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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

20kg? Actual trail riders spend hundreds to thousands shaving grams off their bikes. I think this is just another attempt to break e-bikes away from being a distinct product, to keep the "e" an optional upgrade to whatever bike the customer already owns.

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Approximately no one is paying thousands of dollars to shave grams off an eMTB. There is a small but visible group of people doing that for road bikes and a much smaller group of people doing that for non-electric mountain bikes. There's probably some weirdo out there doing it for an electric mountain bike but they're probably more of a "decorative expensive bike purchaser" than an "actual trail rider".

That makes sense. If I'm already saying I need a motor to get myself up the trail I'm pretty far from worrying about shaving weight off my bike (or off of myself for that matter).

There are carbon fiber E-bikes, perhaps it’s “few” but there are people paying to have a more light bike since the extra weight up and down hill isn’t as fun

The weight difference between equivalent carbon and aluminum eMTBs is generally around a kg, but the argument for carbon MTBs has mostly shifted away from weight. While carbon fails more catastrophically than aluminum, it's harder to hit the failure point and it's less susceptible to stress fractures. It is also generally argued that carbon is both more dampening and stiffer in the places you want stiff, but it is very hard to tell how real that is.

Actual trail riders mostly do not do this. Source: worked at a bike store. People with a lot of money that treat their bike as something to optimize and not something to ride do this. I'm not saying its wrong, its just another way of being a bike enthusiast, but this type rarely overlaps with serious riders. Training improves performance, not $3000 wheels that shave off 50 grams.

At least in the pacific northwest, mounting biking isn't just about riding the bike any more than owning a motorcycle is just about riding a motorcycle. It's a culture or talking about and bragging about bike tech. Weight is bragging rights for mountain bikes as "aero" is for road bikes. Lots of people will pay to have the better toy. The running joke is that many bikes are worth more than the cars that bring them to the trailheads.

I think your confusing regular mountain biking with ebikes. The people bragging about bike tech will most likely be looking down at people that ride ebikes on the trail.

Agreed. For most people it would be more reasonable to lose the three-four kg in body fat and keep the aluminium frame rather than upgrading to carbon fibre.

Unless you have found a way to spend a few thousand dollars to make 3-4 kg of body fat magically disappear with no complications or effort, losing weight and spending more on a bike are not things you're choosing between.

semaglutide comes pretty close to "a few thousand dollars to make 3-4 kg of body fat magically disappear with no complications or effort"

Other than pros most of the people spending lots of money to shave weight would be better served losing weight from their belly over the bike, but that’s harder to solve with a credit card.

Again, semaglutide solves this pretty well with a credit card; not even that if you have The Good Coverage.

Reorient yourself, the frame has shifted.

Isn't this about e-bikes? Do people generally train on e-bikes? It feels that these two would be distinct sets.

I don't think people with e-bikes even pedal into the orange zone. It's more of exercise theater, to borrow a term. HOwever, I do hope e-bikes start to overtake cars as modes of transportation in temperate climates.

I don't think competitive e-biking is a thing. And if you're commuting or riding recreationally, you probably don't care much about weight.

And this looks like a competitor for the Bosch systems that power many e-bikes, needing a similar frame design - and not a kit to install on non-electric bikes.

I've always laughed at that. Part weight in grams is just a marketing gimmick to differentiate products to charge higher prices.

Even tour de france folks have a minimum weight they can't go under, and they frequently weigh several kg over anyway.

For casual riders, you could save several $k equivalent on your super-lightweight-bike by just losing a few pounds or trading jeans for shorts.

personally, I would love if all the bike lights had a standardized bus and connector so headlight/taillight/etc could power off the bike battery. (I know some bikes have an output but think more like a standard USB connector and maybe a dashboard setting, not running bare wires under the hood and using a proprietary app to set things up)

> Actual trail riders spend hundreds to thousands shaving grams off their bikes.

Spending hundreds to thousands to shave "grams" is not a thing among real trail riders.

Actual trail riders are generally pretty smart about the tradeoffs. If they see a product that is "hundreds to thousands" more expensive and brings no benefit other than shaving a few grams, nobody will buy it.

20kg is fairly light for an e-mtb. I'd bet typical use is to climb the uphill paths on an mtb trail system, even though the bike they mention isn't a dedicated DH bike.

While in amateur, I’ve been mountain biking a long, long time.

Nobody cares about grams on a mountain bike. The environment you’re riding in is so hostile that you really can’t tell the difference.

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