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Coredump posted:When I look at videos of countries with bicycle infrastructure that have more than .01% of the population riding bikes for work/commuting they ride bikes shaped like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0cFOubQ5I Yes, but they are not electric. 
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Sep 19, 2014 23:53
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DrakeriderCa posted:I think the problem price-wise is that Americans expect to make $30/hr to weld and assemble their products Nah, that's the answer to "why aren't more ebikes made in America" or "why are American/Euro ebikes so pricey"? That doesn't answer "why doesn't American import a shitload of ebikes and escooters like Colombia does? They're still way, way less common than ICE bikes in Bogota, but if I'm in a decent part of town I'm sure to see someone riding one every time I go walking around. Most people here ride motorycles functionally vice recreationally, so all the delivery guys I'm sure are sticking with ICE since they need to be out and about all day, not recharging every few hours. If battery tech improves to the point you can ride an escooter most of the day, I'm sure we'd see a switch. Welcome change since the smog here sucks. I just wish they had more electrics that looked basically like a Puch top-tank moped, something not as goofy as a drat scooter. FAKEEDIT: the eSolex resembles an underbone Tomos moped, which is still cooler than a scooter, and it's only a bit over €1000. However, it's imported to the US in tiny boutique numbers so a novelty vice an actual competitive option.  EDIT: CX AGT, also a French bike that's underbone-esque, runs €1500:  The Ultramotion A2B still runs ~$3000  The Spanish Otocycles Otok sells for $3700 in the US. Design seems pretty simple, offshore that bitch and let the rest of us buy one for $800.  The Italian ITALjet looks pretty similar, US models from $3000-5000 
TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 16:03
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Battery electric is so last year! Have some fuel cell niceness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR5rpVdMtXM
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Sep 20, 2014 16:45
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Hold up, there's no 2104 Tokyo Motor Show? The 43rd was 2013 and their site says the 44th is 2015: http://www.tokyo-motorshow.com/en/ Dammit, I was hoping they'd announce the release of the Yamaha PES and PED motorbikes. Apparently a year and some ago they said "in 2016" and then they changed that to "in the near future" so I was hoping for this year. If Yamaha actually mass-produces an e-bike, I can't imagine it'd start anything above $9k, since they have to beat out the boutique firms by a good margin (plus their little emotos only do 60mph). Batteries aside, wouldn't an ebike be cheaper to mass-produce/assemble due to fewer parts, maybe less skilled labor? 
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Sep 20, 2014 18:17
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Auto manufacturing is so hugely efficient and automated now that I doubt labor costs make up much of the cost of a vehicle compared to energy and materials. And batteries are just expensive to build, both because of the raw materials required and the advanced technology needed to do it.
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Sep 20, 2014 19:11
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Sagebrush posted:Auto manufacturing is so hugely efficient and automated now that I doubt labor costs make up much of the cost of a vehicle compared to energy and materials. And batteries are just expensive to build, both because of the raw materials required and the advanced technology needed to do it. Batteries do seem to the goal of modern alchemy. Someone soon is going to invent something that makes smaller and more efficient batteries, and there will be a collective worldwide forehead smack of "why didn't we think of that?" In the meantime I'm still reluctant to get too deep into e-motorcycles since the tech is advancing so rapidly it's just dusting earlier models.
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Sep 20, 2014 19:50
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I still don't think that straight battery technology will be the way of the future, just because of the infrastructure. Not charging stations; it's easy enough to build those. The real problem is getting the electricity to the vehicles when you have tens or hundreds of thousands of them all charging at the same time. Right now, a handful of electric cars drawing 15 kilowatts at public stations around the city is no big deal for the grid. But let's say that in the future, half of all the cars in San Francisco (350,000 registered in the city/county) have been replaced with Teslas. If each car has to be recharged once a week and has a 60kWh battery pack, that's nearly 550GWh of power annually that needs to be dumped into the city just to recharge cars. That's a tremendous amount of electricity that will require new dedicated power plants (an average nuclear plant has the capacity to charge about 10,000 Teslas on superchargers simultaneously) and new electrical lines to avoid blowing up the old ones with the load. In many parts of the country the grid already has trouble keeping up when everyone in a city turns on their air conditioner at once; what happens when everyone in a city plugs in their car at 6:30 PM simultaneously? No, I think the solution is going to turn out to be fuel cells and a renewable fuel source. Biomethanol, for instance, with catalytic on-board reformation into hydrogen and CO2. All the advantages of an electric car combined with all the advantages of an easily handled liquid fuel that we already have the infrastructure to distribute.
