cycles out of your battery. If you go from 80% state-of-charge down to 20% then you can get thousands of cycles out of your batteries. That's one of the reasons I designed that pack as large as it is: to stay within the 80-to-20 range on a 100 km trip.

Interesting! I've only gotten that low a handful of times. Definitely a bigger battery would be good if you're going that low on a regular basis.

The “charge to 80%” advice isnt generally useful to PEV riders in 2021

It is true that a lithium _cell_ lasts longer when charged to 80%, but a _battery of cells_ must be “balanced” and PEV BMSes only do that balancing in the constant voltage stage of charging in the hours after the charger indicates the battery has been fully recharged.

For anyone just learning about this, an unbalanced cell is usually the cause of a battery going “dead” and can even be the cause of a fire. Very few batteries die because they have outlived their charge cycle count.

This is different than your cell phone which has at most two cells (but usually one) in the battery. In that case, the BMS can monitor and charge individual cells. In a PEV the BMS usually monitors several groups of cells, and can not charge individual cells.

This can change in the future! I believe electric car BMSes generally do it. But its an added expense and PEV manufacturers have not started spending the money. Ill be happy if another commenter can correct me and show that there is some manufacturer who is ahead of the curve.

By charging and balancing individual cells, you mean group of cells that are connected in parallel (the 4P in 12S4P)? I don't see how or why would you balance individual parallel connected cells, unless you had a different battery configuration.

Simplest "balancers" drain cells that have too high a voltage as you are approaching full charge. You do need to occasionally top the battery off, to keep it balanced. Seeing they already have sense wires and discharge resistors, they could fully monitor state and balance even without top off, but that's additional code complexity.

There are nice BMSs that can shuffle charge between cell groups - they increase range by helping the weakest link, and should help longevity, by again, decreasing strain on the already worst cells. I don't know how common they are, just that they are not typical. There you can also have good and sub-optimal algorithms.

I have heard of individual cell monitoring and maybe balancing, but I have no idea what, how or why it does it.

The pack I built has a balancer, that's what all the red wires on the photograph are for. It uses a charge pump to move some charge around so that the high cells get clipped and the low ones brought up. It keeps the pack within 2 mV. The unit it monitors is the cell group, all 10 of them have a wire to the balancer and a ground for reference. It is very accurate and it wills substantially contribute to the life-span of the pack.

There is an active balancer in the pack I built. It keeps the whole pack within 2 mV.

Oof, $1500 per kWh.

I keep hearing about lithium ion batteries getting so cheap per kWh; when is that going to make it into reasonable-quality products?

This is truly hacker! awesome.

Reading OPs own multiple mentions of live bomb, more than a little bit scary, "especially given where it is located" makes me nervous just looking at it!

Hopefully op says the casing trespa has enough protection so they can get off it it catches fire or the ali express balancer breaks. From what I've read managing the batteries is a big part of tesla's success.

Ha awesome! Sorry if I missed it, but I didn't see a mention of the weight of the battery pack by itself, how much does the custom pack add?

It adds about 7 kg.

That's super light for that kind of range!

Yes, that's what I figured. I was a bit concerned that the reduction in range from accelerating the extra mass would be a problem, but that's only about 6% change and once it's going there isn't any difference. It's a bit more cross wind sensitive though due to the enclosed area in the frame.

So that’s 7kg extra for your 2150Wh, over the original 500Wh battery? So around 250Wh/kg?

I’ve been planning a velomobile that I can live out of, and I’ve been interested to observe that by the time you get to one kilowatt hour, I can’t find any Li-ion batteries at all: they’re all LiFePO₄. https://au.renogy.com/renogy-smart-lithium-iron-phosphate-ba... is then about 1280Wh (12.8V/100Ah) for 11.8kg, 110Wh/kg, around half the specific energy (though I haven’t excluded the weight of the controller electronics or any differences in casing). But I understand LiFePO₄ will live longer, and is generally safer (less prone to thermal runaway and whatnot).

I’m guessing you were going with Li-ion because you were working in the Bosch ecosystem (and potentially for weight as well), but do you happen to have any wisdom to offer about the differences between Li-ion and LiFePO₄?

Yes, LiFEPO4 would have been preferred but the Bosch BMS doesn't know how to deal with that chemistry. There are some interesting developments, have you looked at these?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYx097cVR48

If I had free pick of chemistry I probably would have gone with those. 250 Wh/kg sounds about right, I'm running the cells in a very conservative regime though, topping them up to about 80 SOC and discharging to about 20, so my effective range is smaller but the battery life-span will be very long, many thousands of cycles. The balancer also helps with that.

LTO definitely sounds very interesting, and I’ve noted it down for further investigation, but on brief examination it’s not sounding particularly compelling for my particular use case over LiFePO₄: I probably wouldn’t actually benefit from any of the places where it’s superior. Life span, for example: sixty years of daily discharge is nice and all, but LiFePO₄ should already easily last me a decade or two (time will kill it, not cycles), and I don’t think it’s useful to forecast beyond there. And I don’t need its more rapid charge or discharge. And so the main thing that’s left is its lower specific energy, and I’m not fond of the idea of lugging around an extra dozen kilograms per kilowatt-hour. (Its lower energy density wouldn’t be a problem; I can readily allow a few extra litres in the design, which you couldn’t do on an e-bike.) Stack all that on the more restricted range of options unless you’re willing to deal with unknown Chinese entities and AliExpress, and I expect I’ll end up staying with LiFePO₄.

For typical off-grid house power needs, on the other hand, LTO sounds extremely compelling.

Hi Jacques! A little late here. It's cool to see someone else spot welding! For the DC area, it's totally faster to commute and I took my daughter everywhere! Now we're in Philly and I use it for long ranges. I've built a bunch of these in various forms, my favorite is a big wheel scooter. It's my main commuter. Look up rivet nuts for securing to the frame! Was a big life saver.

One thing: After years of riding various bikes I've built, please for the love of everything, be careful at high speeds because I've discovered the weakest point of the bike is the C shaped thing at the end of the fork for the wheels. At super high speeds the bumps are rougher on the bike and will eventually pull it apart, even with mid motor power. It may not even come apart all the way, but spread open slightly. Maybe millimeters.

I've tried several bikes, offroad and everything. It won't happen now, but like at odometer 6000 or something. Every single time it fails there. I've had 3 bikes, various scooters, all fail that way. It means your wheel may eventually, suddenly come off at a high speed. I think the answer is a custom fork, but haven't gone there yet.

I'm jakecodes on twitter if you want to trade knowledge.

Hi Jake, I love this kind of response, all the armchair lawyering and other bs is just a huge distraction, there are exactly four comments in this whole thread including yours that are constructive. You mean the metal part joining the two sides of the fork? That's a great warning, I never thought of monitoring that bit in particular but now that you mention it that makes perfect sense, there is quite a bit of force on that joint.

I'll go and have a look at my bike right away and I'll keep a sharp eye on this as well.

And you've got one more follower in Twitter :)

Do you have any pictures of those failures? I'd love to see what they look like to get an idea of where an early warning might manifest itself.

I looked up the names for the parts of the fork: It's the part of the fork called the dropout that fails. Here's a picture of a dropout itself: https://i.stack.imgur.com/VZ8bO.jpg, not mine.

When it fails it may look exactly the same (you won't see anything wrong), if you take calipers to it, you'll notice the gap has widened. So measure it now and remeasure every once in a while. If it's changing you've got a problem.

OR you may be able to see it is visibly slightly wider, like more bowl shaped. It doesn't take much for the wheel to come off, it's very tight tolerances. I've never had one snap yet, but I've heard of other's whose dropouts have snapped.

You will notice it is starting to fail when you brake and the wheel feels like it is shifting ever so slightly. It might make a tiny little clink sound. Sometimes it will make the wheel clink around in the dropout when you go over bumps, since the tolerances are SO tight in that area.

It's not just stretching the C towards a straight line that happens, but also twisting at that area or flattening from side to side movement.

Ever since they failed on me a few times I've been riding less because it's a problem I have not solved yet. I reinforced them with 1/4 inch steel. Still it moved independently.

One other solution I've heard about to get bigger tires, they are often called "fat tires". That dampens the stress on the bike a lot. It also makes for a much smoother ride. But I've not done that yet since fat tires need space in the fork. I think a stronger fork and fat tires may totally solve the problem. Fat tires would be nice because it'll turn your bike into a nice smooth ride, and you know how rough the ride can be at that speed for that long.

I've got 2 1/4" on there right now, and those drop-out pads are massively overengineered on the Riese & Mueller bikes but I'll keep an eye on that anyway.

You could get a thru axle fork and wheel. It's supposed to be much stronger and rigid-er.

While I've never seen/heard of this happening, I suppose it's possible. I'd chalk it up to 2 issues: 1) possibly not tightening the quick release skewers quite enough 2) cheaper aluminum dropouts on the suspension lowers. One solid option is to purchase a thru-axle fork and wheel. They're becoming pretty much the standard across the cycling/mtb industry and you can even find rigid steel options (https://surlybikes.com/parts/karate_monkey_fork). If you're replacing your fork, that'll also open up options to buy a larger rim & higher volume tire to absorb more impact. Generally speaking, thru axle forks are designed to take a lot of abuse, so you'd be hard pressed to overstress one in a commuting setting, even over a long period of time.

You can also try a bolt on hub/fork where you're actually tightening a hex nut to secure the dropouts on the axle—most older 10 speeds are in this vein. They're also typically steel which is always nice for reliability.

I electrified a Kona Unit last year as a car replacement and have put it through the ringer. If you like tinkering, I highly recommend poking around the forums on lunacycle.com.

Good stuff, I've always been very kind to my bikes, avoid impact on the rims if I can (no kerb hopping, always aiming for the least impact if there is an obstacle on the road). Even so, with these bikes and the mileage they make (my brother wears out a frame every couple of years) it's probably a good idea to up the monitoring rate on the frame, especially at all the weld and high stress points. I've never had a frame fail - yet - in spite of many km on all kinds of bikes but that has also turned this into something of a blind spot so that warning is definitely a good one.

Look for thru-axle, they're standard on gravel-oriented bikes and mountain bikes, and are getting onto more and more of the road oriented bikes.

This bike has the added benefit of being theft resistant - on the basis that it's too heavy for one person to lift. Seriously though, what does it weigh?

With a typical sized Dutch man, stopping from full speed is going to be a real test of the brakes...

For the same reason I don't like scooters on bike paths, I wouldn't want this sharing a bike path with me. When heavy fast vehicles and regular bikes collide, the regular biker usually suffers more.

About 35 to 36 Kg. Bike + rider is 105K, which is actually not that bad. Your typical parent+bike+two kids is a lot heavier, I've had my 'daddy bike' up to well over 130 Kg before one of the kids was old enough to ride by themselves.

Full speed to stop is pretty good too, I did a couple of e-brakes to see how the change of weight and COG affected the bike. Stopping distance is a bit longer, it doesn't kick out when braking hard in a corner more than it did before, and - not surprisingly ;) - it transfers a bit more weight to the front when you hit the brakes hard.

But compared to a scooter it is much lighter and compared to a normal e-bike it is only 5 Kg heavier (29 vs 35 Kg).

That is impressively light. My opafiets is 30kg.

All aluminum bike really helps, as well as a relatively small frame size. But still, the battery makes it noticeably heavier.

haha I'm more than that on my road bike and I'm stopping with rim brakes. This is incredibly impressive work; congratulations! Can't wait to see the update. I suspect you're going to be just fine on water ingress based on what the inside of the package looks like.

The tricky spots are the front top where the cables run over the top of the pack, that's a perfect spot for water to seep in and at the very bottom where the spray from the wheels hits the bottom of the pack. Once it's properly sealed that won't be an issue though, but in this experimental phase I'm eyeing the skies carefully before a ride to make sure I won't end up being drenched. A couple of spatters it will definitely survive but a full-on Dutch-dunking could well be problematic.

Bare weight of the cell is 50g. With 170 cells that is is 8.5kg. Still considerably lighter than cargo e-bikes.

And 40 of those cells can be discounted because they were also present in the old pack.

>stopping from full speed is going to be a real test of the brakes...

I'm sure it'll be fine if you stick some high end mountain biking disk brakes on there. I suspect you could also use the moter to bring it to a sharpish stop.

It's got large diameter hydraulic disc brakes, there clearly is a bit of a difference with the added battery weight but it stops just fine (still way faster than my 10 speed with rim brakes in spite of the much higher bike weight). The fat tires (2 1/4") also really help with that.

People steal cars and motorcycles that are heavier. If you leave it out and think it’s too heavy to be stolen you’re living in a much friendlier place than me, electronic transport isn’t even always sought after for personal gain. Scooters are routinely thrown in the water around the world.

https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/local/hillsboroughcounty/s...

https://www.electrive.com/2021/06/17/hundreds-of-scooters-la...

https://www.kcrg.com/2021/06/03/teen-arrested-for-throwing-e...

I am surprised velomobiles are never mentioned: they are much faster than traditional bicycles, have some protection from the weather and can be electric assisted too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velomobile

They are super dangerous too. Very low to the ground, nearly invisible from the perspective of a motorist and far harder to overtake with on narrow bike paths than regular bikes. We have a couple of them near here, also a few battery assisted ones. The velomobile would be an ideal vehicle if everybody rode one.

> Very low to the ground

That makes recumbent bikes safer (actually the safest) during falls. Less height - less kinetic energy.

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

> nearly invisible from the perspective of a motorist

Usually solved by bright colors and adding a flag on top.

Yes, that's what I thought. I had fallen many times with recumbents and never the slightest problem, because you're so close to the ground.

And then my foot hit the ground, ever so briefly. And that's a failure mode I never really considered but what happened next went pretty quick and irreversible once it starts: your foot hits the ground, the bike moves a little bit forward, this puts more pressure on your foot, so it becomes harder to lift. Within a fraction of a second all of your weight will be on that foot, there is no way to lift it up because you are still seated behind your foot. By the time your foot is under you you will have a couple of broken bones and a twisted ankle. If you're lucky.

So no, they are not the safest bikes, they are safe most of the time, except for that one nasty little corner case.

I live a theoretical argument as much as the next guy but in this particular case my practical experience should count for something. Don't ride a low racer, not if you like your legs.

That's a well known issue and why people are generally advised to only ever ride recumbents with cleats (or heel slings or similar). And in any case it doesn't affect velomobiles for obvious reasons.

The very first thing I did on getting my recumbent tricycle was to swap my cleat pedals in (rather than the ones it came with, with a plastic foot cage), and I shudder to imagine the result of feet falling to the road at 30km/h.

Of velomobiles, remember that they normally have foot wells; if uncovered, the harm of feet falling will still be reduced, but not absent.

I think it's called "leg suck". I wonder if there are taller city-oriented recumbents where your legs are far enough from the road.

I haven’t yet ridden a velomobile (though I may purchase one soon and am planning on building one for riding round Australia and living out of for a year or so), but I’ve been riding a recumbent tricycle (Greenspeed GT3 Series II) since 2014, including various touring in Australia (Victoria and some South Australia), America (through California, and from St Louis to Philadelphia) and New Zealand (Auckland to Kaikoura¹).

People often assume that the trike is more dangerous than an upright bike because of being lower, and there is some truth in that aspect, but on the balance of things I consider and find it much safer than an upright bicycle. The increased width increases visibility again somewhat; the fact that the maximum width is at ground level rather than over a metre up means that you can’t ride in the gutter as bicyclists often do and have to be further out from the edge of the road, which makes you much more visually distinct (rather than blending in with the edge); the fact that you’re necessarily further from the kerb makes it so that in many places cars can’t sneak by you dangerously close and have to be more considerate in how they overtake; you the cyclist are far more aware of how traffic is flowing due to your posture (constantly beholding the world in front of you rather than craning your neck painfully from time to time, and with a mirror² in which you can also constantly monitor what’s coming up behind) and so can interact more usefully with it (which is a massive deal for safety). I always run at least one flag, and when heavily laden drape the back of one of my old hi-vis orange shirts over the back of my load. Combine all that with the inherent stability (which incidentally helps you to go in an actually straight line), the greater comfort, the low centre of gravity and a few other such factors, and I feel very significantly less safe when riding an upright bicycle (road or mountain), as I have a handful of times since getting my trike.

Recumbent bicycles (as you seem to be showing talking of in part) I have no experience with; they indeed have some notable problems for casual use, and are more suited for racing. When talking of velomobiles, make sure you’re considering their tri- or quadricycle basis, as distinct from two-wheeled speedliners which have a tendency to amplify some of the problems or hazards of recumbent bicycles even further. Of velomobiles in general compared with recumbents, I have heard some people reporting that traffic sometimes interacted with them more like a strange small car than like a strange bicycle, and that they felt slightly less safe.

—⁂—

¹ At Kaikoura just a couple of weeks ago I suffered unexpected and unexplained sidewall failure in my rear tyre, upon which I discovered that literally no one in the entire country stocks 349mm tyres—the national Schwalbe distributor, for example, doesn’t import anything below 20″. So instead of cycling the rest of the way to Christchurch I took a bus, and on returning to Australia last week equipped a spare I had, and I can buy more.

² On uprights, mirrors don’t tend to work well for lack of suitable attachment points and techniques, but on recumbent tricycles they work much better, and on recumbents in general mirrors are nigh essential as seeing behind otherwise takes leaning forwards out of your seat a fair way in order to twist your body enough to see behind adequately.

That sounds like an amazing thing you are doing there, do you have a write-up somewhere?

My velomobile plans? Not yet, but when I get a little further along I do plan to write about it publicly at some length (including during the build process, and after).

It’s even going to have a trailer, built in part to house a digital piano (which will be a dozen kilograms or so well spent).

