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Comment by wolfram74 | Hacker News Reader

Mentioning the pedal assist bikes is important, for the amount of battery a cybertruck ships with, you could ship 400 of the ebike I use for 90% of my trips.

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And I can create an infinite number of "real" bicycles since they don't use a battery at all, plus they're even better for your health than an e-bike!

Snark aside, e-bikes are great, I don't have one but that's because between my nice road bike that can crank out 100 miles no problem, and my battery car, I don't need one. But they do work for lots of people. I wish I could get one for my kid, but it is illegal for anyone under 14 to ride one, where I live.

That a non-electric bike is better for your health is often wrong. If you are very sporty, you are fine. But there are plenty of people who would get better exercise with an e-bike, as they are more likely to use it or just use the electric assist to bike more often or longer distances. Also, there are a lot of regions where there are steep roads which could be obstacles without assist.

This - an e-tricycle kept my dad active until the day he died - he loved it. There is no way he could have ridden entirely under his own steam, but the e-trike was a life-changer for him, and us as a family.

It's a stupid thing, but I wish I could hack the cargo bike I use to bring my kids to school so it wasn't at the second highest level of assist when it turns on. I often forget to turn it down and miss out on a lot of exercise that way...

Might be a dumb question but I’ll ask anyways. One of the main factors preventing me from owning a bike is the lack of a permanent residence. I’m forced to move every few months/years, sometimes to a different country. What’s the best way to bring such a large object with me? So far I’ve been forcing myself to own as little as possible such that I can bring everything with me in a single luggage and backpack

There are a lot of folding bikes that can compact small enough to go in an overhead bin or get checked as luggage. You could also just stick with budget non-folding options then sell your old one and buy a new one at your destination. You'll lose some money every time but on the upside you can buy a bike that fits your lifestyle at every destination, or skip getting one when it doesn't make sense.

Brompton bikes are one of the classic recommendations for folding bikes but there tons of other options nowadays as well.

I have moved around a fair bit in the past decade, and for me the most effective movers I have used have been SendMyBag [1]. They are great for shipping luggage and other reasonably large items. They arrange an DHL pickup and drop, with a lot of flexibility, and their support has been great for me when I needed it.

SendMyBag do ship bikes, but I have mostly used more dedicated bike shipping services, which have been very reliable. SendBike [2] iswho I haved used in the past, but I have also had friends use ShipMyBike [3] successfully in the past. The advantage of these companies is that they will first ship you a box to use, if you dont have one already.

[1] https://www.sendmybag.com/en-gb/ [2] https://sendbike.com/ [3] https://www.shipmybike.com/

"they're even better for your health than an e-bike!" - debatable. Ppl with ebikes tend to have more exercise since they don't get tired that quickly, unless you are talking about electric scooters or hyper ebikes where you don't need to pedal bc of powerful motor

Let me tell you, since I have only access to an analogue bike, and no car at all, an e-bike is looking more and more like a it'll be life changing for me. We have some rental e-bikes in my town that I've used from time to time, but I don't like them as the designated parking spots is not ideal for my use case.

Access to an ebike will probably result in me taking significantly more trips with it, where I would otherwise have opted to either rent a car for an hour, or just not make the trip.

I don't have hard evidence to back up the claim, but I'm certain that an e-bike will rack up more than enough km's in a time period that the overall volume of ebike-exercise outweighs analogue-bike exercise, even if you subtract the "lost" exercise due to the e-bike assistance.

The amount of emotional and confidence boost you get from 250W of electricity honestly cannot be measured.

This isn't zero sum. You can do both

It sorts of is, actually? If our capacity to make batteries is limited (or make batteries within some fixed, acceptable, level of environmental impact.)

Unfortunately that's now how humanity builds stuff.

It's rarely the case that "we all decide that we have this very important thing to do for humanity" and focus on doing just that.

More often the benefits for humanity flow down as side effects from other more basic incentives like making money selling fast sport electric vehicles used to signal that you're rich or whatever

I think I read in Walter Isaacson's Musk biography that when the Model S came out, it was using something like 10% of the worlds supply of Lithium ion batteries. And that was a pretty small number of Model Ss. EVs have scaled up massively since that time and battery quantity has kept up -- my point being, as long as the price of the ebike is able to pay market prices for the batteries, it seems like supply will scale.

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