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Sep 20, 2014 20:52
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Also the charge time is a huge barrier for the foreseeable future. You can gas up in minutes, until you can have that experience with batteries, I don't see it getting huge. You could treat batteries like propane and have charged batteries waiting at the gas station that they just swap in and you leave yours behind. This would require standardized batteries across all makes, as well as extremely resilient batteries that are tracked and removed from service at the end of their life. That's why I don't see battery being viable for the near term.
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Sep 21, 2014 00:30
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So are ebikes a misleading evolutionary dead-end, or at least a way to kickstart moving away from fossil fuels? I'm still thinking my best bet for urban transportation in Bogota is a small ICE motorbike. I kinda want to get an AKT (assembled in Colombia from Chinese components) just to be in the national spirit, and also because they're smaller-framed bikes where I can actually flat-foot. Plus I've never owned a kick-start. I do want to consider an electric though. There are easily a dozen stores here selling ebikes, and two are in the same neighborhood so I'll check them out Monday. One has this, which looks like an attempt to make a scooter look as moto-like as possible. If it's like under $2000 and has any kind of decent reviews online, I'll be strongly tempted:  Anyone recognize this? It pretty much has to be Chinese, so it must be some known brand that's just house-labeled.
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Sep 21, 2014 01:10
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"Chinese" and "known brand" aren't usually words you'd put in the same sentence. The strategy of chinese manufacturers seems to be "change the brand we make our poo poo under on a yearly basis so that no one can ever get spares when they need it for their 18 month old scooter".
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Sep 21, 2014 01:55
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So Chinese ebikes are basically disposable? That might still be doable if it's under a grand and lasts at least a year or two before selling for cannibalization. Failing that, I'll buy a little 125cc AKT (standard urban getaround here) and get an emoto when one of the Big 4 gets off their rear end and makes one.
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Sep 21, 2014 02:32
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Nah, that's the answer to "why aren't more ebikes made in America" or "why are American/Euro ebikes so pricey"? That doesn't answer "why doesn't American import a shitload of ebikes and escooters like Colombia does? Oh I misunderstood the thrust of your post then I'd say its cultural as well as a limited market. How much of America is truly urbanized? As in they actually live work and play within the range of a emoto and have a reasonable public transit system to handle further trips? I know in Canada that's a very small portion of our population. Western Europe is totally different.
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Sep 21, 2014 06:04
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DrakeriderCa posted:Oh I misunderstood the thrust of your post then No worries, I was going to say "I know a bunch of folks who could use that", but then recalled that DC is easily in the top-ten for carless-capable cities in the US, maybe even in the top five. I'm looking into the Copenhagen Wheel and the FlyKly, the drop-in 26"/700mm ebike wheels. Non-throttle, but assist-pedal. Failing anything else, I'd consider getting some kind of beach-cruiser bicycle here, and when my gf visits in November having her bring down a e-wheel as a carry-on. I need her to bring down a pico projector anyway, electronics too expensive down here. Is there some kind of way to switch from a chain to a belt when converting to an e-wheel to cut down on grease mess? I feel I'm kinda all over the map here, between a small ICE bike, an electric scooter of inscrutable Red Chinese make, or a high-quality e-bike wheel to drop into any basic coaster bike I buy off the market down here.
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Sep 21, 2014 06:17
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Also the charge time is a huge barrier for the foreseeable future. You can gas up in minutes, until you can have that experience with batteries, I don't see it getting huge. One of the reason Musk is pushing so hard for building SuperCharger and FastPack networks is that he wants Tesla to be the company that sets the standard. Iirc any manufacturer can license the Tesla base plate and charging technology, which allows them to build cars that are compatible with their charging system. In an ideal future you would own your car, but you wouldn't own the battery pack. Instead you subscribe to a program that gives you access to the battery swap stations, and the money that goes into that program pays for the replacement and recycling of dead packs for everyone. It would completely remove the "Battery pack needs to be replaced after x miles at $$$$" cost drawback of EVs. edit: This is all currently irrelevant to electric motorcycles of course, but there's really nothing saying you couldn't have a similar system for bikes.