That sounds like a fantastic adventure in the works. I you want to have a person to bounce your ideas of feel free to contact me.

Too close to the ground; that's what "killed" Sinclair's version of it.

By and by, enough cars will be equipped with enough driver assist that heavy cars that must be crashworthy at relatively high speeds will no longer be needed, much in the way active safety makes light high speed rail carriages possible. Then lightweight vehicles can come in to wider use. Imagine how road capacity would be increased by something like a lightweight one-seat series hybrid "bike" with an enclosing fairing. A lot of communities could be done in vehicles weighing 5-10% the weight of a car.

Yes, this is definitely a good point. There is an arms race like effect at work here, if you could de-escalate that lighter vehicles would be much better.

One wonders whether there is a place for "Active Crumple Zones"? Instead of a car having to weigh more that the opposition, it carries an explosive charge in it's nose, which is used to provide a burst of forward momentum to the leading edge of the car during a crash, preventing it from being forced back into the passenger compartment. One can imagine refinements, such as inertial sensing and a feedback loop to control the size of the discharge, so the "virtual" weight of the light vehicle matches the vehicle that it is colliding with.

Count this as idle speculation rather then a serious proposal! Mind you, if a bike was equipped with such a system a 4WD owner would get a big surprise when they ran into a cyclist and got like-for-like.

Edit: I guess I'm really describing Reactive Armour for everyday vehicles.

> "virtual" weight of the light vehicle matches the vehicle that it is colliding with.

I imagine physics would intrude at some point and make this a non-starter.

Collision with a pedestrian as well.

Oh that's evil :)

How powerful and effective could that be without launching the lighter vehicle backwards with dangerous force?

From a purely theoretical point of view, if there was a perfect feedback control loop the energy of the explosion could be controlled to bring the front of both vehicles to a perfect stop. Both vehicles would then crumple about that stationary point.

From a practical point of view ...

Trying to imagine two such vehicles colliding head on...

> Instead of a car having to weigh more that the opposition, it carries an explosive charge in it's nose, which is used to provide a burst of forward momentum to the leading edge of the car during a crash, preventing it from being forced back into the passenger compartment.

> Edit: I guess I'm really describing Reactive Armour for everyday vehicles.

Or basically an external airbag.

It's very much less convenient than a bicycle since it's bigger, less maneuverable, harder to get in/out and harder to "park".

Also, when commuting you don't need "fast". A bicycle or a regulated ebike are sufficient enough given the constraints you will encounter (lights, stops...). What makes using (e)bike to commute awesome is not the speed per se, it's the reliability. You won't be stuck (= taking part) in traffic, so if on Monday you take 30 minutes to go to work, it will be the same each day of the week. No need to rush to +30kmh between lights.

Awesome project and 500 km range is a cool achievement! Kudos to OP for all the effort and research that went into this.

I’ve run into the same issue that standard battery packs on eBikes are just not enough. The problem is not so much needing to do super long trips but if you forget to charge one day, you’re going to be stuck the next. Luckily it’s become more common for OEMs to offer dual battery setups with the piece of mind of extended range but also having a warranty! We own two cargo eBikes in the family and both have two Bosch batteries. Range varies from 80 to 200 miles depending on level of assist and is more than enough for our daily ~20 mile errands.

FYI: spot welding is a lot easier and precise using this welder: https://www.keenlab.de/index.php/portfolio-item/kweld/

With the capacitor module, you can easily power it with a lab bench power supply.

Finally, a constructive comment instead of a bunch of legal stuff and fantasy performance figures. Thank you very much, I'll look into this.

edit: Hm, the power supply looks to be a LiPo pack, the other two options are no longer available. But very nicely executed kit, now to find a way to power it from a wall socket.

If you pair it with this ultracapacitor bank, you can power it with a regular lab bench power supply.

https://www.keenlab.de/index.php/product/kweld-ultracapacito...

That's what I did for a custom ~600Wh pack I made. From memory (that was ~3y ago) I've set the voltage to ~12V and amperage to 30A. If you weld super fast, you'll start to be rate limited by the capacitor charge rate, but then you can just slow down a bit and all is well. It seems like the creator of the project has since released this custom voltage regulator that you can hook to a server power supply:

https://www.keenlab.de/index.php/product/ksupply/

This would be useful if you don't have a lab bench powersupply that can't provide 30A at 12V, and you're impatient. The website looks like their stuff is all in stock, so you shouldn't have a problem. Although you already built your pack so it might be too late. :)

Too late for this one but for sure there will be more and the capability to spotweld stuff is handy anyway. I already repaired a bunch of electric tool batteries as well as a series of Nikon camera batteries for a relative. Very useful skill this. Thanks again for the pointer.

> I traced it down to the several KA welding pulse that caused the ground fault interruptor to be EMP’d. Running the welder without ground took care of that.

That's a solution, I suppose. Not one that I would pursue, but I'm glad the author got the pack welded without any injury.

I know my way around electrical stuff, not having ground on the welder was ok given the work place setup, but agreed that if you are unsure about the possible consequences that you shouldn't do that.

Ironically, the only time I ever really got zapped was when I was connecting a scope to what I thought was the ground terminal of a very large high voltage power supply. The only slight problem was that it was a positive ground system...

Kind of strange that they build scopes with ground tied to mains earth, as it is the source of so many problems and hazards. Letting the entire thing float would be the proper solution.

That's because the metal case can go live if there is an internal short. That's what that protects against. But agreed, that really caught me out. I had a blind spot for days due to the afterimage.

It's probably because touching the outer ring of the BNC connector (which is at ground) can become dangerous, yes.

So the best way to go about it is to use an isolated differential probe. Or use an isolation transformer to float your device under test, which is always a good idea.

Yes, I learned that the hard way that day.

This is an interesting project, but if I needed long range transportation and didn't want a car, I'd get an electric scooter (the Vespa kind, not the Razor kind), or an electric motorcycle. It's built to handle higher speeds and can coexist with cars more safely.

For highways of larger roads perhaps. If you’re somewhere with good bike infrastructure you won’t be able to take advantage of those nice separated lanes.

I bought a Vespa instead of an e-bike a few years ago because I thought e-bikes would get cheaper with time and I figured I already have a bike, why get a more expensive one? Also because my SO could ride with me instead of having to have two bikes.

However I noticed that bikes can still be faster than sitting in traffic and trying to filter through to the front at traffic lights. Now I have an e-bike but have kept my Vespa for the wind-in-the-hair feeling of a scooter on nice summer days.

Unless you are doing some competitive riding, there is a reasonable limit for how long you want to ride per day. As a motorcyclist, I know well that distances of 350-600 miles per day are possible but taxing on your body. So for regular commute or light weekend riding (roundtrip), I would say 4-5 hours of battery life is sufficient. Depending on cruising speed, you can calculate the distance it will get you. Anything above that is just an extra unnecessary battery weight you are carrying.

This is true, modulo that if you charge your battery to the max and discharge it all the way that you are murdering it, so some spare capacity will very much improve your battery's life span, way beyond what you would get out of it otherwise.

I have a question for the author - what safety precautions do you take against theft for such an e-bike, especially when going to public places like supermarkets? I recently came to the Netherlands and have heard that bike theft is common, especially for expensive bikes. I would guess that such an e-bike would be an attractive target, so do you take additional precautions when parking in public places (like 2/3/4 locks), or simply not park in public places at all?

I would not leave it outside for more than a few minutes unattended. It's too expensive for that.

That makes sense, thank you. I assume you use a "regular"/beater bike for such activities (like supermarkets)?

Yep, we have an oldie sticking around for that purpose alone. The lock is worth more than the bike (which is the only way you get to keep your bike in NL ;) ).

I park a similar ebike in San Francisco fairly often. I have a good U-Lock and only lock to secure bike rings on main streets but haven't had any trouble. I've left it for hours at a time, but never later than about 9pm. You can mitigate the overall risk with an insurance plan, which is only a few hundred bucks a year.

Get two different locks, one cable lock as well.

Do people steal the bikes by picking them up with a car, or do they try to ride them away?

I'm surprised I haven't seen e-bikes with an electronic immobilizer (that will either disable the motor or use it as a brake, unless unlocked with a code or physical token).

I have a specialized Vado sl. You can purchase a range extender and easily do over 100km with it, in reality closer to 200k. Any reason you didn’t consider this as it’s manufacturer supported?

I never even knew about the brand. The three that I looked at were Stromer, Bosch based systems and Klever. The Bosch based system won out because it doesn't use fancy one-off stuff, there is a fairly good source for spares (batteries, motors, controllers) and it seems to be the most reliable system on the market. The Stromers are a bit faster (higher powered motors), the Klever looks clunky and I've read a ton of stories about their reliability issues.

Will look at the Vado, thanks for the pointer.

Specialized is one of the most well-known bike brands among enthusiasts. Unfortunately also one most expensive ones.

But they have some interesting innovation going on, e.g. with the FutureShock system on rigid bikes, integration of storage in downtubes, their various suspension designs on mountainbikes, first dual-crown fork on an enduro bike, and their own e-bike system.

You can think of them as the Apple of the bike market.

I've looked a lot more at their bikes now, if 'Apple of the bike market' means overpriced fashion statement then I am inclined to agree. Those prices are absolutely ridiculous.

The Vado SL with the range extender still has a smaller battery than the Vado. If you want that kind of range all the time, isn't the Vado the better choice? At $450 for 160Wh, the Vado SL range extender is the worst deal in the Specialized catalog, and that's saying something!

The Vado is also twice as heavy. The SL is super light so that heavy battery is hauling a lot more weight around. The SL is for those who still want to cycle. The power of the normal Vado basically makes you redundant.

I've looked at that bike now. It's a regular e-bike, not an s-pedelec so quite a bit slower, also the range is very small. I like the looks though, very elegant. But like I wrote in the article, I'm probably faster on my old non assisted racer than I would be on that bike even though it would give me more range because it's assisted. The battery on my bike is more than four times as large, and will do 180 km at maximum assist, far faster than that Vado SL bike will go, and it's a different class of bike entirely (pedelec vs s-pedelec).

Are you driving the s-pedelec on bike lanes in NL? It’s illegal to do so here in Finland although it’s not well enforced and no way am I riding in traffic here. You’re also required to have a license plate for the s-pedelec here also.

Yes, this is legal here, not the square signed 'fietspad' paths but the iconic ones that are also used by scooters. The speed limit in town is 30 on those, outside it's 45.

Great project. I have a 2018 giant quick e+ that is speed limited to 28mph for the US market - in reality gets up to 26-27. In general the push bike cycling technology is universal (SRAM, shimano, campy, etc kit works everywhere) but for e-bikes there are wierd oddities where all the enthusiasm of the international DIY community doesn't quite translate to different locations because of differences in the battery and motor. I wanted to add a supernova headlight to my bike and what seemed like it would work was really hard because the US wire harnesses were different, voltages were different, etc.

In order to support the weight of the motor and batteries these bikes tend to be really beefy and top out at around 50 lbs. Not sure how much your extra batteries weigh - but if you exhaust the batteries on a 50lb bike you need to make sure you have a super granny gear to get you home if you have hills.

Chances of depleting this battery in normal use are nil unless you end up driving to Berlin from Amsterdam or so :) It can go up to the country borders in every direction.

The added weight is 130 times 50 grams + the weight of the enclosure. 170 batteries in there, but the original battery already had 40 of those.

Agreed that you don't want to pedal it uphill without the motor running that would get old really quick.

I built a stretch cruiser ebike out of parts, including a bafang / 8fun mid drive and 52v “shark” style battery. It does pedal assist and straight up throttle to danger in lickety-split.

This is a cool project, however, I wouldn’t have gone this route because:

It isn’t a great idea to lock up an ebike, but there are circumstances where you might want to and you’ll want to take the battery with you when you do.

If you need added capacity, I’d recommend a second battery to swap in during a longer ride. This can limit the size of the extreme failure should that occur, and let’s you choose less weight for shorter trips.

Finally, there are some quality battery builds out there, in a variety of shapes that include enclosures offering some resistance to shock.

Besides all the testing and perfect wiring here, you can rely somewhat on the seller to back up their work.

If the battery isn't easily removed then I would say it's probably just as safe to lock up this ebike as much as any other expensive bike. It'd be really hard to flip/fence with a custom battery like that though

Batteries are stolen more frequently than bikes!

What's HN favorite fancy-ish ebike from the likes of VanMoof or Cowboy or something else? I saw one of the bikes sell for as high as $5k which, provided how many very nice-looking alternatives at 50% the cost there are seams unreasonable.

I bought this one second hand for half of what they go new for. It was sold as though it had 1800 km on it, deep readout of the controller revealed that I got scammed (it has done 11000 km), but I still think it's a pretty good deal, I'll just need to swap out some bearings a bit sooner.

The Stromer range is very nice, super pricey, Klever as well.

I haven't tried or looked at other s-pedelecs. Regular e-bikes there are so many types and brands that it is hard to say what works and what doesn't without just trying them.

This store has quite a few brands of s-pedelec:

https://www.speedpedelecs.com/

But I'd never buy a new one, I think they are simply way too expensive, it's just another bike with a small electric motor and these prices are ridiculous, you can buy cars for that kind of money.

Van Moof is my favorite, because bikes are stolen a lot where I live and Van Moof comes with an alarm and GPS.

Interesting reading this as a US resident that modded an existing bike with some parts from Grin and other places. The battery I bought has 17Ah which supposedly has ~50 miles of range which is more than enough for my needs. I'm also able to throttle control and pedal cadence control and hit top speeds of 30+ mph. It's unfortunate that modern e-bikes are so locked down and restricted because the DIY route is a lot of work and pretty expensive, but clearly mainstream e-bikes are arbitrarily limited and holding back the true potential these bikes have.

True potential for what exactly? How do you see them being used if the limits were removed?

> clearly mainstream e-bikes are arbitrarily limited

I don't know that I'd call laws ensuring that high-speed motorcycles aren't allowed on mixed bicycle/pedestrian lanes just because they happen to be powered by electricity "arbitrary"; seems utterly reasonable to me. YMOV.

Wow, this would have been perfect for me when I was younger. I hope this will become more mainstream, an off roader would really open up the places to explore on a day trip.

For anyone interested in e-bikes, that has a do it yourself attitude, I recommend looking at Grin Technologies in Vancouver. I met someone who built their own e-bike this summer while out riding, and he suggested them to me. The founder has a bunch of videos online about e-bike technology that I learned quite a bit from.

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

> and besides a lot better for our precious climate, which is the main reason I wanted to cut down on the use of my car.

I'm sure building an e-bike is a lot of fun. But there must be plenty of other ways to help the climate if you'd like to use your car occasionally.

For example, people who bike a lot might still order a ton of goods online (say, from Alibaba?) to save money, which then has the double effect of encouraging the global trade + transportation routes that are not climate friendly, and encouraging the "emerging market" businesses which don't necessarily produce products in the most sustainable ways in order to lower cost.

I know somebody who refuses to turn on their central air conditioning lower than 77F "because that wastes energy so it is irresponsible", and another person who turns off their hot water heater in between daily showers. Really I'd just like some sort of website that compares people's ideas about what helps the climate, to what actually helps, and how to balance things out in one's life.

that seems unfair.. OP is a nerd doing nerd things with the side effect of a feel good environmental story/reward.. vs turning off a hot water heater between daily showers is more like a misunderstanding of thermodynamics(?) or some part of physics. or not running an A/C which, hey, if they're happy, who gives a shit?

> hey, if they're happy, who gives a shit?

They should, and the reason why is recycling.

Everyone believed the claims that recycling would help the planet. But it turned out that most (not all, but most) recycling was being burned or buried, because it was never going to be cost effective. Nobody verified the claims, but it "made them happy" to think they were helping the planet. And now we live in a world with just as much trash and even more microplastics, when we could have been making real changes to actually reduce our waste impact. Letting people blithely say "oh I'm doing it to help the climate" helps people be happy while exacerbating the problem they're pretending to be helping to fix.

Another example is people who say "hey I'm not racist! my best friend is black!" while their subconscious bias at work actively prevents black people from being hired or promoted. Or "I'm not sexist! I love women!" while speaking over them in every meeting and shooting down their ideas. It's not enough to just feel good about what we're doing. We need to verify we're actually helping, not just assume we are.

After reading this, did you ever consider using petrol, gas, oil or whatever you call it there for environmental reasons (against electric is Lithium battery manufacturing, power loss in AC transfer, dirty fuel used to make electricity, and battery degrading) weight, energy density, simplicity and would the fuel cost much more? It’s 2-3x more than in the US would that have changed your mind, and would you still find it cheaper to maintain? Here’s some motors https://boneshaker.bike/motorized-bicycle-kits/

Do you see a benefit in a using 2 battery packs, so one can charge and the other will be used and swapping them, you can mount them so you don’t carry them, or switch them since they don’t rely on high voltage.

For the Bosch is it easy to beat the DRM? If they’re at best using essentially voltage to turn a brushless motor, it can’t be that hard to beat can it?

I figured with the kind of mileage that I'm getting out of this and the cost of electricity it's a pretty good deal compared to firing up my trusty boxer.

I've used two packs, two times 500 Wh but I'd run them dry on my regular commute so that's what drove the decision to build this bigger pack. There are some advantages, but the Bosch system keeps a reserve so you'll end up transporting some idle capacity anyway and you're killing the batteries cycle wise.

The DRM I have not - yet - been able to crack. Not for want of trying though and I'll definitely have another go at it. The CPU is a 32 bit chip that can do all kinds of neat encryption stuff so it's not going to be easy. To my knowledge it hasn't been hacked yet.

