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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

So, I think that personal e-bikes are basically a small percentage of e-bikes in the city. Most of the e-bike users are food delivery drivers / couriers. As they talk to each other, I'm sure they all have the most cost effective option. (NYC has had e-bikes forever. They were illegal until 2020, but they have been a mainstay since the early 2010s.)

The problem these delivery drivers face is that the battery doesn't last for an entire shift. As a result, they've almost all switched to mopeds. (A moped, as far as I can tell, is the world's loudest lawnmower engine attached to a drivetrain.) I thought it was over-regulating e-bikes that led to this trend, but I think it's actually an energy density concern.

The TL;DR is if you see e-bike fires going down, it's because everyone ditched their e-bikes for fossil fuels. Very sad.

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Delivery-oriented ebikes like the Arrow models in NYC use very large battery packs, and some deliveristas carry a second battery on a rear rack. My impression is that, as deliveristas have moved to working for apps rather than specific restaurants over the past few years, the expected delivery radius has expanded, which drove a lot of the range issues that have lead to widespread adoption of gray-market motorcycles with no plates.

Said unlicensed mopeds are current subject to widespread seizure in NYC, so it does seem like ebikes are coming back.

One major delivery-oriented ebike importer, 'Fly Ebike', has gotten a model UL certified.

We have multiple issues:

* Delivery guys need to charge batteries a lot

* Not all batteries are safe and we have too many deadly fires

* Delivery guys go too fast

* Citibike batteries need to swapped in, rather than charged at the station if the utility (ConEd) allowed that

* Citibike has imbalance issues at rush hour, with empty/full stations, which they try to fix with vans and so called Angels, who are told to bike from A to B in exchange for points

My solution: plug Citibike stations into the grid, add more stations and bikes, require/encourage delivery guys to use Citibikes (which have a safer speed cap) at a substantial discount and also let them double as Angels.

The high torque needed when starting from zero is a lot more dangerous than the need for high speed. The former creates current bursts that can overheat the regulator circuitry, while high speeds need less current and also provide better airflow to cool down electronics (and batteries). The main problem to me however is the need for very fast charging which quite often overheats batteries without any airflow; I'm not sure battery packs can detect if any of the cells is overheating, as placing a few thermal sensors here and there cannot monitor all of them. They simply have to stop this fast charge thing that aside being dangerous also lowers batteries life significantly.

To me the problem with high speed is primarily safety for pedestrians and other bikes. Given also that the state has just given the city the green light to reduce the speed limit on most streets to 20MPH, the delivery guys will stand out even further.

If you run out of juice, you just get another bike (and attach whatever you use to carry the deliveries). Battery safety and longevity should be better when charging and monitoring across an entire fleet, using e.g. slower speeds as you mention. This, of course, would require getting more stations and bikes into the network, which would be a win also for regular users in outer areas who are sorely underserved right now.

> So, I think that personal e-bikes are basically a small percentage of e-bikes in the city.

Here in Munich, it's gone up a lot - you can clearly spot the e-bikers by them moving to the front at every traffic light and accelerating way faster than conventional bikers, and I jumped on the e-bike train a few weeks ago myself. Delivery drivers here tend to go to electric mopeds or s-bikes (45 km/h).

I will say that we have a lot of e-bikers in NYC as well; but they're the bikeshare bikes. I see those zooming all over the place.

I have ridden one and they are quite fast. Actually scares me a little bit.

yup, the acceleration of e-bikes tends to be quite surprising if you're not used to it. Here in Germany, the top speed is limited to 25 km/h, more than enough in urban scenarios.

One thing I've noticed about my ebike is that riding on the road is much less scary because I'm able to better keep up with traffic so car drivers get much less angry at me and aren't always jockeying to pass. I have mine unlocked to do about 26mph (42kph) and it's about as fast as I feel comfortable with on bike tires and wearing a regular bike helmet.

25kph seems like it is too slow to keep up with traffic. That's barely any faster than a regular bike.

