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Man, when I saw "hack" I thought the Santander bikes are e-bikes, and the hack would be a device that leeches power off their batteries...

Same! Like, the bikes are charging via some inductive method, and the battery sucks off that. That’d be cool as hell!

They have some sort of battery that powers the lights. I wonder if the dock also charges those?

They're powered by a dynamo, so probably only have the tiniest of batteries or capacitors necessary to keep the low-power lights on when not moving.

Nope just a fancier dynamo