Keeping them within a certain range is useful but not as much as preventing them from overheating, heat and fast charging is more dangerous, basically if you limit them to 80% it will prevent trickle charging, you can do this in hardware by monitoring the speed it charges at and shutting off when it lowers with wattage monitoring equipment. Apple has this as well, and every lithium charger has trickle charging at 80%, but not all of them are able to end charging at this percentage.

https://linrunner.de/tlp/settings/battery.html

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210512

The best implimentation from my understanding is this one under android.

https://github.com/VR-25/acc

By hack I mean a bypass versus your meaning of attacking the security and removing DRM, is there a reason you can't just use another chip or anything special its doing? Do you need the CPU and is the cryptography documented enough to make it easy or woth the effort? It may also be a passion project so I understand if you just want to do it to do it, and even share the information. If it is battery charging features if they're important are not special. The last 20% makes extra cycles and is the most stressful.

https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-409-charging-lithiu...

>Turn off the device or disconnect the load on charge to allow the current to drop unhindered during saturation. A parasitic load confuses the charger.

>Charge at a moderate temperature. Do not charge at freezing temperature. (See BU-410: Charging at High and Low Temperatures)

>Lithium-ion does not need to be fully charged; a partial charge is better. Not all chargers apply a full topping charge and the battery may not be fully charged when the “ready” signal appears; a 100 percent charge on a fuel gauge may be a lie.

>Discontinue using charger and/or battery if the battery gets excessively warm.

>Apply some charge to an empty battery before storing (40–50 percent SoC is ideal). (See BU-702: How to Store Batteries.)

It all helps, heat and fast charging are bad, charging to 100% and discharging to zero are also bad (100's of cycles vs thousands!).

I salvaged a BMS from a borked battery to fool the Bosch system into thinking that it has a 'legit' battery, and yes, you need that chip, the CAN-BUS communications do all kinds of stuff such as report state-of-charge to the display, enable the high voltage bus and so on. Without that the bike simply won't work.

The pack has enough capacity that range simply isn't a problem any more, just charge it up to 80% and go where ever you want that is within a reasonable distance (say 150 km).

I'm aware of battery university, I probably know the Lithium Ion page by heart now, you can quiz me :)

Can you explain how much of a difference it is from non state of the art equipment? I don’t know much about electronic vehicles, I assumed that it was just power regulators, and it could be done on hardware like charging through an advanced IC charger. Basically if you replace the chip with another one, what is the greatest cost?

Do you have that replacement might be mitigated through other means?

Do firmware updates matter? I know that there were projects to make a Bluetooth finder with non replaceable batteries not functional when the batteries were replaced, it was tile, it depended on waste, a replaceable battery that was locked, and became non functional to sell more product.

Do you see it being bricked in a forced update like the tiles? Are you sure it’s able to be tuned for the newer battery capacity, or do you see workarounds? I can see a switch that can change it to stock mAh cells to ensure the best compatible with the software, but you also lose efficiency through voltage lowering buck conversion.

The Bosch BMS is a little wonder of engineering, the packs less so. It has a 32 bit NXP CPU, a separate battery managing chip, a bunch of FETs, a DC DC convertor and a battery balancer and whole slew of safety measures (both sw and hw) in a 40 x 60 mm board.

It's one of the most, if not the most impressive BMS I've seen for its size. The packs are a different matter, the engineering of the rear carrier ones is mediocre, the frame mounted ones much better and the PowerTubes are much better still, but far less service friendly.

So far I have not found a way to fool the motor/controller into wanting to play ball with anything other than the genuine article on the other side of the CAN bus.

The battery firmware can be upgraded, but you don't really need to, it just woks. The higher range is not recognized (the battery still reports the Ah capacity of the battery type it shipped with), but the %age state-of-charge is accurate and that's enough to ride by without further monitoring (it's displayed separately, and you have to do a little bit of mental arithmetic to work out how many km you can still go).

There is no loss of efficiency, the batteries are at the same voltage as the originals (and that is something that would instantly cause the BMS to brick itself).

A city-wide charging network with standardized, user-replaceable battery packs would be the "holy grail" of short- and medium-range electric bike and moped commuting. Unfortunately, jury rigging a larger battery capacity is the only solution due to competing, non-interoperable solutions and outdated speed and distance regulations.

Regenerative braking may be able to help, yes?

https://radpowerbikes.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004517...

The tech for that isn't there yet. Direct drive motors are impractical (can't disengage, heavy).

Regen will usually only gain you 3-5% total range, most of the power from biking is dissipated as heat through aero drag, even if you're biking up and down hills. Source – my company exclusively does ebike research and development.

I love the idea of e-bikes and would love to be able to use them and not need a car (which i don't own), but i just don't feel safe using them in US cities... NYC has too much traffic, SF has too many hills, Seattle is too wet.

I wish there was more alt-transit for commuter scale transportation to get around without a car, but the autonomy of not using a bus. Scooters seem promising but they're a pain on the roads (with laws banning use on sidewalks), and i've heard horror stories of how unsafe they were.

I feel like the ideal form factor is a pallet dolly: You have a handle, its wide so its comfortable to stand without balancing, and you can ride in the road confident a car can see you and not run you off.

You can always come up with a million reasons not to do something. Plenty of people bike safely in NYC, SF, and Seattle.

You don’t have to wish for an alt-transit solution that’s not a bus. Bikes exist. The more people who ride them the safer and more normalized they get.

I’ve bicycled (conservatively) 7,5000 or so urban/downtown miles over the past decade or so in Portland, OR. I get wet, I get sweaty, I get tired, I get into the occasional close call with cars, I get scared.

My biggest tips are: don’t buy a bunch of gear at once. Buy 1 thing at a time once you figure out what you might like. Ride slower, it’s not a race. If you get too scared, pull of the road, walk your bike, and take a break — I still do it even after a decade of riding.

> Plenty of people bike safely in NYC, SF, and Seattle.

Oh i know and power to them. Personally, i'm very clumsy and not very balanced, so i don't feel like i'd be comfortable riding in the city. I've rode a bike around silicon valley a bit, and it was fine.. most of the time.

I used to bike a lot in youth, (mostly on bike paths for fun), and for sure i know that a mostly-bike/ped environment feels much safer.

> The more people who ride them the safer and more normalized they get.

This is why i've been keeping an Ebike in the back of my mind (and hoping for alternatives to emerge). I'm hopeful for a future where cars are second-class citizens on urban streets.

Maybe i'll try biking around my neighborhood this spring, and see if I can get used to it.

(BTW thanks for the tips :) )

I used to live in Seattle and a personal scooter is where it's at. Plus, it's impossible to look like more of a dweeb than the tech people riding electric unicycles.

It's great for 8 months of the year at least.

> i've heard horror stories of how unsafe they were

Wait, scooters are not a thing in the USA? As in, obscure enough that the closest experience you have is "heard horror stories" and that's it?

I feel like every second person here (Netherlands) owned one, or perhaps rather, at least I would expect every teenager to know someone with a scooter. I personally never saw the appeal but then I also hate cycling (too much work, can't transport groceries well at all, and you get wet) so I consider myself an outlier anyhow.

Electric Scooters (the kind you stand on, like Bird) are very very common in US cities.

The small wheels mean it’s easy to get knocked around whenever you hit any small side walk bump.

Oh those! To me a scooter is a thing you sit on, pull the handlebar and get to 45km/h (30mi/h), and typically using gasoline (though electric ones are becoming more of a thing). In dutch we call the other things "step" because you, y'know, step to go forwards.

These electric stepless steps, to me, seem mostly dangerous depending on the driver. They're in a number of cities here now and I almost killed one of them because they were coming out from behind a tree at full speed, and I was driving less even than the speed limit (50km/h) because I was approaching a crossing, but I didn't see nobody and this person just flashed by right in front of me. They could have seen me coming but I couldn't really have seen them, so that's just stupidity on their part (even if likely I'd have been responsible because they went straight, if on the sidewalk because the actual street was closed for construction, and I was turning off and so should give right of way also to pedestrians). Also on dashcam videos online you see similar stupidity, i.e. them driving on a part of the road where cars are also allowed, not considering other vehicles at all, but it's outliers by and large. If you're a responsible 'step' scooter driver, you'll be fine.

Hills are the reason to get an e-bike! I live in the Texas hill country and that's why I've thought of one.

Great article. Bosch seems to be the go to for most electric bikes sold in london. My experience so far is OK; school run replacement has been brilliant. The range estimation is ridiculously bad! I find the battery bars are better estimator.

I this spurs on more entrants or drives more features. Recharging feels too frequent. There's no feedback on 'driving' style and impact on range. I'd love regenerative breaking. Silly things like a clock on the control pane would be hugely useful options.

As someone who lives in SEA this obsession with e-bikes is rather fascinating. Modern ice motorbikes are dirt cheap (you can get one for the price of OPs battery pack) , easy to maintain and are surprisingly silent. Finally it can carry the whole family - pets included! It's not that uncommon to see 4 people on a scooter around here.

Honestly aside from weather I wonder why the west has such terrible adoption for imho the best transport vehicle we've got.

> Honestly aside from weather

Also we are generally wealthy enough to afford cars and they fit a whole family a lot more comfortably. If you can afford a car, why by a motorcycle unless you want one for fun? Ebikes are nice in the west because they can travel in bike lanes which have a lot less traffic.

> Also we are generally wealthy enough to afford cars and they fit a whole family a lot more comfortably.

I'd disagree with comfort - sure sitting in a car is great but a motorbike brings it's own comforts like easier parking and faster commute. I think we can all agree that the worst parts about commute is the traffic and parking - getting rid of these does change your perception of the experience significantly.

ICE motorbikes in the west are usually ridden by hobbyists, not people using them for commuting. Where I live, it is cold and/or miserable for 7 months of the year, and its rare to see motorbike riders during that time. So they're bought by people who already have other modes of transport. The weekend rider crew. And they are usually quite expensive. On top of that, where I live they need special licensing, so add 2000€ for a driver's license. Also, you'd be pulled over so fast for having a child or pet unsecured on one of them, your head would spin.

> it barely discharges over a trip like that, which should help with longevity

Only if you don't charge it fully though, right? As in, charge to just below X% when the amount of charge you expect to need is X/2 percent-points, rather than to 100% and not use it fully. At least that's my understanding and how I've been treating my li-ion devices.

Very precisely: it goes from 40.5 (about 80% soc) to 37.5V (about 60% soc) over a 64 km ride.

So indeed, not charged fully. Just enough to stay in the 80 to 20 window, which still gives me about 100 km of range to play with which is plenty and if I need it I can always charge it up fully and run it down but I don't expect that to ever happen. But those would be expensive cycles life-span wise.

The innovation possible due to a customizable battery configuration, and the simple drivetrain of a electric motors, can lead to some very wild experimentation with all kinds of mobility assisted devices. While pedelecs are seeing the initial interest, but a rapid evolution of battery powered exoskeletons cannot be very far.

Everything about this is awesome, great work. Love the write up — the bits on safety in particular. The layout is also oddly aesthetically pleasing. Inspiring, though I’m so so far at the beginning of the road with hardware and electronics. Might attempt a solar powered pond pump and battery though.

The biggest issue I have with getting more than 20 miles out of my e-bike is the controller. The manufacturer of the controller set it to shut off when the battery pack hits 42v. (using a 52v pack) Sucks pushing a bike up a hill when you know you still have ~15% capacity remaining.

That's to increase the life-span of the pack. At 15% max discharge the pack will live much longer (orders of magnitude) than if you were to ride it down to zero. This is precisely why I over dimensioned my pack.

I still remember the author of of the post for making pianojacq, a free in-browser piano learning helper software Yet another interesting project! I wish I had the knowledge to dive into making the same bike. How about a crowd funding effort to manufacture some more?

What's the motivation in peoples mind between using an e-bike and just using a tesla? If the argument is that the tesla is still unclean since the energy might not come from clean sources, doesn't that apply for e-bikes as well?

E-bikes can be much faster than a Tesla in dense urban cities. The reason for this is that in places with dedicated bike lane infrastructure you can easily skirt city traffic.

It uses a tiny fraction of energy to produce and drive around with. Lower emissions if you're using dirty energy. More energy left to spare if you're using clean energy.

According to wikipedia[1], an ebike is about 10x as efficient per passenger mile as a tesla. Also, an ebike is 2x(!) as efficient as a conventional bike.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transpo...

A bike is infinitely more convenient and fun than a car if you live in a city. And only cost a fraction.

Cars requirements on roads, parking lots and traffic jams also add to environmental profile if that’s your thing.

You should post this on endlessSphere if you haven't. Great write-up!

I haven't, I didn't even know it existed!

You've been hacking and building an e-bike without knowing about the largest online forum for exactly that?

Apparently :)

In any case they'll love it there! I'm more onto other energy storage forums, and it's sometimes a bit less active than I'd wish it was but you can get some very good insights from some of the users there. I've avoided quite a few headaches and lesser documented problems with energy management w.r.t liion batteries thanks to those forums.

Feel free to post it there, I have my HN and Twitter accounts and that's enough for me.

Thinking about this a bit longer: this is in a way a bit like saying 'you built a computer without knowing about hacker news?'. I don't particularly care about fora other than HN (and Twitter, but that's far more general than HN), I just like to tinker with stuff and that's a different thing every other week. I'm sure there is a piano forum, a lego forum, a forum for insomniacs and so on. But I'm not all that interested in those fora, I'll find my own way and when I get really stuck then I may go and see if there is something that can get me unstuck and if that's some forum somewhere I'll read it - likely without even noticing the domain - make some notes and move on again. I really don't need more sites that I have to visit regularly to keep up on some subject. I'm probably a-typical in that way but I have three or four sites that I use regularly and the rest is on an as-needed basis as the answer to a search query.

That's cool, but why not just carry extra batteries and switch?

Because the batteries have to ride somewhere, in a bag in the back it messes up the weight distribution of the bike and every time you make a turn all that weight bangs into the frame at the back. Another problem is that you get a silly little bit of range per battery, 30 km on a good day, so you end up maxing out those batteries. If you want to spread the load across four batteries (same weight) then you will have to swap batteries every 16 km or so. So this is far more practical and much better for the cells in the longer term as well as a safer bike to ride.

Awesome! What speed does eco mode mean? A 500km range is pretty impressive, possibly also longer than it would be comfortable to sit on a bike without needing to sleep!

The speed doesn't really change, it's just that you have to work that much harder to achieve it. In ECO mode I'd say you are going to get tired about twice as fast as you would at max assist.

The 500 km range in eco mode is something I never expect to even go near though it might be fun to once ride around IJsselmeer or so on a single charge.

My dream e motorcycle - https://www.zeromotorcycles.com/

I have the 2022 Zero S and it is a delight. Highly recommend it for anyone who would be interested to try a motorcycle but don't want to deal with clutches. First motorcycle as well. There is simply less overhead to getting started, it's more noise appopriate for neighbors, and I don't have to worry about silent operation since I try to avoid risky maneuvers with other drivers when I can. I don't plan on dealing with traditional motorcycles ever.

"Avoiding risky maneauvers" :) - reminded me of an insurance agent of mine who always quipped that motorcyclists are a claim waiting to happen... and his joke that there's only two types of motorcyclists, those who have been in an accident and those who will be in one.

People in general, at least in the US, don't really even register you as existing if you're on a motorcycle... it doesn't jibe with the typical car driver's frame of mind, which means - and you've already figured this out - the higher burden of staying alive/responsible is - sadly or not - on you.

Had a boss who rode his Harley every single day in Seattle to work and home, for 25+ years, no accidents. He was of the same mindset as you - no risky/stupid maneuavers and defensive driving. Turn your body/bike into a flashy/strobe thing if you have to, that gets attention... who cares if you inconvenience someone w/extra lighting as long as it saves your life and lets them know where you're at.

Take it out for a spin for me! :) Envy you.

That's pretty awesome. Amazing range.

Be careful on bikes Jacques :) Let me know in advance if you plan to cycle this way or code some statistics dashboard.

Mail me!

Inspirational project!

I love it. This is "only" three times the size of the battery in a factory-built e-bike like the Specialized Turbo Vado 5.0, but at half the price.

Nice. What's the 0-60 time?

Infinity, unless you drop it off a mountain or out of an airplane :)

To get up to 35 Kph is slow enough that in traffic it irritates the hell out of drivers of cars.

I see you've played GTA5!

> S-Pedelec (...) top speed 45 kph (...) in many places you are forced to ride in traffic

Yes. This is the way. Thank you, Dutch government.

If somebody feels like wheezing an almost completely silent 200kg projectile, godspeed. But please gtfo from the urban bike paths, if at all possible.

It weighs half that, including me, and the average speed over a longer trip is about 33 to 35 Kph. In cities you ride just as fast as the rest of the bike traffic, there isn't any point in trying to go faster, and top speed is rarely achieved, you'd need a 100% full battery and a rider in very good condition. More usual you'll be around 35 to 38 kph in open country where there is very little other traffic.

My 'commute' is 64 km, it takes me two hours on the dot door-to-door.

Using my Stromer ST1X — which lacks the top of the line motor of the ST3 and ST5 — I can bike at 45kph at any battery % above 30.

I am probably 140kg with bike, battery, laptop, clothes, and stuff.

Outside the cities I can go in the bike lane, and I am absolutely twice as fast as most bikes.

I live in the Netherlands, so everything being flat helps.

That's a very neat bike and that motor is twice as strong as the one on the Bosch models. What kind of range do you get out of it at 45 kph?

Something like 50/55km on the 800Wh battery.

Nice! Stromers are great gear, I like the looks too.

