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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

Why should cars not have governors, but ebikes should?

Because you can't drive a car on public roads without mandatory training and passing an exam - so the assumption is that you know and understand the standing speed limits and obey them, but you ride a bike/ebike anywhere without any training or licences so the barrier to entry is lower .

Same way how(at least over here) anyone can ride a 50cc motorbike without any training whatsoever, but to ride something more powerful you need a proper motorcycle licence. I'd be happy with some sort of process where you can only ride a 250W ebike with no self-drive without a licence, but more powerful motors are available after passing a licence and with mandatory insurance.

Before we go hog wild with regulations, let's wait until there's a database of vertifed major injuries to innocent people with these rascals on their electric bikes.

(I am not a fan of overregulation. In the USA we have made practically everything illegial.)

Just so I get this straight - you're saying let's wait until people get injured and only then regulate this?

That's right. Not just minor injuries, but major injuries. And not just to guilty people, but innocent people. Then once we have a database (definitely a heavy duty one like Oracle with lots of consultants to nurse it), we'll need a consortium of independent auditors to verify that all those injuries were major, and all the injured people were innocent. Only then will we be able to embark on developing a standard VerifiedInnocentPersonMajorInjuryRecord interchange format, and begin the debates about whether it should be based on CORBA, XML, YAML, JSON, or CSV, and if we can't come to an agreement on that, then we'll have to develop converters between all the different data formats. Because the free market trumps government regulations every time. For some definition of "Trump".

The "mandatory training and exam" are an utter joke in the US. The reality is that of course cars should have speed governors, but we have turned cars into luxury goods so now peoples fragile ego centers around how big and fast their transportation is. Reasonable people want to simulate a PID controller for hours as much as they want to shift manually - not at all.

Cars typically have speed limiters. Not sure why people think they don’t.

Not at a meaningful speed for safety.

Many (most? all?) cars absolutely have governors from the factory. And they're often related to the rating of the tires factory-installed.

You definitely should be able to (and can!) have e-bikes without governors, however, an unlimited e-bike is (and should be) legally treated as the equivalent of a moped/motorcycle, not as the equivalent of a bicycle.

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