https://www.cyclingelectric.com/news/shimano-e-bike-motor-road-gravel
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Cycling News
"The electric bike is not a short-term trend"
(501 posts)-
Posted 5 months ago #
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A new study tracking the habits and attitudes of a pool of people riding electric bikes in Sweden has concluded that people are taking note of the similar and often greater levels of convenience the transport form affords in relation to driving and thus the assisted cycling habits are proving more sticky versus those of a bicycle.
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https://www.cyclingelectric.com/news/electric-bikes-challenge-system-of-automobility-says-study
Posted 5 months ago # -
That's a surprise!
It would be nice to have more power I guess. Although it would extend the useful lifespan of our bike (as the passengers get older and heavier) and make it more useful to a wider range of people in general, it would also mean higher wear and tear (perhaps good news for the local bike shops).
I can already pedal 250W harder than some other cyclists, so I'm not too convinced by some of the concerns. If the govt wants to regulate, they won't be bothered about the fine print of motor performance IMO.
Posted 1 month ago # -
The logical outcome will probably be more people using legal (or illegal, to combat excessive cost) e-bikes as a substitute for motor scooters and motorbikes, and perhaps even as a substitute for cars. The roads will be anarchic, full of silent, speeding, death weapons, but we seem to have managed for a century with a larger, louder, more polluting form of that anyway.
In the urban environment, where the careful road user has to be alert to myriad hazards all the time, a speed limit of 20mph is actually quite well aligned with what the human brain is capable of processing without it throwing away all the ostensibly extraneous information. Whether higher powered e-bikes will conform to that notion is yet to be seen.
Posted 1 month ago # -
When will they halve the legal kilowattage of cars?
Oh you mean there isn't any legal maximum? At all?
And a 17 year old can get in a Tesla capable of 0 to 60mph in 2 seconds... Absurd!
Posted 1 month ago # -
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On Tuesday 27th Feb, officers charged a person with five road traffic offences in relation to an electric bike . The E-bike, had no insurance, no licence, the driver failed to comply with a red traffic signal, was not wearing a helmet and identified as driving carelessly!
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Posted 1 month ago # -
Police conflating e-bikes with speed-pedelecs (or mopeds) again. Sigh. No doubt the general public will start to believe you need a helmet, and all the other motoring guff, to ride an e-bike now. Sigh.
Picking on the poor delivery riders trying to scrape out a living, no doubt
Posted 1 month ago # -
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Beryl and scheme partners Herefordshire Council are celebrating the impact of the introduction of e-bikes, after they replaced almost 21,000 private road transport journeys in their first year.
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Posted 1 month ago # -
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‘Unexploded bombs’: call for action after 11 deaths in UK due to e-bike fires
Dangerous batteries and conversion kits still being sold online, new safety data reveals
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Posted 1 month ago # -
Now regulation of large batteries is something I can definitely get behind (unlike the moral panic about whether more powerful ebikes might displace cars in a way that is ritually impure)
Posted 1 month ago # -
I don't generally cycle to work these days, but I did today. It took an hour with the ebike motor on the whole time, and according to my Garmin pedals the motor was 'topped up' by 691kJ of human effort. That's quite a bit really. They say that the average ebike owner gets 3x more exercise, and you can see how it would add up if it gets you to ride a few more journeys.
Headwind on the way home, but maybe I won't get a pinch flat on the canal as I did this morning, so could all even out!
Posted 1 month ago # -
If passed existing Bosch motors can be reprogrammed to deliver default 350W+ of assist? They do already of course as the 250W assist level is allowed to be surpassed for short periods hence a 60kg cargobike plus 70 kg rider with 100kg on board can go uphill.
We see the same equipment used on USA versions of bikes but software altered. Fuel consumption will be higher and therefore bikes may have to have double battery array of 2 x 500Wh. This in turn raises price again although E-bike per KWh price is much higher than an EV.
More power = more wear?Posted 1 month ago # -
Will it drive more business to the local bike shop, I wonder.
As you point out many bikes are already cross sold into the less restricted US market. Unclear how much will really change, the counter argument to the industry doomer is that more powerful legal bikes might neuter some of the illicit motorbike type bikes
Posted 1 month ago # -
I see a lot of cats running their lecky bikes at low setting so as not to cause wear.
Posted 1 month ago # -
@chdot: "Dangerous batteries and conversion kits still being sold online, new safety data reveals"
Also from that article:
Fire safety officers say consumers should buy from a reputable retailer and warn e-bikes fitted with conversion kits or fitted with batteries bought online may pose a greater risk.
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An analysis by the [London Fire Brigade] of 73 e-bike fires in the capital in the first six months of last year found at least 40% were believed to involve a converted e-bike.
"At least" 40% of fires involving converted e-bikes doesn't say to me that conversion kits are the main problem, "at least" not without knowing the proportion of converted e-bikes to built-and-sold-as e-bikes out in the wild.
That said, I do agree that dodgy lithium batteries are a menace - but it's not just e-bike kits that contain those (I believe even some of the non-rechargeable ones e.g. as found in so-called 'disposable' vapes can turn nasty).
Posted 1 month ago # -
Huh, I missed that. So potentially 60% of fires came from reputable brands! I wonder though what the detail is under "at least 40%" (eg how many of them are not assigned one way or another)
Posted 1 month ago # -
Yes, but what if there are 50 times as many reputable e-bikes in the UK as conversion kits?
Then the 60 / 40 split wouldn’t be such a big deal. If 40 reputable bikes out of 4 million caught fire, that’s a 0.001% rate.
Whereas if 32 conversion kits caught fire out of 80,000 bikes, that’s a rate of 0.04%, 40 times higher than for reputable bikes
Posted 1 month ago # -
@neddie: As I said: "...not without knowing the proportion of converted e-bikes to built-and-sold-as e-bikes out in the wild." That information is missing from the article - and I suspect that the London Fire Brigade doesn't have it.
I suspect that "at least" in that article probably means that 40% were confirmed to be kit conversions. The proportion might have been higher, if they couldn't work out what kind of bike it was once the fire had been put out. Li-ion batteries do burn surprisingly fiercely, as it does say in the article, so it's possible that in many cases there isn't enough left of the bike to be sure.
The article does make it sort-of clear that it's dodgy conversion kits and aftermarket batteries that are regarded as being the major part of the problem. Ironically, the photo at the head of the article is of an e-scooter, the vast majority of which are bought off-the-shelf i.e. not conversions. The article does mention that e-scooters are included in the calls for tighter regulation but, as so often happens in the MSM, the headline just uses "e-bike" as a catch-all term. And the same seems to occur in other parts of the article, e.g.:
London Fire Brigade warns e-bikes and e-scooters are now the fastest growing fire risk in the capital. It recorded 149 e-bike fires in 2023, and three deaths, and 87 e-bike fires in 2022, with no deaths recorded.
There's one mention of e-scooters at the start of that quote, but the rest of the paragraph seems to be all about e-bikes - but again that could just be lazy/careless use of words.
It does rather undermine the usefulness of statistics if they're presented in such a confusing and unclear way.
Posted 1 month ago #
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