I recently sold my ST2. I could get only 30-60km on a full (1kwh) battery at max speed (46 kmh). But then why would you go below max speed om a 7k bicycle? I got rid of it because it was also very expensive in maintenance, and because cycling on the road slightly slower than cars really sucks (a few too many encounters with aggressive cars). The stromers are near impossible to ride without assist, think because of the regenerative engine. When the battery was empty or I had one of those weird error 18 things I could go abou 17kmh with a lot of effort. I got a vanmoof bike instead niwy, so much nicer. 30kmh, easy to pedal past assist speed cause of light front wheel motor. Lightweight, 500wh battery is pretty ok (also same 30-60km range). Lots of repairs (under warranty) though, build quality is subpar. My 30km commute is 65 minutes now on my vanmoof, where it was 50 minutes on a stromer.

How was the Stromer reliability wise?

I had my share of controller issues, where the bike would give an error. Removing the battery a few times usually solved it, but somehow the magnetic connector is too sensitive. Worse is that it is really easy to improperly connect the charger, so sometimes it would not charge at work Depending on wind and temperature that would give me a ton of range anxiety. Especially as cycling on a stromer without assist is very very hard. So all in all it was ok, I rode 13k km and it mostly worked. But when it didn't I really hated it.

The €250 travel charger is only 80W, so a full charge takes 12 hours. I ended up writing a script to poll the api to make sure the bike was actually charging when at work.

That is why being able to use the bike as normal when off/dead battery was a primary criterium for me. The bike I have now has a cheap little hub motor on the front wheel, and it lets the wheel spin freely when the bike is off.

A final remark, I used my Stromer ST2 exclusively for commuting. Just not practical in the city, only in between cities. I use my regular ebike for almost all trips, so I get a lot more value from it.

Thank you. I know two people with Stromers and their stories are quite comparable. The gear looks awesome and when it works it works fantastic but it seems a bit fickle and I'd really hate to be stuck halfway on a 65 km ride on a bike that heavy. Which is why I ended up building what I did, the Bosch system is reliable, a bit slower and DRM'd to the hilt but I figured I'd find a way to make that work. Fortunately the BMS is not smart enough to recognize the much larger battery to the point that it will brick itself, it ends up a bit confused about range, as the battery depletes the kilometers get longer and longer :)

It is not the weight that is the problem (though the bike is heavy), it is that the fancy hub drive will not let the rear wheel spin freely when powered off. I have had to cycle home up to 20km with at about 18kmh, so slower than a lot of normal cyclists, while sweating, wearing my ugly helmet and illegally riding on the cycle path. The last time that happened I decided to sell the bike.

Probably electromagnetic drag. I can totally see how you decided to sell it, transportation should first of all be reliable. Funny bit: the bike may be slower than the car but with the car the variance is a lot larger due to traffic variability. I've taken three hours to do a 45 minute trip and with the bike it is the exact same time every time.

Yeah, same for me. I know my commute by bike will be 60-70 minutes, regardless of conditions. By car it is 25-90 minutes, depending on predictable and very unpredictable circumstances. If speed pedelecs work depends hugely on where you live, if there are proper "bromfietspaden" or if you have to go through an inner city. Also in some cities (e.g. Rotterdam) you can take the bicycle path and local law enforcement doesn't care. In others the police is much more vigilant. Being the slowest vehicle on the road is not fun. That's why for my situation a normal 25kmh e-bike works best, especially because mine is accidentally set to the US speed limit of 20mph/32kmh, oops

I cycle Baarn->Arnhem and back twice weekly, that's 65 km one way. A bit much to do on a regular bike. The hard part of that trip is passing through Amersfoort, there is no really good way to bypass it so I just have to deal with it. It is a much more dangerous part than the rest of the trip and I always time it so that I'm never out there during rush hour.

Hehe, what a funny coincidence that your bike has that glitch :)

I don’t have the ST2, but 30km on a full battery seems off to me :)

That was worst case, I ride in all weather conditions. 7 Bft headwind in winter would deplete the battery from full to 0 on my way home. Also it was difficult to get to max speed witb strong headwind, but 40kmh was always achievable

My concern at those speeds is traction. I prefer fat tires so a bit of loose gravel or a pothole doesn’t ruin my day.

I go at that speed on my road bike under my own power with teeny tiny tyres to reduce drag. By comparison this thing is safer since it has disk brakes and larger tires.

Yeah road bike riding is absolutely what I want to avoid though. Suppose it’s personal preference but I hate those tiny tires. I’ve hit a curve + gravel/loose asphalt and had my front wheel slide sideways causing me to lay the bike down at full speed. Back in my BMX days I had a friend lose his top lip like this and I was riding right next to him (it got sewn back on). And I’m just a casual rider now a days. I’m not a commuter or sport rider, just gets me outside on a nice day. So I am taking in my surroundings and not necessarily 100% focused on the road.

2 1/4" tires on it, traction is pretty good. Haven't fallen yet, had to brake hard for animals (cats, dogs, deer, a rabbit or two, and once a boar). So far so good, but having already had a pretty bad bike accident I'm pretty careful now.

I have a class 3 and I don't feel safe riding in bike lanes at full speed, zipping by slower bicycles. There's no place to go if someone swerves. I will usually ride in traffic instead.

Riding in traffic here is suicide. Drivers get very irritated when you are not exactly at the speed limit and I've had more than one instance where someone essentially overtook and then forced me into the bike lane. And that's just here in town, where there is absolutely nothing to gain.

> forced me into the bike lane

hold up, forced your bike into the bike lane? Why were you not there in the first place? (Not meant accusatory, I must be misunderstanding or missing something; I don't even know where "here" is.)

Here is NL, legally in town I'm supposed to be driving in traffic with this bike, it's an s-pedelec, not a normal e-bike. It's insured and has a yellow license plate, and it is legally treated like a 45 kph scooter even though it clearly isn't a scooter visually and so drivers get irritated by the slowpoke in 'their' lane.

Ooh sorry I thought you were talking about the bike, not the 45km/h thing. Got it!

Np, it's a confusing subject in practice and to talk about. There are 6 different classes of vehicle here that you can find on a bike path and probably more when you start to factor in cargo bikes and such.

All the speed of motorcycles without the sound awareness, what could possibly go wrong? My overall experience is that E-bike riders generally have decent cycling manners, it's the scooter and unicycle riders that seem to think they can just crank their walking speed up to 30mph and go everywhere a pedestrian would. I usually just give them a firm "heads up next time" when I get buzzed by an electric motor whine at 20mph.

Scooters are a plague (and this bike is classed as a scooter, unfortunately, so I'm lumped in with the worst), but a bigger danger is mobile phone use by cyclists. That's roughly 1/3rd of all the adults and 2/3rds of the teenagers here.

> but a bigger danger is mobile phone use by cyclists.

Or by pedestrians!

My brother curses the number of pedestrians in Glasgow that cross the road while looking at their phones... they're by far his biggest hazard.

Screen-zombie pedestrians annoy me as well. So do uneven pavements, trash, rocks and any other obstacles that appear on my way. If I'm on an electric scooter or a bike though it's my responsibility to ensure that I'm not riding a silent, heavy and fast vehicle into someone. Especially if they can't see me because I'm approaching from behind. And to emphasise - there is an entire range of pedestrians that might have a disability (mobility issues, seeing, hearing etc.) which makes them much more vulnerable to accidents.

Absolutely. But spending time on your mobile phone has no place in traffic and that has nothing to do with being disabled. It's just being grossly disrespectful towards others and endangering them and yourself.

Sure it does if you’re in a cross walk. As a driver of a vehicle, you should be yielding to those as per their right of way and paying attention to anyone who might or might not take their right of way.

In practice: cyclist head down looking at their mobile phone swerving all over the road, two hands holding the phone to be able to text using whatsapp or whatever other IM they are using entirely lost situational awareness. I've seen enough accidents from this by now to become an advocate for substantially increased fines for cell phone use in traffic.

Roads are way too biased toward cars and away from pedestrians, and if this is what it takes to reclaim them then I'm all for it.

you should get a "trail bell", you can turn it on to make a constant noise to make people aware, much earlier, that you are coming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRLZ1MMk3mc

The biggest danger is cars that kill 2 million people every year around the world.

Everything else is so tiny as to not count.

I used to ride a motorcycle, now I have an ebike. They seem equally safe to me, which is to say neither are safe at all if there are other people on the road. The only solution is extremely defensive driving/riding, assume no one (including pedestrians) can see you. This attitude has been embedded deeply in the motorcycle culture and is the best way to all-around responsible riders -- and it needs to be propagated to ebike riders. I don't think it's about having manners, really. Also, sound awareness is a myth propagated by Harley riders.

100% agreed, defensive driving is the key, and a good part of that is to know when to slow down: when there are other cyclists near you.

> assume no one (including pedestrians) can see you

Exactly. I'm in the same situation. I used to ride a motorcycle (that I still own but almost never use now) and am on an ebike every day.

It's not about "assuming" no on "can" see you: it's that nobody does see you, and nobody cares.

It's also the fact that people don't think about your speed or your ability to slow down fast -- they only care about your general volume. People will be more careful around a big parked truck than when faced with a small barrel rolling down a hill at full speed.

The way to stay alive is to be able to predict what everyone is about to do. I think I have become quite good at this, although one is always learning.

>Also, sound awareness is a myth propagated by Harley riders.

This pisses me off so much. I know harley riders that have straight pipes and ride around with ear plugs in to keep from going deaf. Anyone caught over the legal noise limit should have their ride confiscated. It's asshole behavior masquerading as 'safety'.

The only saving grace is at least they know the word 'safety'. I've ridden with such guys too and yes they are assholes, but notably they espouse the same defensive riding opinions of most riders, and they're still alive. That's the key in my opinion, being safe/responsible is not the same as being polite, and I think this gets lost when people focus only on (e)bikers needing to learn good manners and be nice to other road users. (One should do both of course.)

Yes the problem with ebikes isn't other people being aware of the bike's sound, it's the rider being aware of the risk to themselves and others. Maybe this is ingrained in the motorcycle culture, but it seems like most buyers of ebikes I know have never ridden a motorcycle before and were not riding bicycles regularly either. They just go "oh this makes my commute like that time I biked when I was on vacation" and approach safety with a lackadaisical attitude. That makes them relatively irresponsible riders in my opinion. This problem hopefully fixes itself over time as they learn from accidents and an ebike safety culture emerges, but for now it's pretty sad.

The bigger danger here in NL are the elderly, who suddenly go zooming around at twice the speeds they had before they got their e-bikes. Accidents every day like that, nasty ones too.

I find the e-bike that the article talks about (S-pedelec) to be the peak of unsafeness for two wheeled vehicles. A colleague had one and let me try it - I quickly noped out.

He's doing 40mph in traffic with his bike shorts and a flimsy helmet. The power to weight ratio also gives him enormous acceleration, so he can jump from the red lights in front of everyone. Other drivers often misjudge how quickly he can move and he had some close calls like this.

If I were the author I would reconsider using one of these, especially with his history of accidents...

I'm doing 40 kph, not mph, big difference there.

Power two weight is very modest, it's only a 350 W motor in there for this one.

My history with accidents is simple: I was cycling on a low racer recumbent and hit a traffic obstacle at a very unfortunate angle. Shit happens. But this bike is about 100x times safer than that recumbent. And a lot slower too, in spite of being assisted, low racers are very fast for unpowered bikes.

> unicycle riders

You probably mean "one wheel" riders? (As in the electric, low profile, self balancing type, not the traditional large wheel, seated, fixed axle unicycle) Unless you live around an inordinate amount of rude unicyclists. In that case, I must see that as it sounds very humorous.

We really need a terminology to differentiate better between pedal-assist only e-bikes ("pedelec") and electric motorbikes. A "bicycle" that can accelerate without the need to pedal at all is an electric motorcycle, no matter if you put pedal on it or not.

I see the two as totally different things: I've tried pedal-assist e-bike and they're great. But... Although I have nothing against motorbikes I'm not cool at all with basically motorbikes getting a free pass because they're disguised as bicycles.

BTW this reminds me of the old french "Solex / VéloSolex": basically a real engine put on top of the front wheel, and able to accelerate by itself without the need to pedal. But the thing still had pedals. I used to use one and still have one in a garage. But I didn't use it on the bicycle lanes...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9loSoleX

This is a pedal assist e-bike. There are people that cheat and that install throttles so they can move without pedaling but that's a great way to get your vehicle confiscated.

A typical ride has me providing 40 to 60% of the Joules and the remainder comes out of the battery. If there is a very heavy wind up (not rare here) that might drop to 30/70 and if I have a tailwind it is the reverse. The bike has a nice stats display where it tracks all this stuff. Maximum assist is 350W (10A current out of a nominally 36V battery), at the wheel considerably less than that, this is only used when starting up from a complete stop. The rest of the time you're at a small fraction of that.

My wife just bought an ebike (from RadPower) that has both pedal assist and a throttle that doesn't require pedaling. You can also adjust the amount of pedal assist so you can "feather pedal".

Who's going to confiscate this bike????

It depends where you are. Most EU countries forbid throttles, but they're ok in the US as long as your under 1000W motor output (Federal laws), but local laws can make this stricter.

I've built several e-bikes, for fun, and like the author of this article, I've got a long range one, but only with about half of his battery capacity, which is enough for me.

Depends on your country, really. Throttle ebikes are legal in the USA so long as they don't go faster than 20MPH on throttle alone.

And really speed is what matters here. Who cares if it's pedal-assist or throttle so long as you aren't going markedly faster than normal people without any motor at all? There's no safety concern.

At a certain point, you've added enough extra mass to the vehicle in terms of batteries, motor, beefed up brakes and frame, etc that you need to start asking questions about how much kinetic energy it's carrying and what happens to it all in case of a crash.

Silly comparison, but we wouldn't let a car drive on the sidewalk even if it had a special module that limited it to 5km/h.

The weight of the bike + rider is still well below what some riders weigh all by themselves. Compared to a scooter it's a featherweight, compared to a regular e-bike it's about a 5 Kg premium.

> Silly comparison, but we wouldn't let a car drive on the sidewalk even if it had a special module that limited it to 5km/h.

We do in the UK - it's perfectly normal for cars (including police cars) to mount and drive along the pavement, before being left there

Same in China. Doesn’t matter if they are allowed to park there or not.

Same in practically every European country I’ve been to.

And it’s not like it doesn’t happen in the US either. Most residential streets don’t have sidewalks in the first place so technically parking in front of a house without a curb or lane is the exact equivalent. Just because it isn’t explicitly marked as a sidewalk doesn’t mean it isn’t treated as one when it’s the only option.

There has been some talk of changing the law on that, although I can’t see how that would work in many streets.

There’s an order of magnitude between a 2 ton vehicle and a 250 pound vehicle+rider.

Cars also have huge blind spots and if a bike rider gets in an accident, it’s usually very painful for them too, so their incentives to avoid accidents are quite high.

Okay, then take away the blind spots and some of the mass and ask the same question— why don't we allow motorcycles to drive on the sidewalk or multiuse paths assuming they pinky swear to always go really slowly?

Seriously? 1. Motorbikes weigh at least 10 times as much as bicycles, and can't be picked up any moved around by the rider 2. Motorbikes are much wider than bicycles 3. Motorbikes can accelerate much faster than bicycles 4. Motorbikes emit noise and exhaust fumes 5. Motorbikes have a much larger turning radius than bicycles 6. Motorbikes are capable of keeping up with cars and therefore have no need to be on bike lanes.

Probably a lot more reasons as well.

The starting point for this discussion was:

"Who cares if it's pedal-assist or throttle so long as you aren't going markedly faster than normal people without any motor at all?"

And my point is that there are a lot of devices out there that are legally an ebike, and therefore have access to bike infrastructure provided the observe a 20MPH speed limit, but that are in reality much heavier and less maneuverable than what most people consider a "bicycle".

Obviously this has been lost on the downvoters, but just as some examples, if I were out with my kids cycling on a multi-use path, I would not be thrilled to have "bikes" like these passing me at 20MPH:

https://rugged.bike/

https://ebikegeneration.com/collections/rambo

https://www.addmotor.com/products/m-5500

Then you also have:

- bakfietsen (cargo bikes)

- delivery bikes

- e-scooters (25 kph)

- e-scooters (45 kph)

- regular scooters

- mopeds

And all of those you can encounter on a bike path. I cycle daily with my kids on the way to school in traffic and I spent a lot of time over the years educating them to be safe. This is pretty hard work because kids really have the attention span of mosquitos and tend to be very easily distracted.

The scooters are the biggest danger, followed by cars, cars, cars and cars. E-bikes and other bike like devices have never over the course of many 1000's of rides to school and back been a problem. This is NL, so that may well be different where you live, here bikes are pretty well respected in traffic as long as you don't mix it up with the cars.

I have a fairly large cargo e-bike; it weighs 75lbs. I weigh 200lbs. I'm sure you'd feel a difference being hit by me that rather than me on my 18lb road bike, but I go faster on my road bike except when climbing.

I'd love an Electric Hot-Tub Bakfiets, but the batteries don't last long, they aren't very maneuverable, and they spill a lot around corners.

Those things are amazing. Here are a few photos I took of a dude in Amsterdam riding a bakfiets carrying an outdoor urinal.

https://imgur.com/a/nq2rnBW

Yes. Maybe a stopping-distance requirement. Many "e-bikes" are under-braked and under-tired for their speed and mass.

Big-tire "e-bikes" with disk brakes are really light motorcycles. Forget the pedals and admit it.

I completely agree— electric fat bikes are totally a fun time, but I think they really land in an odd place when it comes to where they belong on the road. They're likely too bulky and heavy to be in the bike lane, but shouldn't really be in the car lane given their speed limit. And the speed limit shouldn't really be dropped without imposing licensing, and once you're there, there's no point— it's just an electric motorcycle.