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Sep 21, 2014 13:03
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Wouldn't the subscription cost of the battery program take away from the incentive of decreased fuel/driving costs? I wonder where that would shake out, price wise.
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Sep 22, 2014 02:44
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Charging an electric bike right now costs about 1 cent per mile, while gas runs maybe 5 or 7 cents a mile. Triple those figures for a car. There's plenty of room between those two for the battery swapping infrastructure -- if it's cheaper than gas and equally convenient, people will do it. I still think that liquid fuel is in every way a better solution than a battery, and once someone figures out how to make the right fuel cell batteries will fall right off the market. 1 kilogram of gasoline: 44.8 megajoules of stored energy 1 kilogram of bioethanol: 27 megajoules 1 kilogram of cutting-edge lithium-ion battery: 0.8 megajoules The only reason batteries are even feasible today is because of how inefficient gasoline combustion is. If an electric car today can get a hundred miles or so on a lithium battery pack, just swapping that out with an equal weight of ethanol in a fuel cell that's even half as efficient as a battery still gets you 1200 miles with no other modifications. Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 03:06
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Checked around a few more stores, and found some tolerable-seeming ebikes. My boss kinda wants a Vespa, but is also interested in electrics (plus the small ones don't require plates/license here), and also she's a really small gal (5'1) so a standard Vespa is a little tall for her comfort, and electrics are smaller. This one looks reasonably classic, chassis warranted for 1 year, motor for two, electronics for 6. Seemed not the highest quality but at least basically sturdy, 40km/h, 35k range, weights 50kg, 500w brushless motor. Sells for CO$1.890.000 (US$945). Does this seem even moderately decent, or is this just asspain on a stick? The stores seem pretty reputable dealers, I see a zillion bikes around here with the GoGreen or Biológico label.  On Kr11, a decent-sized tertiary road with huge bikelanes, a very large portion of the people riding by during rush-hour are on non-standard bikes. Foldable bikes, gas-engine assist, electric assist, scooters with "pedals" for legal reasons, mopeds, etc. This city is huge into 2-wheel transport and the bike lanes have all the weird stuff. FAKEEDIT: Colombian cops supposedly have ebikes now, though I don't think I've seen any even here in the capital. 
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Sep 23, 2014 20:40
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Sagebrush posted:Charging an electric bike right now costs about 1 cent per mile, while gas runs maybe 5 or 7 cents a mile. Triple those figures for a car. There's plenty of room between those two for the battery swapping infrastructure -- if it's cheaper than gas and equally convenient, people will do it. Why aren't we seeing any of these prototypes if this is so realistic? It seems like a much easier solution than using fuel cells and liquid/gaseous hydrogen, yet a few manufacturers have developed that type of prototype.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:28
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Because making a fuel cell that can internally reform methanol into hydrogen efficiently turns out to be really hard. Especially if you're trying to get it down to vehicle size; the current prototypes are all things the size of refrigerators that produce enough power for an apartment block but also need to be heated up to 1000 degrees to start the reaction and so on. I believe Sony and Toshiba both have small prototype methanol cells that are about the size of a lithium battery and can produce enough power for a smartphone or a laptop, but they also aren't ready for production and I don't think making a vehicle-sized one is as simple as just adding more cells to the stack. There's no physical reason it can't be done -- there's just a lot of engineering involved in taking what are currently laboratory prototypes into something you could mass produce.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:36
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Hot drat! The folks who make the classic Čezeta are up to their fourth prototype on their electric, hoping to being production soon. Estimating €9,000 for the final product, range of 100km, 5kWh battery, etc. Aiming to start delivery in 2015, and claim that soon they'll have test-rides available in Prague. When I google up cool ebike projects, I run across a lot of "any day now!" for awesome designs... in 2011 or 2012, that never made it anywhere. So I take every plan with a grain of salt, but this is pretty awesome. EDIT: And here's what the Estonians are building, "coming soon". It's not a big bike, it's a little moped-size, or "monkey bike" or pit-bike or whatever, but it's adorable: http://exo-bikes.eu/  Sure it's small, but brosef is probably like 6'2" or something, so on 5'6" me this might not be ridiculous: 
TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 19:35
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Sagebrush posted:Because making a fuel cell that can internally reform methanol into hydrogen efficiently turns out to be really hard. Especially if you're trying to get it down to vehicle size; the current prototypes are all things the size of refrigerators that produce enough power for an apartment block but also need to be heated up to 1000 degrees to start the reaction and so on. I believe Sony and Toshiba both have small prototype methanol cells that are about the size of a lithium battery and can produce enough power for a smartphone or a laptop, but they also aren't ready for production and I don't think making a vehicle-sized one is as simple as just adding more cells to the stack. Why is no one focusing more on propane and natural gas, both things that don't need to be heated to 1000 degrees in their container to be useful? There are also proven retrofit kids to convert regular gas engines to propane/ng, it seems like a slam dunk. This is me pondering these propane-related questions: 
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Sep 24, 2014 21:47
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Why is no one focusing more on propane and natural gas, both things that don't need to be heated to 1000 degrees in their container to be useful? There are also proven retrofit kids to convert regular gas engines to propane/ng, it seems like a slam dunk. The vast majority of such gases are unfortunately of the long carbon cycle, fossil so to speak, and thus as fiendishly greenhousey as gasoline, yet of lesser energy density. The volumes harvestable from short carbon cycle sources are lamentable in comparison, examples being rotten garbage, fermented grass or digested organics in gaseous form, expelled from mammalian anuses.