Ah, we have separate bike lanes on the major streets where cars are allowed 50 km/h, but on the streets where we don't have them the speed is limited to 30 km/h either by law or by congestion.

25 km/h is often slower than a mechanical bike if the rider and bike are both in good shape. The goal is not to keep up with car traffic; Germany has dedicated bike lanes on larger roads, and cars are expected to wait their turn on narrow ones.

> cars are expected to wait their turn on narrow ones

Yes, but the drivers don't like that, especially if they're following a bike doing 25kph on a 55kph road. The drivers are much less annoyed if the bike is doing 40kph on the 55kph road.

Citibikes were recently capped from 20mph down to 18mph (29km/h). Delivery guys are another story.

Part of the switch to gas mopeds was due to the fact that most of them were being ridden around completely illegally; without license, insurance, or plates. The barrier to entry there was artificially low because the NYPD didn't prioritize taking them off the street. I think they're starting to crack down now so maybe we'll see fewer mopeds.

I think your theory is people like to do whatever is most illegal, but that doesn't seem right. Mopeds must be preferred over e-bikes for some reason; e-bikes don't require a license, insurance, or plates. (I laugh because this theory appeals to me somewhat; e-bikes were super popular when they were illegal, then they were legalized, and now everyone's riding unregistered mopeds instead. But I think it's a change unrelated to the law; another comment mentions the transition from per-restaurant delivery crews to the apps requiring a larger radius, that seems most logical to me.)

I do hope that peak moped was some time in the past. I can look the other way about maybe not obeying every traffic control device when you're not burning any fossil fuels, but if you're just going to burn gas less efficiently than a car, I can't get too excited.

I think you misread or misinterpreted what I wrote. They don't have any specific attraction to committing crimes, but rather an aversion to spending time and effort to do things legally. Getting licensed and insured is expensive. It's much easier if you can ride without those things.

E-bikes were already in very wide use well into the food delivery app era. The explosion of mopeds in NYC was in the past 2 years.

I believe the reasons were three fold: they are more capable than e-bikes in range and speed, the bargain basement Chinese models are almost as cheap as e-bikes, and the police were not sufficiently enforcing any laws regarding them.

I think more of them would last a shift if they actually peddled. Using the battery to start from a dead stop is just brutal for efficiency.

Seems like there would be a market in NYC for those e-bikes/scooters that can swap batteries at a kiosk like the Gogoro stuff out east.

I for one would not complain if there was more commoditization of ebike and scooter batteries. I hate that every single ebike company ships their own custom battery solution that is outrageously expensive per watt. I'd also love to see the same thing happen with tool batteries.

I think forcing battery standardization is exactly the kind of thing the government should be working on. If your TV remote requires 2 AA batteries, you can get those anywhere. If an ebike or cordless drill requires a battery, consumers have to do too much work and spend too much money and in the end it's wasteful.

Why do you think we need the government to standardize batteries?

To increase competition, reduce waste, and reduce prices to consumers.

because a standard hasn't emerged in the decades it's been for one to emerge. the closest we've got after the AA and AAA is the 18650 and that's not all that common as a consumer battery.

I might be wrong, but I believe the 18650 is the commodity cell inside most proprietary battery packs.

I wonder if they could keep their proprietary pack design, but instead force the individual cells to be replaceable (ie don’t use solder tabs)? That would be standardized enough for me.

Unfortunately it is not that simple. All of the cells in a pack need to be balanced the same so it’s not as easy as just swapping in a replacement for a dead cell. Even if you replace all of the cells at once they need to be balanced.

The biggest time sink when building DIY battery packs is testing and charging every cell to the exact same voltage.

You should definitely replace all of the cells at once, even if you are just using drugstore batteries. If you don't they are not going to last very long.

Manufacturers are not being as careful as you are. They bundle batteries from the same manufacturing batch with no testing and rely on battery monitor and balancing ICs.

https://www.ti.com/battery-management/monitors-balancers/ove...

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