Yeah, there's an argument to be made somewhere here about banning obese people from running. :P

Here in NL that e-bike would not be legal. It's quite possible that where you live that such a bike is legal. Do check up on it though to make sure!

Same in Belgium, and they are pretty strict about that.

And France:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8106261/Fran...

> Who's going to confiscate this bike????

Most european cops if they catch you: some countries may treat s-pedelecs as bikes, but in most it's a moped, you need a driving license, insurance, a license plate, and all the legal equipment of a moped (e.g. lights, rear view mirror), and commonly type approval (which is going to be very, very expensive). Also can't use cycle paths.

Over the last few years many (but probably not all) member countries have passed laws to treat devices not exceeding 25km/h to bikes, but that's only for hard-limited devices, not "I swear I don't go faster than 25", the latter? mopeds.

On the day that daylight saving time changes so it's dark an hour early, the Dutch police sneak out all around the city, hide behind bushes, and jump out to surprise unsuspecting bike riders who don't have their lights on yet, and write them traffic tickets.

This has to be a joke right?

Dutch people don't joke; they insult you and then laugh

No, it actually happened to me, but it may have been a mailbox the cop was hiding behind.

> it's a moped, you need a driving license, insurance, a license plate, and all the legal equipment of a moped (e.g. lights, rear view mirror), and commonly type approval (which is going to be very, very expensive).

The amount of bureaucracy in Europe for completely mundane things is completely unbelievable.

Getting a Driver's license in France, for example, is an uphill battle against a very hostile administration. I can completely see why some tried to dodge some of these absurd regulations by innovating in the e-bike space.

Having a tiny bike barely able to break the 25mph limit be considered a moped just because it has a throttle as well as pedal assist is completely ridiculous.

> Having a tiny bike barely able to break the 25mph limit be considered a moped just because it has a throttle as well as pedal assist is completely ridiculous.

Yeah, what is the world coming to when a moped is considered a moped? Insanity. Cats and dogs living together.

> There are people that cheat and that install throttles so they can move without pedaling but that's a great way to get your vehicle confiscated.

Note that this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In the US e-bikes with throttles are legally classified as Class 2 electric bicycles and are generally legal for use in bicycle infrastructure as long as they don't exceed 20 MPH.

FYI, the US classes are as follows: (1) 20 MPH (32 km/h) max, pedal-assist; (2) 20 MPH max, throttle; (3) 28 MPH (45 km/h) max, pedal-assist.

I'm not in the US.

I know, I'm just clarifying for readers who are.

Ah ok! Maybe I should add that bit to the article to make sure that people have that context.

Everyone is an American on the Internet (unless stated otherwise).

I don't think you need to defend yourself so vigorously in this thread. But I would say that what you're seeing is distinctly the American experience with e-bikes and bike enforcement.

Americans are generally clueless about e-bike laws. This includes police and e-bike owners. American e-bikes are marketed as having throttles, being to bypass traffic at high speeds using the bike lanes and bike paths, and not needing licensing/registration. As an analog cyclist, my experience is that e-bikers jump the lines at red lights, sometimes shoving you out of the way. With the bulk of my cargo bike, they sometimes instead jump around me on the sidewalk instead, which is kind of funny-terrifying to watch with their heavy bikes. On bike paths, e-bikes stand out for their high speed in crowds and you wonder if the "assist" from the motor is a binary on/off.

If all bikes were given more room and more consideration from drivers, this may not even be a real problem as each type would be able to spread out. But the infrastructure is pretty poor and police enforcement against drivers is even worse. So all the "alt transportation" people need to cram together in whatever meager space was won at the last road reconstruction meeting. E-bikes look great for converting drivers to bikes so no one wants to talk about banning them. But they also end up keeping their car driver mentality of me-first and objectifying everything else on the road around them.

I added the 'I'm not in the US' bit because I probably should have added my location to the post.

Agreed, poor infrastructure serves as an amplifier of irritation between classes of vehicles that should not even be sharing the same pathways except to occasionally cross. The USA is very much car centric, I'm not even sure if I would ride a bike there. Where I live we have pretty good infra but even here e-bikes and s-pedelecs have upset the order a bit. But I'm sure it will work out in the long term.

Americans are generally clueless about bike laws.

There, fixed that for you.

But they also end up keeping their car driver mentality of me-first and objectifying everything else on the road around them.

This is a great point, and I've observed the same behavior among analog cyclists as well (I've been a regular bike commuter for over 20 years in a city without much cycling infrastructure). Many cycling advocates don't realize that simply getting people on bikes isn't the end goal. It really needs to be about changing the way people move through space among their fellow citizens.

I don't think it's helpful for us cyclists to be turning against each other. We ought to be unified in advocating for better bike infrastructure. (Personally, I use an electric bike because I'm still recovering from a broken ankle and don't want to strain it.)

NY only allows pedal assist. In NYC they will crack down on electric motorcycles using the paths but ignore the delivery guys.

This appears to be incorrect. In NYC e-bikes with a throttle are permitted, and subject to the same limitations as pedal-assist bikes, as long as they don't exceed 20 mph (~32 km/h). [0].

[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/ebikes-more-engl...

Looking at those power numbers, I can't help but wonder how much you'd gain by doing this sort of modification on a bike that is more efficient and/or aerodynamic even without the motor attached.

A touring bike frame with 700c wheels and a more stretched out position would likely allow you to travel at the same speed for lower total power output - and make your battery go further (or not require such a large battery).

There are velomobiles here, and also e-bike versions of those that go wicked fast. They also ride on the bike paths. I think they're quite dangerous because they are so low that you are riding below the height of a car hood (or a mirror for that matter).

Here is a picture of one:

http://dutchbikes.nl/artwork2/kv4/passing.jpg

and a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAcy7EVRpXc

I think it's insane this is allowed on the streets without a license or anything. I'm afraid of riding my regular bike if there's no bike lanes, let alone something like this in the middle of all the cars. Insane.

Agreed, they are very dangerous. But there very few of them (because people realize they are dangerous).

But why does anyone actually care if you technically need to be pedaling in order for the electric motor to engage? Surely an electric bicycle could still go arbitrarily fast while arbitrarily requiring the pedals to turn. Isn't this whole thing just a silly loophole in what is considered a "bicycle"? What if instead, bicycle lanes just had rules regarding top speed, weight, form factor, etc.

I object to the pejorative "cheat" as to suggest that non pedal assist is morally worse than pedalling.

Edit to say nice job on the project, this is awesome. Here in Texas, I would love to see a lot of people using these in the bike lane.

Cheats as in 'breaking the law'.

> This is a pedal assist e-bike. There are people that cheat and that install throttles so they can move without pedaling but that's a great way to get your vehicle confiscated.

I really need to understand what's the difference with a throttle and a pedal assist whose curve is basically so that it gives all power at a ridiculously low pedaling rate...

> I'm not cool at all with basically motorbikes getting a free pass because they're disguised as bicycles

Why? Seems like a pointless distinction in regards to any sort of rules. Surely where they're allowed to operate, for example, should be based on things like speed and weight, rather than "whether or not the operator is moving their legs in a circular motion."

Read jacquesm's reply to my comment: there are people hacking their pedelec so that they accelerate without you pedaling and that's illegal. I think it's a good thing it's illegal. I do also believe only pedelec are allowed on bike lane in Belgium/Brussels.

A bicycle which you can use without using the pedals is, to me, not the definition of a bicycle.

> Surely where they're allowed to operate, for example, should be based on things like speed and weight, rather than "whether or not the operator is moving their legs in a circular motion."

speed / weight and acceleration. But I'm still not sure about that. Bicycle lanes were made, at first, for people cycling. In European cities it's part of an overall move to be "greener": what's green about a vehicle with can be used without doing any exercise at all? You basically took the ICE engine of a motorbike and put instead an electric motor.

KTM (motorbike company) is already in to e-bike game. These companies are going to come and game the system as much as they can if limits aren't set: they'll otherwise build ultra light full-carbon e-bike with crazy fast acceleration and the selling point is going to be "It's a motorbike you can use in a bicycle lane".

I do honestly think saying: "if you don't need to pedal at all, it's not a bicycle and hence cannot use the bicycle lanes" (like they're apparently doing in the Netherlands) ain't a bad rule.

That and there are fixed maximum ratios between the pedal input and motor assist.

Why does it matter from a safety perspective if the locomotion is powered by a motor or a combination of a motor plus someone's legs?

(Or if it doesn't matter from a safety perspective, what's the practical need to legislate against it?)

It's not the safety perspective that drives the legislation, but trying to create meaningful classes of vehicles that then can be used to drive safety. The classification comes first. And s-pedelecs are a bit of a weird in-between thing. From a technical perspective a bike, from a speed perspective potentially as fast as a scooter (but rarely so in practice), a bit faster than a normal bike or e-bike and a lot lighter than a scooter. So it's a tricky thing to classify.

In the end the governments decided to limit the power for e-bikes, limit their speed and tie it in with pedalling. S-pedelecs have all those restrictions but they're a bit higher, so you can have more power, go a bit faster but you still have to work to get to some speed. On 'takeoff' my bike can briefly do 350 Watt bursts but that quickly falls off to 150 and at the maximum speed (45 kph) it's like driving into a wall if you want to go above, the motor cuts out completely and there is considerable drag.

Why would classification come first? That's entirely backwards. Surely we should understand what characteristics of a vehicle make it safe or unsafe, and then build the classifications around that to legislate against.

If both are the same safety, why make one illegal? It seems like a law which restricts liberty for no reason (other than legislative convenience, or because 'the government decided to tie it in with pedalling because they decided to').

It seems like the argument is 'bikes with pedals which can be powered with a button can never be classified as bikes because existing laws say that they are not classified as bikes'.

Classification comes first because that's what governments need in order to split traffic into different sets so they can create an environment that works for everybody.

S-pedelecs, and e-bikes are a new development and so fall between the cracks. Riding them on the bike paths may endanger other cyclists, riding them on the main roads endangers the users of the s-pedelecs and e-bikes. There isn't really a 'third class' and legislators all over are struggling with this classification problem.

Tieing in s-pedelecs with pedalling rather than with throttle based systems is a legal hack, but in practice the hack works quite well. The only situation where it doesn't is when you ride an s-pedelec in city traffic where you are forced to ride between the cars, who get irritated because you are measurably slower than they are. Plenty of towns are re-considering this now and are making explicit allowance for s-pedelecs to use the bike paths. But there are already so many 45kph scooters that break the law that the difference is likely negligible.

Eh, personally I don’t agree - classification is only useful if we are classifying the vehicles together to solve a problem for legislative purposes.

If we classify stuff together and then ask what legislation we want to enact it’s clearly backwards.

This is why in UK law at least classifications are generally tied into specific bits of legislation (ie definitions).

> A bicycle which you can use without using the pedals is, to me, not the definition of a bicycle.

My point is what difference does it make? Like I said, if you want to cap weight or speed, or maybe acceleration, within given areas, fine. But who cares whether or not you classify it as a "bicycle." If a person wants to exercise on their way to work or get there in a suit without having to shower, I don't care.

We do have scooters, it's just a different class of vehicle.

> In European cities it's part of an overall move to be "greener": what's green about a vehicle with can be used without doing any exercise at all?

The "green" movement is about the environment, not exercise.

> You basically took the ICE engine of a motorbike and put instead an electric motor.

That's the "green" part. ICE is not "green". Electric is.

Yeah that argument for forcing pedaling to me seems like a way of gatekeeping to keep something a little more "pure" without any actual reason.

Not really, without the pedals it's no longer a bicycle but a moped. We have e-mopeds already and there are plenty of rules for those.

Your views are colored by the laws you have dealt with, as are mine. Just because that is the law near you doesn't automatically mean that is the ideal way of regulating society. It is just what you are used to.

Obviously, I am arguing from the position of legality where I live, that would seem logical (as the writer of the article). If you live somewhere else and have a different legal environment I'd be very interested to learn about it but I won't adapt my behavior based on that because it simply doesn't apply here.

They're not asking you to change behavior. The claim was that forcing people to pedal is gatekeeping without an actual reason, which is separate from legal arguments, and saying "the reason is the law" is missing the point/circular.

I just twigged from this thread that “moped” is motor+pedal.

Now I’m annoyed that in the UK we use “moped” for Vespa style scooters which have no pedals.

(I was already mildly annoyed that we use “scooter” for Vespa style vehicles which you sit on and are entirely motorised, when it really describes the variant skateboard with handlebars you stand on using one foot and ‘scoot’ along using the other foot for propulsion).

Yes, scooter is heavily overloaded. I had that problem recently when writing a report and realized that there are actually three different classes of vehicle and they're all called scooters.

On a cargo bike carrying children in a hilly area the throttle is nearly essentially to safely get going from a stop and then to have pedaling take over.

I don't understand this comment. There are tons of non e cargo bikes. Are you saying they're unsafe to use? You could simply walk the bike if the terrain is too steep.

It can be much harder to ride those cargo bikes by pedaling and throwing your center of balance around when weighed down compared to allowing the motor to accelerate you while keeping the bike properly balanced.

There’s a reason why heavy cargo bikes originated in flat places like Christiania, and the Netherlands. Walking a Larry vs. Harry Bullit up a steep hill is hard enough empty, but with 3 kids and groceries in the bucket I can see a lot of people preferring an assist.

Speaking of gatekeeping...

A lot of people, adults in particular, appear to have an aversion to riding bicycles due to their inability to place both feet on the ground while seated (and I'm speaking here about the standard bicycle geometry, not recumbents, etc.).

It's too bad too because you would love to get more people out of large steel cars and into efficient e-bikes/scooters.

I wish we could lighten up a bit with regard to requiring pedals/pedalling and try saving the planet a little.

Absolutely agree, harping on the specific form of the vehicle rather than just enforcing reasonable safe speed limits for paths that everyone has to follow is maddening. I don't care if someone is more comfortable on a standup scooter, a pedal bike, a recumbent, or even a segway. Just lower the barrier of entry and get more people out and not in their cars.

This. There's an element of snobbery often in this discussion where there's a disdain for people who haven't "worked for" the movement they're getting.

Which seems besides the point. The reason you can't ride a motorcycle in the bike lane isn't because you haven't worked hard enough to deserve it, it's because of the top speeds and mass of the vehicles presenting a danger to others in the lane. It's the same reason cars present such a danger to cyclists - the scale of kinetic energy going around is just too high.

I think fast e-bikes are a technologically interesting thing, but from a regulatory point of view I'm much more mixed. ~30 kph seems eminently reasonable for bike infrastructure, and I'm excited about the ability for that to displace car trips - both from a sustainability perspective and a road capacity perspective. Much faster than that though?

My ebike cuts out the assist around 32kph (20mph) but I apparently hit a max speed of 45kph (28mph) sometimes, so even faster than that must be easily achievable on a much lighter normal bike. So 30 seems too low for a general statement.

The pedaling aspect is also not really what matters, because you can in principle reduce the load factor so much that the pedals also just become a fancy throttle, no?

No, there is a direct relationship between the power exerted and the power the motor will add. There is a nifty torque sensor built into the cranks.

What I am saying you could hack the power to torque factor to be so high you don't really have to exert very much force at all.

You can't. 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.

The penalties for having such a hack detected on your bike - assuming you would get away with it - is confiscation. I would strongly advise against such tricks.

You can see how much work just changing out the battery was. There are plenty of parties selling limiter removers or speed boxes but they're all illegal and you are uninsured when using such a device. My bike is perfectly legal to ride.

> You can't. These bikes are DRM'd to the hilt and any attempt at hacking them will cause the bike to brick itself

This does not match reality at all. E-bikes are some of the most modify-able and hackable devices out there. Most of the parts are interchangeable, and a decent portion of these bikes are assembled piece by piece. I can change the acceleration profile of mine at will, via bluetooth. Amperage limits, battery codes, everything. I have used many devices and parts and kits, and have never even once seen DRM present.

Oh, sure, I'm making it all up. I just spent two months picking apart the Bosch e-bike system, I think by now I know what I'm talking about but feel free to prove me wrong and show me how you're able to get your battery to talk to a Bosch controller without using a Bosch BMS.

Hint: you won't be able to, the key is embedded in an NXP processor that has it's fuses blown (both sides, controller and battery) and any kind of hacking you want to do will have to be at the sensor level and even there I would advise you to use an older version of the firmware because the newer ones are very good at detecting such hacks.

I think you both can be correct. The more expensive e-bikes as sold in the EU are DRM'd to the hilt, whereas cheaper bikes sold elsewhere or assembled from kits won't have any restrictions. On reddit/r/ebikes you can see some crazy builds that would get you a hefty fine in most of Europe.

I did write 'these bikes', as in Bosch based e-bikes, specifically s-pedelecs. It is pretty obvious I'm only talking about this kind of bike, not about 'all bikes out there including those in other countries and cobbled together from parts'.

No one else was taking specifically about Bosch systems (edit: in the comments, not the article) until you came along, and your original reply didn't mention them by name. There are lots of e-bikes out there, including pure "pedelecs" with no hand-operated throttle, which do not use Bosch parts and do not have torque sensors. They assist when the pedals are moving, not when you're applying pressure.

The article is mine. And that's the context in which you can read my comments.

I realize the article is yours, but you responded as if you were talking about all pedal-assist electric bikes (as the comment you replied to undoubtedly was), not just your particular model.

Read again: the claim is that these bikes can be hacked. Believe me I tried and reverse engineering is not something that I have a moral block against or so.

Every s-pedelec that I'm aware of is legal to buy and drive on the roads here is locked down. The Bosch system is the one that I now have extensive experience with and the handshake between the controller, the motor and then battery is of a complexity level that I have not managed to crack it despite a serious effort in that direction. Time will tell if I will eventually manage to run my own firmware but right now I'm not hopeful that that will ever happen (I'd love to update the range computation algorithm).

Regular e-bikes (the 25 kph version) are hacked with abandon but even then you are no longer legal (here, in NL and many other european countries). The Bosch system (which has substantial market share in that domain) can be hacked but only at the sensor level, and it's clever enough that it tries to detect such trickery and if it does it will brick itself. The factory diagnostic software contains a field for 'cheat detected' and it's pretty sensitive (to the point that sometimes bikes that have not been modified get flagged).

If you get a supermarket Bafang or other bike, especially older models then you are likely going to be able to hack it, but there too you won't find any s-pedelecs.

The few brands that sell them are all pretty good at locking down their stuff. Build a bike from parts and it's a different story, but then you won't get a license plate, type approval or insurance and your bike won't be legal to drive on the roads.

> Read again: the claim is that these bikes can be hacked.

"These bikes" as in pedelecs in general. Not just ones with Bosch parts, and not just the ones that are available legally as regular "pedelecs" rather than "s-pedelecs" in NL or the EU. In most cases you wouldn't even need to hack them; this is how they work from the store.

No, this became about you, personally. It is unfortunate that you are unaware of that.

I mean... I'm not on a Bosch E-Bike?

You're in the realm of replacing original parts with the new battery mod. Why not replace the Bosch motor controller with any available motor controller that lets you configure your throttle inputs however you want?

Because that would invalidate the type approval and that in turn would invalidate my insurance.

The insurance is OK with a home made battery? And there's no concern for public workers if some unidentified custom battery catches on fire for example?

I've never seen a thumb throttle burn down someones house. Alibaba batteries though? https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=87975

The insurance is perfectly ok with a home made battery. And public workers will arrive on the scene when there is nothing but some charred trespa left of my build if it should ever catch fire. Which is why it's located where it is on my bike, because I lack confidence in my ability to build stuff ;)

Note how the theme of safety has been paramount during this build, during the use and even in case of a crash or other accident, this wasn't a 'oh let's build a pack' project done in 48 hours, you're looking at a couple of months of research and work.

As for Alibaba batteries: you get what you pay for, and I would never use a pack for a project like this with cells that I haven't tested myself, each and every one to a very high standard.

I'll take your word for it because I'm on the other side of the planet but it just seems incongruent and illogical that replacing a component with another compatible part, mass produced and used all over will get your bike confiscated and invalidated but a totally custom one off with no real world test, certification, or such is fine.

It just seems like bureacracy gone totally out of control. You take bicycles, possibly the pinnacle of appropriate technology, a set of tools can fit in a shoebox and nearly anyone can take apart and fix every last piece, and its super useful. Now incredibly there comes along additional components capable of augmenting and improving the bicycle. Add a multimeter and wirestrippers to your bike toolkit, attach a battery to your frame, replace a wheel or bottom bracket with a motor and any bike becomes an ebike, incredible. But then the law decides to ruin incredible by saying only select pre-approved models can be ridden. And making certain modifications is completely illegal, but dramatically internally modifying is allowed and even insurable.

I hope your pack is safe. Some aspects of the design seem inherently safe like using that many batteries in parallel for a 350 watt load, the peak usage will always be below the continuous rating of the cells. I'm no electrical safety professional but I have taken some workplace safety 101 online website multiple choice certification things and theres some issues i wonder about. Hopefully you've addressed and mitigated all of these concerns already, or plan to as you finalize the build, or get lucky, or are at least aware and prepared if a failure does occur. Here comes more internet stranger critique:I saw nothing about shock and vibration design, no drop tests, no mention of short circuit tests, no thermal measurements taken during a controlled charge/discharge, no mention of arc flash considerations during your assembly, first time use of a new tool that was uncontrollabe/inconsistent during assembly, possibly wasn't connected to a suitable electrical source, an ad-hoc decision to do 3x the number of welds w/no mention of ensuring that didn't overheat the cell.. And that's simple stuff any hobbyist is capable of, nothing compared to controlled third party testing that would be done to certify a commercial pack.

And how many man hours of development and testing do you think go into that commercial battery pack you can buy? Probably more than 2 months. And they're equipped with mutual nda's and proprietary data from manufacturers, vs youtube, online distributors, and some guts of a bosch bms. This was a first time pack build, manufacturers probably destructively tested more packs of each of their models than you have built, and at some point economies of scale and upfront investment give them access to superior manufacturing processes and materials. And because laws get applied equally to every person, consider this project built by another version of you, equally confident and less skilled or lucky, do they too get the official thumbs up to ride it in public?

In the USA if you wanted a 2 kwh pack you can buy them premade, although thats the largest they sell currently, and replace any ebikes battery with it, convert any bike into an ebike, or buy a third party assembled bike with it, or buy from a custom manufacturer that integrates the battery and motor into the frame itself. And needless to say you can put any motor or drive on it. But the idea of licensing, registering, and insuring a bicycle is an unheard of, and its especially word to have anyone inspect your bike or care what parts are on it. Entirely different worlds but it just feels like the European regulations introduce big limitations on the potential.

> I saw nothing about shock and vibration design, no drop tests, no mention of short circuit tests, no thermal measurements taken during a controlled charge/discharge, no mention of arc flash considerations during your assembly

So, this is why this project took a couple of months instead of a few days. I don't just slap stuff together.

The pack is 9 layers, has two inner layers of foam to cushion shocks, is shrink wrapped twice, uses high density ABS spacers instead of glue the way other people build their packs (at the expense of some space), has the wiring very carefully routed so that shorts are not just unlikely but pretty much impossible. The 'inconsistent' welds problem was solved by the overkill method: where a manufacturer would use two welds I used six, trial welds on bad cells proved that I could not tear the cells from the welds without major damage to the cell structure, in other words: those welds are pretty solid. I also measured their internal resistance across all cell groups, and monitored each group during a pretty stressful charge/discharge cycle to see what would happen to the interconnects. On the electrical front there is thermal monitoring, voltage and current monitoring, short circuit protection, overcharge and undercharge protection.

That pack is safe, short of getting crushed.

Also, and in case you're not a aware of it, I built a one-off windmill, 5 meters in diameter, rated for 2.5 KW, had a couple of Canadian winter storms attempt to take it down but it survived everything, built an overhead crane, a computer controlled plasma cutter and owned a fair sized machine shop. I'm not your average DIY person, and spent probably more time on safety on this particular design than I did on anything else.

I would trust this pack over a manufactured one, including the ones that Bosch puts out. I didn't do a drop test but that's mostly because this is a one-off and a after a drop test I would simply discard the pack, there is no way to do that non-destructively with a battery this heavy. That said, I'm very sure that the pack inside the foam core would be fine (it's dimensioned for that) but the housing would crack for sure.

As for why the bike is still legal: type approval is mostly related to the drive train, the maximum power the motor can put out, the degree to which it amplifies the pedal input power and various cut-outs, the batteries are not subject to the type approval, you can buy and fit aftermarket batteries for many bikes.

That said, your concern is appreciated.

> The penalties for having such a hack detected on your bike … is confiscation

In what jurisdiction?

Edit: just realized it’s your article and you’re in NL. Confiscation might be an issue there but it’s not universal by any stretch.

It's treated the same way as a souped up scooter would be. Get caught and you are more than likely to lose it. The good news is that you can then try to buy it back at government auction ;)

>but they're all illegal and you are uninsured when using such a device. My bike is perfectly legal to ride.

Plenty of people 'technically' break the law in small ways every day. If your bike looks like a normal bike, and you're not doing outlandish speeds, I'm not sure it matters whether or not your bike is 'technically legal'.

Right up to the point when you cause and accident, it turns out that you are not insured and you are now in debt for the rest of your life. This is not a small matter.

How does someone on a bike 'cause an accident'? How exactly is a cop going to know that you've modified your bike? They aren't tour de france officials. I'd be fine taking my chances. You seem to have a very legalistic outlook that doesn't translate to reality.

The police here is pretty good at accident mechanics, the insurance will insist and if your bike has been modded you are in pretty hot water.

My 'legalistic outlook' is mostly informed by the local news.

But don't take my word for it, have a read:

https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&q=opgevoerde+e-bike...

Another clueless American ebiker question about Europeon law. Is the article's bike legal? Individual can self build a high energy battery with parts and tools from online sellers putting an alibaba balance charger in parallel with the original BMS, no external testing review or inspection. And the authorities/insurance don't care about this customization vs the factory model they presumably inspected before certifying.

Alternatively if you software configure a motor controller so that it sends motor current from a throttle instead of a torque sensor in the pedals, you'll be busted?

You're describing one particular kind of (high-end) e-bike. Many perfectly legal, unmodified e-bikes do not have torque sensors. If the bike has a cadence sensor, like mine does, then it doesn't care about how much torque you're applying to the pedals. All it cares about is how fast they're turning. And at the higher speeds (around the 20 MPH limit) the gearing and small wheel sizes on mine are such that one would need to pedal very fast to exert any significant pressure on the pedals. A much lower pedaling rate with no pressure will still maintain the top speed on level ground.

There is no significant difference between "pedal assist" and a hand-operated throttle. It would be really nice if the politicians would recognize this and remove the meaningless class 1 / class 2 distinction based purely on the location of the throttle. (Though to be fair there are many more sensible places which already treat them the same.)

Those are more than likely 25 Kph limited bikes, s-pedelecs are a different class altogether.

I've found this to be correct on most every e-bike I have rented. You can "feather pedal", just spinning the cranks without engaging any energy, and the e-bike will send power to "assist".

I'll try that and see what my top speed is.

I come across modern Solexes with regularity on the bike lanes here, never seen one in traffic.

And they're legal there? With the ICE engine running?

Yep. Speed limited to 26 kph.

The laws where I live do not see it this way. If it has pedals, and is under 750 watts, then it is an e-bike. This includes the ability to use a mid-drive motor that supplies 750 watts but makes full use of the bicycle's gearing system.

This one is my first sight of a "bicycle with engine" ever (sorry article is in Italian). It was used in the movie "Bread love and dreams".

https://www.cronachemaceratesi.it/2017/04/18/il-museo-del-si...

That's a beauty.

> I'm not cool at all with basically motorbikes getting a free pass because they're disguised as bicycles.

As long as they'r not causing problems for other cyclists, they're still a big win in terms of transportation: way less carbon usage and occupies less space.

As long as they'r not causing problems for other cyclists

And if a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass when it hops. "Other cyclists"? They're not cyclists, they're motorcycle riders, for starters. Now any jackass can zoom down the bike path at 25-30mph, but yeah, as long as that doesn't cause problems...

In Belgium we have pedelecs (max 25kmh) and speed pedelecs (max 45kmh). Pedelecs are catagorized as bicycles, and speed pedelecs as scooters, which require a license plate and all other stuff, including their proper place on the road.

In California it's 32kph (class 1 with pedal, class 2 with throttle) and 45 kph (class 3, pedal assist only)

Class 1 and 2 are currently allowed on all paved paths that bicycles are allowed on.

Class 3 does not require a license, may use the lanes on roads for bicycles, but not walk/bike paths. You also must be 16 or older to operate one.

Enforcement is currently nonexistent where I live. I regularly see people with ostensibly class 2 e-bikes going 50kph, having modified the motor controller.

You are strongly suggesting it yourself, that if not for the speed the difference would be negligible.

The other factor dividing the two realms in practice is control: in a bicycle the speed is directly a function of leg activity: does the "legs independent" motor-bicycle offer the basically same degree of control?

In pedal assist mode, the motor stops when you stop pedaling. So it is the same concept. In full throttle only control, obviously it is not even the same.

You realize it is not hard for a cyclist to hit 25-30mph without motor assist, right?

I'd argue 25-30mph is not an easy cruising speed for most bike commuters. Unless I'm on the wrong forum and everyone here races Cat 1/2 in their spare time.

I'm no competitive cyclist, and in pedal assit mode on my eBike, the motor stops being because I'm pedaling at 20mph on my own. My eBike is also a big heavy bike, so from where I'm pedaling, I'd assume others can do the same on a better bike. <shrugs>

Power required increases with the square of the speed being primarily a function of wind resistance at higher speeds. Your motor shutting off cause you hit 20mph on a slight decline might give you the wrong impression.

Maintaining 25mph requires in excess of 300 watts. Some 90% of the population won't be able to produce that for a mere minute.

In short bursts or downhill sure? Consistently in a commute? No, that is definitely atypical.

Do you ride bikes or mostly just e-bike?

I don't have a wardrobe in spandex. I ride bicycles for fun and commuting, not sport. Only time I rode a bike for any kind of fitness was long long ago in offseason for running sports. My pedal bike is a beach cruiser and has 3 gears on it. Not getting competitive with that, and have actually been told to get out of the bike lane in spandex wearing asshats.

At one time I was a Cat 1 (last stop before pro) bicycle racer. Races would typically spend hours at 25mph, so I have a pretty good idea of how hard it is. 30mph on flat ground, unassisted, for any non-trivial length of time? Yeah, damned hard even if you're in shape (and impossible if you're not). 25mph by yourself? It might be "not hard...to hit" 25mph, but to sustain that speed is going to be nearly impossible for the ones I see zooming by on their electric motorcycles. And it's going to be tough workout even for an in-shape cyclist. As another commenter points out, that's over 300 watts. If you can do that for your hour ride to work, go get a race license, you'll do well.

Exactly. The kind of stuff thrown around in this thread borders on the unbelievable or we have a couple of pro riders here that I wasn't previously aware of. I think I know a couple of really strong cyclists (notably, my brother but also others) and in spite of my injury I'm no slouch and am rarely overtaken on a regular racer but if I'm to believe this thread then I really should be checking my bike if something is dragging or not ;)

For 10 minutes tops or when falling down an embankment, sure.

I worry more about the added mass of the e-bikes in the case of a collision with a pedestrian, another cyclist, or a traditional motor vehicle. Potential speeds are relatively the same.

I own and frequently ride e-bike, and am an advocate. That being said, operating one should be done responsibly.

Perhaps your comment could inspire some useful discourse if it were worded less negatively?

Details like that certainly need to be worked out but such criticisms are usually made in a way that ignores the bigger picture.

Internal combustion engines contribute substantially to pollution and human-caused climate change. Motor vehicle accidents maim and kill lots of people every year yet fans of that form of transportation hand wave it off as irrelevant.

We don't have to speed blindly into the future on our current vector. We can change course. It will take work and creative solutions.

Not to say such concerns shouldn't be brought up but they shouldn't be brought up in a manner that sounds entirely dismissive of a new solution with a lot of promise. Ideally, it gets brought up in a more constructive fashion overall that is more conducive to meaningful engagement and less prone to simply making people mad or defensive.

What's the difference between that claim and the claim "if cars which can go 120mph are legally considered cars then every jackass can zoom down the highway at 120mph"? The difference, of course, is that highways have speed limits.

> As long as they'r not causing problems for other cyclists,

They cause problems. Maybe not every e-motorcycle rider, but most of them take full advantage of the power to out-accelerate other bikers and double the top speed of everyone around them.

Bike paths were design with typical cyclist speeds in mind. It's not uncommon to see a young kid flying down our local bike paths at 40mph or more on a modded e-bike, forcing all of the pedestrian and other cyclists to get out of the way as fast as possible. Worse, two e-bikers flying toward each other at 40mph in opposite directions is the same as one of them crashing at 80mph. Those speeds aren't really appropriate for bike paths, yet here we are.

I frequently run into young e-bikers or e-motorcycle riders on my local trails who are flying at unexpectedly high speeds. They're also tearing up the trails at a rate much faster than normal bikes because the rider has less control over wheelspin and is more prone to throttle out of corners than someone with a direct connection to the drivetrain.

I was a fan of e-bikes when they first came out, but the current incarnation of e-bikers and e-motorcyclists is quite bad in the real world. Again, not every e-biker, but many of the most prolific e-bike riders on my local trails are the same ones running modified e-bikes with too much power and manual throttles.

Trails are a different matter, and I'm more skeptical of the really fast ones there. For getting around town, I think treating them advantageously, on the other hand, makes some sense, because of the reasons I cited above.

E-bikes should stay off trails. And in NL it is forbidden to use e-bikes on paths marked cyclists only, which is all of the scenic routes (the difference is the rectangular 'fietspad' sign versus the iconic blue one).

two e-bikers flying toward each other at 40mph in opposite directions is the same as one of them crashing at 80mph

- only if one of them weighs infinitely more than the other.

crashing into the other* at 80 mph.

> Maybe not every e-motorcycle rider

I'm not sure if people are using these terms colloquially or if they are codified in law or generally accepted, so I may be making some false assumptions here: as an ICE motorcycle rider, using the term 'e-motorcycle' to refer to what is effectively a no-pedal bicycle dramatically overstates the capabilities and gives a false impression of what such a vehicle/device is.

While some no-pedal electric bikes probably can move at a decent clip, I have to imagine that they're much closer to pedal bike than motorcycle performance.

Not sure if you've heard of the Sur Ron or the Cake bikes but they're RAPID. I have a modified Sur Ron and it's way closer in performance terms to my Husky 701 than an e-mtb or similar (peak power to weight ratio of about 0.3hp/kg).

People put pedal kits on them to try and hide the fact it's basically a super light motorbike but in my experience it's not really suitable for riding on bike paths or trails.

Devices like in the OP are much more of a grey area as it's basically impossible to tell their power output / weight on an individual basis...

>but most of them take full advantage of the power to out-accelerate other bikers and double the top speed of everyone around them.

The full throttle mode of a eBike is limited to 20mph (specifically in the US). I have one, and even when in full assist mode have been passed by dayglo spandex wearing bikers like I was sitting still.

E-bikes on singletrack are incredibly destructive. So are horses, believe it or not. The analog MTBers I know take very good care of their trails.

> They cause problems.

Okay, but if they cause problems then that's already...a problem.

The reality is that there is no useful bright-line rule to distinguish between bicycles and motorbikes. Historically, the two have been very distinct, so we haven't needed one. Now, we are starting to see more of the space between the extremes be explored.

We do absolutely need good laws and conventions here, for safety and fairness. But i don't think basing them on a classification is the way to write them.

It used to be simple.. if it has a motor and pedals, it's a moped. But yeah, whatever you call it doesn't solve the regulation problem.

Right, but there's a large question at least in the US as to what & who the bike lanes and infrastructure are for. There are commuters who travel via bike, casual bikers, and then there are also extreme bicyclists that compete.

There are bike lanes that are on normal streets and then there are bike paths that are often shared with pedestrians.

I think there is a solid case that bike lanes adjacent to streets are for commuters. The main argument is that the entire argument for installing bike lanes was to provide an alternative to driving.

The bike paths are a bit different. A lot of places in the US will have paths that ban anything with a 'motor'. In the past this just meant that motorcycles including small [sic] mopeds were banned as well. However, in recent years it isn't unusual for someone to use these paths wile riding a e-bike or e-scooter. IMO the main reason for banning motors was that those vehicles were loud and larger than a bike/scooter.

I think that since it's practical to use a e-bike/e-scooter at the normal non-assisted speeds the proper solution is to just have speed limits in places to protect pedestrians and other bikers.

A bike lane far from a city center could have the same speed limit as the road since the it's going to be mostly commuters using it. A bike lane closer to a university campus might have a speed of 15 or 20mph since those lanes will have a lot more traffic and a greater mixture of e-bikes and regular bikes.

A bike path that connects the bike lane to the bike parking area would be like 15mph. A shared sidewalk/path with pedestrians might have a max speed of <10mph.

I think the only group that might loose out is the pure-bicyclists that are used to using the bike lanes more like a gym so having to share the bike lanes with e-bikes could be an issue. But even then I think very few of them tend to ride during the peak commuter hours.

I see it more as a matter of power produced, I'd probably use 1hp or 750w brushless or something thereabouts as the line to draw. With most pedal ebikes you go faster by pedaling anyways.

As a motorcyclist, I would call them e-mopeds ;).

I think that is the best name, since mopeds also have pedals that nobody uses.

I never understood while we regulate on the mechanism to engage the motor instead of top speed or max power.

Agreed, 70mph but you have to pedal to keep the bike going = e-bike (although an illegal one)...

15mph and has a throttle = electric motorbike (and also illegal)...

But make that 15mph illegal electric motorbike 10mph faster and add extra hardware so users have to waggle their feet around in a circle to trigger the motors... SUDDENLY LEGAL!

I highly doubt there are any safety benefits from pedalling - it seems like an arbitrary limit.

> it seems like an arbitrary limit.

Of course it is, all limits are arbitrary, even if informed. Lawmakers probably picked limits which would be reasonably achievable by average healthy humans over long distances.

> all limits are arbitrary

I should have really said purposeless!

Usually limits have a purpose - for instance limiting the speed of cars by law is because of accident reduction.

Unless the argument is that pedalling makes it safer, it seems to be a limit for no particular reason.

Pedelecs are regulated on all three: maximum continuous power of 250W, assistance only from 6km/h, top assisted speed of 25km/h.

The point of pedelec regulations (in europe anyway) is to be a baseline: anything which satisfies the pedelec specs must be treated as a bicycle by all member states, so if you have a pedelec you know that it will be usable as a bike throughput the union. Member states can go beyond if they want to.

> I see the two as totally different things: I've tried pedal-assist e-bike and they're great. But... Although I have nothing against motorbikes I'm not cool at all with basically motorbikes getting a free pass because they're disguised as bicycles.

Eh, it depends if you see pedal assistance being the defining difference between a bike and a motorbike.

From a safety perspective, speed may be a better differentiator.

I think something like average real world speed and weight are the two important metrics. Maybe this is the intuition with petal assist vs throttle controlled e-bikes. I do sort of think it should take some work to get a bike up to it's top speed so that riders don't just cruise at that speed.

A typical scooter will blow right by my bike, no matter how hard I work at it. Anything over 40 kph is very intense, 36 to 38 is doable over the longer term traffic permitting.

> so that riders don't just cruise at that speed.

Do you actually ride bikes on roads? This is there because if you're going slow on an actual road you're more likely to get killed because of a car hitting you.

I'm honestly exhausted at this FUD when it's actively fucking with my life as a bike rider on a main road. Even Netherlands allows fully motorized vehicles that are small on their bike paths.

Stop thinking of this as a "free pass" and more of "what's actually the safest for bikers and pedestrians.

In the US a lot of places don't have sidewalks or bike lanes and you're encouraged to cycle in the middle of a road lane so that you don't get killed when a driver hits you at full speed from the side. Also, you're legally entitled to a lane.

In most other places that don't have dedicated bike lanes drive on the side of the road, same places scooters normally drive.

The OP, jacquesm, just mentioned throttle-only ebikes are not legal in the Netherlands.

Anyone who's comparing ebike speeds to rider speeds: most people new to riding bikes cannot sustain riding at 30kph (18.5mph) for probably more than 5 minutes, less if there's any gradual elevation. As such, bikes are "safe" because there's an inherent speed limiter. You pedal really fast, go fast, then you get tired and chill out.

By having a throttle-only mode, the rider never tires and will just want to go fast all. the. time.

> Stop thinking of this as a "free pass" and more of "what's actually the safest for bikers and pedestrians.

What's safest for bikers and pedestrians on multi-use paths (MUP) would be if ebikes actually followed the Class 1 rules and were limited to 32kph/20mph on these paths. (imo, 20mph is already pretty darn fast.) If folks want to go faster, then do it on the street. If you want to rip the throttle wide open, don't do it where a child is learning how to ride their bike or where people are just enjoying a leisurely stroll.

> If folks want to go faster, then do it on the street. If you want to rip the throttle wide open, don't do it where a child is learning how to ride their bike or where people are just enjoying a leisurely stroll

Agreed, but this is also leading to problems: people on racing bikes, especially in groups that occupy the whole width of the bike path.

In general the problem is much simpler: people should treat the roads like a commons and adapt to the slowest present user. That's the safest way, and if that means you'll be a little later at your destination then maybe you should have left a little earlier. And on a racing bike you are no better than any other cyclist, ditto for e-bikes and s-pedelecs. It's a shared resource and a bit of common sense and respect for each other goes a long way.

> and if that means you'll be a little later at your destination then maybe you should have left a little earlier.

Oh gosh, I wish this was the case, but the past two years of anti-masking / anti-vaccinations have clearly illustrated that there is no common good in Modern America.

> You pedal really fast, go fast, then you get tired and chill out.

Is this really true? When I was in France using the Uber bikes to get around I could get up to top speed using almost no effort on the pedals and never found myself getting tired. They really require almost no effort to get up to top speed.

Maybe it sounds like the solution is that a throttle should only take you up to a lower speed though if this is the problem? Like pushing a button can take you to 15 but waggling your feet can take you to 25?

A lower speed for throttle-only sounds like a good solution!

To clarify, my original post was about non-electric bicycles, but my experience with pedal-assist ebikes [Jump (RIP) and Citibike/Baywheels] was that they were noticeably heavy and after a few blocks of pedaling really hard, I'd tire out and slow down. Perhaps you're gifted with a very high vo2max?

I didn't mean to cause quite as much of a controversy as it seems I have. I do actually ride a standard, non e-bike on SF streets, admittedly only somewhat timidly and in places with low speed limits and or good bike infrastructure. It just strikes me that if you want a machine with a throttle, and that can operate at road speeds we have that. It's a moped. If you want something that can operate in close quarters on shared paths with humans we also have that, but it is scary and potentially dangerous being overtaken at speed on a shared path by a heavy machine with wide tires traveling at speed when you're walking on a path.

What both riders and pedestrians need is better car free infrastructure so we can stop it with the biking means going fast business. An ebike capped at something like the top speed of a human is a very different beast than a normal bike even if their top speeds are the same because the ebike is much more likely to actually be at those speeds at any point in time.

> From a safety perspective, speed may be a better differentiator.

Or perhaps momentum, which is far higher in motorised vehicles.

While I agree with this, there are the caveats that both light electric bicycles and heavy analog bicycles exist, and that in many cases the additional mass of the motor and battery may not contribute much to the overall momentum once the mass of cyclist and cargo are factored in.

Note: I commuted by electric bicycle before I switched to working remote, and I have to say that riding a vehicle that tops out at ~30mph when you're slamming the throttle _and_ pedaling as hard as you can on a road with cars and trucks going 45mph (or faster) is a harrowing experience. The few miles where I rode on bicycle paths, though, I capped my speed at 15-20mph (around what a decent cyclist would do) and slowed to 5-10mph when I was approaching foot traffic or other cyclists - and nobody ever batted an eye (except a few people who wanted to know where they could get one, heh).

Speed (or better, momentum) is important. But pedal assistance is definitely material to me. Switching from pedal-assist to throttle-controlled changes the proportionality between impulse and real-world results.

As a kid my first response to pretty much anything with a dial was to turn it up all the way and see what happened. That's a behavior I saw quite a bit during the brief plague of VC-funded scooters: novices at 100% motor output rocketing down sidewalks, etc. That's much less likely to happen it they have to pedal hard to get the top speed.

E bikes also have a dial, all it does is it limits the speed when it stops accelerating. You can dial the bike all the way up, peddle but not apply any force and still accelerate to top speed.

Where I live that would be illegal for an e-bike, that vehicle would be classified as an e-scooter.

Doesn't any Batavus E-Bike does this? That's were I got my (limited) experience from.

That depends on what you mean by 'dial it up', do you mean a throttle? If so then that's illegal. If it is just a 25 kph bike then you can feather the pedals and it will go up to 15 or so and above that you'll have to work for it.

25 kph bike, has a setting for power that has 4 stages and an 5th stage called boost. Would go all the way to 25 with just feathering

Neat, I'll have to try that and see what happens, we have one ordinary e-bike here with a Bosch system as well.

Interesting. So you're saying that they have to keep pedaling, just not very hard? My only experience is with the Lyft e-bikes, where high speed required actual work for me.

yes, as long as i kept rotating the crank with my pedals, it would power me forward, regardless of rotation speed

Interesting! Thanks.

The most important thing should be the speed, not the method. A fit enough cyclist could easily go fast enough to be dangerous to other cyclists with a normal bike on cycle paths too.

Sure for a while. But a e-bike can do it all day. They can be a hazard for hours every day.

the ebikes I'm familiar with cannot travel at top speed all day. more like slightly more than an hour.

OK, but there are endless numbers of e-bike idiots. Super-athletes doesn't scale like that.

fair point, can't argue with that.

> A "bicycle" that can accelerate without the need to pedal at all is an electric motorcycle, no matter if you put pedal on it or not.

That sounds very American. Don’t we have Vespa scooters and mopeds in the USA as well? There are plenty of bike formats between bicycle and motorbikes.

In China most e-bikes aren’t pedal assists and no one would ever claim they were car road worthy vehicles, they got bike lanes or the side of the road, and are not allowed on the ring road. American bike lanes seems to be recreational, whereas in other countries that are oriented much more at daily life and more heavily used.

If its got a motor and it looks like a bike...

An an American, I agree with your assessment. to me, Vespas and Mopeds are motorbikes. they burn gas.

Pedal assist ebikes are a new category to me, and I don't think any of the current rules make much sense for that.

Pedal assists were the original e bikes back in the early 2000s. But the Chinese found that just making throttle only e bikes was more economical, so that’s what came to dominate the biking ways in China (for people there, biking is more about practicalities and economy than recreation).

I’m sure most American heads would explode if they ever saw how moped, scooter, small motorbike traffic mixed with cars in Southeast Asia.

I would not feel comfortable bicycling in Chinese "bike lanes", they are basically just separate lanes for the mopeds.

In China, the rich drive while the poor make do with e-bikes. Yes, you wouldn't feel comfortable in those lanes, but people still need to live.

Oh I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing at all - just that it is definitely not the case that you can comfortably comingle normal bikes with those lanes.

There aren't many normal bikes left, or rather, they are becoming a luxury.

That was not my experience in Beijing in January 2020, but I have not been since.

I lived in Beijing from 2007 to 2016. Commuters has mostly moved over to electric bikes, heck that trend was starting in 2002. Anyways, peddle bikes were most students who needed the, for on campus transportation. But if you spend any time on the commuter bike lanes around the city, it’s 80% electric.

This is a huge change from my first trip in 1999, when you had huge rivers of bike traffic, and gas powered non-car vehicles required special circumstances (a lot of the gas powered rickshaw drivers were ex military or handicapped). Because most Beijingers were never allowed to move to gas, they embraced electric pretty quickly.

There are plenty of rideshare bikes scattered throughout Beijing, although many seem to be either unused or broken.

Those are now mostly E-bikes, though (as far as I can tell in Chaoyang, at least).

Vespa style scooters are motorcycles in many US states, but there are exceptions.

Mopeds with engines under 50cc and that have pedals are often treated differently than motorcycles but some states still require licensing and registration similar to a motorcycle.

> Although I have nothing against motorbikes I'm not cool at all with basically motorbikes getting a free pass because they're disguised as bicycles.

A free pass for what ?

You dont need a motor to reach 40kph on a bike, plenty of people can do it with only their legs. What we can do is limit the speed on bike lanes, but that means we could allow any vehicule on it. There is no reason a motorbike couldn't go on a bike lane if it goes slower than 20kh as most people on bike reach that speed.

It is not because you are on a bike that you have to go on a bike lane.

Speed limit on bike lanes in the city is 30 kph, outside it is 45. So those rules already exist (here, in NL).

What is the max speed of the bike you made jacquesm? I note from the start of the article that low speed of alternatives was one of your motivations. I saw the range stats in the last paragraph but didn't notice speed stats (perhaps I missed that?)

45 kph flat out, if you try to go faster you are fighting the motor. But practically you're going to top out at about 40 kph on the Bosch system, using a Stromer or a Klever s-pedelec you will be able to maintain that 45 kph a lot longer. But 38 is plenty for me, it's still a bike and the little bit of extra speed does not weigh up against the risks.

> What we can do is limit the speed on bike lanes, but that means we could allow any vehicule on it.

No, we can't because of momentum. We could never allow a car or a heavy motorcycle to drive on pedestrian/bike lines even if they are at low speeds.

Less momentum than the rapidity with which momentum can change (power output vs weight, i.e., energy output).

Surely top speed matters more than pedaling?

No one argues that people in electric wheel chairs are really driving ATV quads.

And scooters, electric-scooters, and sit-down electric scooters. And electric wheelchairs, and non-electric wheelchairs and mobility assist carts with handlebars. We also have to delineate between a daydreaming cyclist who's top speed is slow, and a hard-core cyclist with a $3000+ bike that can hit 40 mph in the right conditions. Those cyclists should be banned from using the same paths as the first kind of bicyclist, and should be relegated to the same areas as 'electric motorcycles'. Because it's really about acceleration and top speed, and it matters zero whether the thing has pedals or not.

Or put it another way, if my 'electric motorcycle' is slower to accelerate and has a slower top speed than you could possibly manage on a bicycle, it's really not a 'motorcycle' in any way, no matter how many pedals it does or doesn't have.

Honestly I don’t know if more rules is it. I think better infrastructure that encourages separation is better.

I live in a bike (and very e-bike heavy) US city and the rules don’t really get followed too much.

And I don’t blame anyone, because while there are inconsiderate people, speed comfortability is really relative. Some of my friends find just being on a bike scary versus my friends who skate through traffic just fine. I can’t invite them to the same things.

If you live in NYC like me enforcing the current laws would be a good start. The rules aren't followed because there is zero enforcement.

A really important factor you didn’t mention is weight.

    KE = 0.5 * v * v * m

Yes but probability of a crash is probably related to the spread in the velocities of various agents.

This is why I often ride my 40 km/h max electric moped on bike paths. Cars don't give me enough following distance so I'm not risking my life there. I also slow down drastically when passing pedal bikers.

If you're exerting yourself you tend to pay attention to what's happening around you. I noticed that folks that go very fast on their two-wheeled vehicle without too much effort get distracted quite easily.

I think it may not be the exertion per se, as much as the perception that something is working hard to give the speed you have.

I have been a very very fast cyclist in the past, and when I'm down on my aero bars and doing 40-50kph under my own power, I'm very aware that I'm (a) working hard (b) going fast. This makes me not want to crash, if only because I'd lose all that hard-earned speed.

But I've seen the same effect in cars too. If I drive a very quiet and "smooth" vehicle on a very smooth road, its way too easy to go substantially beyond the speed limit, because I just don't have the perception of "an engine working hard to propel things forward". Switch a noisy, vibrating vehicle on a rougher road, and I'm much more aware of what is going on and will definitely keep my speed under control.

I haven't driven a Tesla or similar, so I have no idea how their near-silent engine affects this sort of thing. On paper, it seems likely to be bad :)

I mean you could just play this on loop while driving the Tesla

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFHqh7Rv2TI

that equation shows velocity is more important though? a small car at 10 mph has about the same KE as a 200 lb person going 40 mph. of course KE doesn't tell the whole story. of the two, I'd much rather be hit by the car. I could run into a brick wall at 10 mph and probably be okay.

I suppose if you absorbed all of the energy from the car, rather than just being pushed back by it, then the damage might be more comparable. For example, I think if someone was standing against a wall and a car rolled into them at 10mpg it might be as terrible as being hit by a 200lb cyclist at 40 mph. Of course, I agree that 10 mph seems a lot less dangerous - it gives many more options to move out of the way, or to spread the impact over time (by walking backwards and pushing against the car). Just throwing out some thoughts on why the same energy from each seems to have such a different destructive force.

True, though most collisions aren't head on, and even when they are, usually only a fraction of the velocity is absorbed because the objects deflect from each other.

Yes but to not give weight a mention isn’t quite right.

Small car: 1500kg

Bike: 10kg

Escooter: 3kg (?)

Multi-lane bike ”highways” would be awesome. What matters most (imo) is that all these riders are unprotected, and should be kept far apart from cars. If the unprotected, single rider, narrow vehicles want do drive at vastly different speeds then multiple lanes seems like a good solution.

We have some of these in NL.

In Montréal, Canada, we have the Réseau Express Vélo (REV). They are uni-directional bike paths that are 3 meters wide. They easily allow 3 cyclists to be side by side.

Eh, this is just extending the argument into absurdity I feel.

That's a valid and useful rhetorical technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Although it can be applied with a bit much snark sometimes. :)

I don't know that it is -- electric scooters are controversial -- some folks want them on sidewalks; others in bike lines; yet others only in mixed traffic with cars.

I didn't see it as absurd at all - there is a huge contingent of bicyclists who should never be on a sidewalk, while at the same time there are massive numbers of casual e-cyclists who should never be riding in traffic.

Ann Arbor recently changed it's laws to reflect that - and I think the cyclists who are aware they shouldn't be on sidewalks, and the e-cyclists who stick only to the sidewalks know who they are.

Sidewalks? You don't seem to have the first clue about what you are trying to comment on. The only bikes that belong on sidewalks are those ridden by very young kids, and indeed that is the law in much of the world.

In many neighborhoods in California, unless you are a serious cyclist, you genuinely run the risk of being run off the road by a driver in some areas, and will absolutely be yelled at or honked at if you take your "bicycle" (E-Bike or otherwise) onto the road with other vehicles. In 5+ years living in Redwood City, I rarely ever saw what I would call "Utility Cyclists" (Just some person trying to get to their job, or get to the grocery store) ever ride a bicycle on the road.

Ann Arbor changed the law to make this legal: http://www.annarbor.com/news/bicyclists-dilemma-ride-on-the-....

And recently for E-Bikes as well: https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2021/09/ann-arbor-movin....

And yes, I know that California law states that bicycles have to be on the road, but that doesn't reflect reality. And, in fact, at least in Redwood City, I never once (In 5 years of walking every day, and seeing dozens of cyclists every day) saw a police officer cite a cyclist for riding on the sidewalk - though, that isn't the case in Southern California, where I read an NYT article that people of color are routinely stopped/searched for doing so - in much the same way people are cited in some cities for "Jay Walking" - which is a universally accepted behavior in other cities.

But, one thing I think you and I can agree on, that cyclists on the sidewalk have to show the utmost in courtesy to pedestrians, and not go racing along at high (> 8mph or so) speeds - essentially occupy the same speed as your typical jogger might. Also, another topic we might agree on - Bicycle Lanes just make things safer for everyone, cyclist and pedestrian alike.

No e-biker should be on a sidewalk.

There are informal norms. Cyclists who cycle on sidewalks should be relatively new and should make sure to behave explicitly with all of the rules of the road (ie. don't run a red from the sidewalk as a cyclist, very dangerous. if you must, dismount and walk across or wait for the pedestrian light). Cyclists on the street are generally more experienced and do not have to explicitly follow all rules IMO.

If you're piloting a vehicle on the road, you should follow all the rules of the road. This is the reason people hate cyclists.

Laws have social interpretation around them - there are plenty of road laws I see routinely broken for convenience by cars that are effectively unenforced.

"Idaho stops", ie. treating stop signs as yields is both enshrined in law in a few different areas and should be law in many others.

Idaho stops are perfectly acceptable in my view.

Not just informal norms, in many states formal laws, just ones that are hardly ever enforced this century. (Many of them on are on the written part of your driving test, though people don't take those often enough to remember their details.)

For example, Kentucky law requires bicyclists over the age of 11 to use the streets. (Prohibits sidewalk usage.)

Washington state law allows sidewalk usage, but also requires wider sidewalks than the Kentucky minimum, and includes a lot of very specific wording about pedestrian right of way on sidewalks (sidewalks are theirs first) and mandate being very careful in overtaking pedestrians and other cyclists.

That's the point, I read the post as satire making fun of the top level comment.

"Free pass" for electric motorbikes? What is that person on about? Why have meaningless distinctions between pedaling or not, when the overriding goal should be "promote bike use over vehicle use"?

What societal good, what good to the citizen, is it to place burdens on e-bikes that are not pedal assist?

> We also have to delineate between a daydreaming cyclist who's top speed is slow, and a hard-core cyclist with a $3000+ bike that can hit 40 mph in the right conditions.

Surely even skilled cyclists should be permitted to use bike paths as long as they don’t tear by everyone at 40 mph. And I’m genuinely a bit unclear as to why no-pedaling-needed bikes shouldn’t be able to mingle with bikes as long as they follow the rules.

I see it as a sort of amateurization/tragedy-of-the-commons that increases the likelihood of injuries.

As a parallel example, from what I can tell, injuries on electric rental scooters haven't really dropped too much, they just stopped being news.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but even a <$1000 road bike with drop bars and 25-32mm tires can hit 30-40mph in the hands of novice/moderately experienced riders assuming they have a decent baseline fitness and either some straight level road or a long downhill run. If you've got a 52x12 gear ratio and can spin up to a cadence of 90RPM you'll be traveling roughly 31mph. Spin up to 110RPM and you're pushing 40mph.

The only difference is the experienced, lycra-clad cyclists with expensive bikes just get up to speed faster, maybe with less of a tailwind or downward grade. However, unlike their speedy novice kin, they (should, in theory) have better bike handling skills.

Overall, I think a strategy of banning with people the highest cycling skills from bike paths seems like a bad idea. Sure, you got weekend warrior dentists with fancy expensive bikes but their mediocre fitness level doesn't allow them to really extract significant benefit from their high-end cycling equipment. Their fancy aerodynamic carbon fiber bikes are probably only getting them a few mph over a classic steel frame. For more serious enthusiasts and professionals, those seconds matter... for everyone else it's just a flex.

I think there is a big difference in physically working towards the speeds you mention and just rotating a grip to move (fast).

Having to work for high speeds, even if just rolling down a long hill on a “bare” machine, regardless of material or price, will create a much deeper mental involvement of what you got yourself into.

Thus, unassisted cyclists are (my guess and own experience) much more aware of their surroundings, what lies ahead and thus alert.

Things obviously can go wrong either way…

> a <$1000 road bike with drop bars and 25-32mm tires can hit 30-40mph in the hands of novice/moderately experienced riders

A novice rider will have a very hard time hitting 65km/h without going downhill or a strong back wind, even on a light bike. It's a challenge even for trained cyclists. So you won't see this on a city's streets but rather on open road.

But stopping fast and safe at those speeds is even harder than reaching them because you can't take your time to do it. A bike that can make it easy to reach them shouldn't share a lane with much slower and unpredictable participants, like regular lanes on sidewalks.

As someone who has biked for decades and puts on nearly ~1,000 miles per month - August I did ~850 - Sept/oct was less due to some rainy days... (All on a 29" x2.1" hard tail mtn bike)

But I used to bike from Alameda into SF for nearly a decade. I even biked occasionally from Alameda to Menlo Park...

That being said, while I really want an E-bike, I am also cautious: I have fallen a lot, and I used to get my bikes up to 44 was the fastest I ever went, down the long bike path along Lexington Reserviour which we used to bike up every morning...

Going ~40 on ANY terrain on a mike is dangerous/scary as heck.

I've had bikes just literally vanish from beneath me and I went sailing through the air.

Never would I want to do that on something that weighs more than me....

PLUS - how do you carry Jacques bike up/down stairs to transition between trains/levels/whatever...

That wonderful hack looks heavy as heck, but lovely.

It has walk assist if I need to move it uphill while walking next to it, I wouldn't want to move it up or down a flight of stairs but if that would ever be a requirement I'm pretty sure there will be a law mandated elevator nearby as well.

Even at 4.25w/kg I cannot hit 30mph without a tailwind or a downhill. I can push MAYBE 26mph, possibly 27. And that's going to be at something unsustainable for me, like 400-500w. (FTP of 350w).

At threshold power, I'm guessing more like 22-23mph.

And, not to toot my own horn, but that's a pretty damn fit experienced cyclist.

Ah, but you should be able to hit it while drafting with aero bars.

My point here is that it's not the bike that makes you go 40mph - it's the "engine" (the human) and the environment. Expensive human-powered bikes aren't going to magically turn someone who tops out at 20mph into someone doing twice that.

> We also have to delineate between a daydreaming cyclist who's top speed is slow, and a hard-core cyclist with a $3000+ bike that can hit 40 mph in the right conditions.

Are there not speed limits for bike lanes? Most cars have a top speed well above the freeway speed limit too.

Yes, absolutely. 30 kph in town, 45 kph outside of town.

I'm totally ashamed that I forgot to mention electric skateboards with 4 wheels and electric skateboards with 1 wheel and electric unicycles (larger single wheel vs a 'one wheel' electric skateboard) and it's too late to edit them in.

In my opinion the throttled e-bikes should be treated as bicycles as long as they have pedals and are under 25kg and 250W power.

That would legalize my e-bike that I have used for 14000km in city saving a lot of carbon emissions and not sacrificing much as I can park it in bicycle stand.

Of course going faster than 20-25km/h in pedestrian traffic (where bicycles are allowed) is extremely dangerous. But from my experience going fast in car traffic 35-40 km/h (where bicycles are allowed) is safer than chugging along slowly as cars don't have a need for overtaking between traffic lights.

Is that with or without the weight of the battery ;)

With the battery. Normal bicycles can be as light as 8 kg when using carbon frame. Should be able to fit your battery in a 25kg bike if trying very hard.

Not this battery :) Anyway, agreed, 25 kg would be a nice upper limit to have. The bike I have weighs in at 29 kg with the original battery, now it is somewhere between 35 and 36.

Where I grew up a bike with a motor and pedals was a moped and was legal to drive without license if under 50cc. They’re still considered bikes.

Here too, but today you would need a license for those. Ditto with my bike, you can't ride it without a drivers license.

E-bike is basically the smaller version of electric cars, whose sustainability depends on how we power our energy (not that they have a circular manufacturing process of course).

Moped?

Not sure where you are located but they already do have this. I have a class one pedal assist which cuts out at 20 mph. Allowed on most Mnt bike trails and to do 20 for any amount of distance requires substantial effort. I get passed on the paved bike trails all the time by road bikes with way more gears. Then class 2 which has a throttle and can go 30ish. Then class 3 with a throttle and speed is essentially whatever you can do. 2 and 3 are not allowed on any Mnt bike trails and depending on city, county, are crazy to ride on the paved bike trails, not legal, but do see every now and then. Most people that own them respect the rule.

They're simply called mopeds in my book. We don't call electric cars, e-cars.

That's not the law in the UK. A throttle electric bike is still an electric bike, as long as it has pedals that can propel it:

https://www.gov.uk/electric-bike-rules

> A "bicycle" that can accelerate without the need to pedal at all is an electric motorcycle

Most pedal-assist-only ebikes can run without you pedaling (and without a throttle either). You just need to pedal fast at first, and then take your feet off the pedals. (You can rest them at the center of the frame for example.)

Usually, if there is some friction in the system (but not too much) the pedals will keep on turning, making the bike think actual pedaling is going on. And then the system is self-sustaining (battery permitting, of course).

It's quite funny to do; not very practical, or elegant, but fun.

Why not just have reasonable rules for bike lanes, like a speed limit and perhaps size/weight limits? Cars with a top speed of 85mph and a 0-60 of 10 seconds are treated with precisely the same rules as cars with a top speed of 170mph and a 0-60 of 3 seconds. We don't really need separate terminology or separate lanes for them.

Differentiating between pedal assist & throttled e-bike serves no great purpose.

There should be no distinction, legally, between a normal bicycle and an electric bike of any kind (throttle or otherwise).

Personal Electric (micro) Mobility is the answer to many problems, let's not add any roadblocks to adoption. Other than keeping powers-that-be comfortable and sparing the feelings of cycling puritans, the distinction is useless, bordering on harmful to the environment.

The recent explosion of high speed scooters has been a menace since my city recently allowed them and e-bikes on bike paths and the local bike rental places purchased whole fleets.

The problem is that tourists and knaves are constantly riding them on paths that are marked pedestrian-only (sometimes due to unfamiliarity with the path system, though often intentionally). Even when they stick to the adjacent bike lanes the scooters accelerate and go so much faster than bikes they are constantly putting pedestrians and slower cyclists in danger. If they stuck to bike lanes on streets it wouldn’t be so bad, but I worry there will soon be a raft of Bernie Goetz style vigilante clotheslining of irresponsible riders.

I don't think there is a meaningful clear demarcation between pedal-assist and electric motorbike. The throttle control just looks different.

On good e-bikes I've ridden, the pedaling is basically limited to telling the motor to go, no meaningful force involved. Sure, you can put "controls motor with button" and "controls motor with pedal" into different legal categories, but I doubt there is much of a benefit in doing so.

It's a giant fire hazard which can also take you to places.

So far so good :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCaDz_2YcGQ

I love it but I personally would be too scared to ride it with that many cells sandwiched between what seems to be just foam board.

That's trespa, very strong stuff, weather proof, 6 mm thick.

Oh... I worked with something really similar but only for decoration purposes. I guess it's rigged enough to give the construction stability but it's still very prone to punctures. Do you think it would withstand a rock chip at higher speeds also do you prefer the high mechanical stability for a battery package? I don't really know if I would prefer it to warp at impact or break like hpl.

Rock chip no problem. Side impact by a car: big problem, but then I would have problems anyway, so my solution is to drive super defensively. Cities are the risky areas once outside of town it's safe to make some speed. The battery box is also protected by the frame triangle, which is fairly strong.

Nice the rock chip would have been my main concern otherwise defensive driving is probably the best course of action. Well done.

next project:

300watt solar panel charging the batteries as you go.

Can be used as roof or just panel above the rear tire.

Hehe, that's more like a sail :) I'd hate to ride around with that much surface but it's a fun idea!

How many times are you going to tempt fate? You already had an accident which makes it so you can't easily ride a regular bike anymore and yet here you are on an e-bike. I don't really want an answer, just more expressing my dismay. Good luck!

That was a pretty bad accident but the mechanics of it were - retrospectively - quite predictable. It's just that a low recumbent seemed very safe right up to the second that it wasn't.

Anyway, those two really don't compare, and I can ride a regular bike just not quite as easily as before. Those screws and the steel really should be taken out but between COVID and work there hasn't really been a 3 month gap where I figured I would chance it, because it's a full recovery after that again.

Thanks for the concern though, and I'll try to stay in one piece.

It’s worth saying that it’s not to hard to train up to being able to do 100-200km rides with no electronic assist. At such distance, the weight saving is probably outweighing the battery and you can use the space in the frame can be used for luggage such as extra clothing. At longer distances the ride limiting factor is comfort, not stamina / endurance - here the Ebike adds nothing

The author provided a compelling reason for this long-distance ebike: they have an injury and the acceleration assist allows them to cycle without aggravating the injury. I don't think it's fair to assume that every person who wants to cycle 200km can do so without electrical assist.

I can do 100K rides just fine, but not in the same time. An e-bike is much more convenient for that, we have this thing called wind here that can really get you. On my 10 speed (an elderly Guerciotti, very nice bike) my peak is 38 or so and I can average about 28 for a two hour ride, after that it drops and there is no way I could do a return after 65 km at that speed without slowing down considerably.

I've done many 10's of thousands of kilometers on bikes and there is no way to compare the two in practice, even the very best racing bike can't keep up with an e-bike over a long distance unless the rider is tour-de-France level.

E-bikes add range, compared to what you would do on your own in the same time. That is what makes them viable replacement for a car, suddenly 60% or so of your car trips are within the range of the e-bike, and with this large battery for me that is more like 95% or even more. Since getting the second battery for the e-bike I haven't used the car more than twice (that's a few months). Car ownership has gone from being a 'must' to 'uneconomical' and no regular bike that I've ever owned had that property.

And that's before we get into the fact that without the assist I have a hard time to get started at all.

Well I can do 100-200 km rides with no electronic assist but I am quite tired and hungry as all hell after that. And it takes time (I don't think I've averaged over 30 kph on a long trip so yeah that's 3-6 hours of cycling plus breaks).

I would like to be able to make these trips 1) faster 2) with less effort.

This has got to be a troll comment. On an ebike on the top assist levels you can pedal leisurely at ~50watts and get 300 watts of output to travel at 30kph plus, and tackle any climbs with no issue, while not getting your heartrate up all that high. Sure 100-200km is still far and not everyone will want to go that far even on an ebike, but it's undoubtedly much easier than a non-assisted bike. You have to train pretty seriously as a cyclist and be in really good shape to ride 100+ km like it's no big deal. And you have to make sure you plan out water stops and plan enough food for the ~5000+ calories you will burn.

And "the weight saving is probably outweighing the battery", is completely untrue. The increased weight of an ebike is probably adding like 5-10 watts of drag on flat ground and maybe 20-30 watts on hills, while the motor is providing 250 watts of output. It's not even close to canceling out, that would be insane.

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