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Sep 24, 2014 23:24
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Time to start investing in those fart factories I guess.
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Sep 25, 2014 19:44
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I'm sitting on a goldmine
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Sep 25, 2014 21:37
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I rode a scooter for the first time ever three weeks ago and had it for two weeks. After getting over the fact you are stuck doing 80 (Km/h) max' I loved it. No clutch work or gear shifting in traffic is loving sweet. I HATE the noise of little engines, I bought an electric lawn mower just to get away from small engines. Now the sound and feel of a V-twin or Straight four with a good exhaust is something to love but for a daily commute I'd rate an electric bike. If the rego' was cheap like it is for 125s here then so much the better. Quite, smooth, cheap to run, no smells, no oils let me at it.
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Oct 8, 2014 12:39
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I rode the Harley Livewire today. It was fantastic. They won't be able to make enough of them.
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Oct 12, 2014 04:13
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mad.radhu posted:I rode the Harley Livewire today. It was fantastic. They won't be able to make enough of them. I'd anybody else signed up to do this in Los Angeles this weekend? I'll be there Friday at noon.
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Oct 23, 2014 04:48
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I picked saturday but now when I check the site it doesn't have my time in. I'm gonna show up with a print out confirmation and see wassup.
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Oct 23, 2014 06:23
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Trip report: it's an electric bike. I had fun. There's nothing to me that seems "Harley" about it other than the people at the demo and the other riders in my group. All characteristics of the bike seem like they'd be the case on any electric (though this was my first). I liked the really aggressive slowing on throttle-off, though coming from my KLR I did apply too much rear brake and coupled with the regen it caused me to lock the rear tire once for a good stretch near the beginning of the ride. Mirror placement was poo poo, though I think that's how it is with most bikes and I'm just not used to that.
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Oct 28, 2014 17:43
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What kind of idiot riding position is this? His arms are locked-out straight and his back already looks uncomfortably curved. How are you expected to steer the thing if you need to kiss the odometer to un-lock your elbows?
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Oct 30, 2014 12:17
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What's the solution for people that don't have an outlet where they park their bike? I have secure parking in a garage but there's no outlets, and as far as I can tell zero and brammo don't have the ability to take the battery out to charge in your house.
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Nov 18, 2014 03:10
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Depending on the length of your commute, do your primary charging at work? Is there an outlet that you can run an appropriate gauge extension cord to?
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Nov 18, 2014 12:21
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Normal cords for bikes nowadays, and I totally could, the problem is I don't always work full days. Sometimes it's only 3-4 hours, or a split shift. Also days off I'd like to go for rides.
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Nov 18, 2014 16:22
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REIhSasJTSo 
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Nov 18, 2014 17:31
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Happening not in the us...... That swappable pack is the killer feature though, that will be amazing
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Nov 18, 2014 20:02
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So glad that finally a major company is dipping their dick in to the e-market. Once one of the Big 4 releases an e-bike, it should be all downhill from there. Still jonesing for an e-bike, but in the short term will have to satisfy myself with renting a fully-electric Fiat off RelayRides while visiting Portland. One of the most depressing things about being interested in electric motorcycles is seeing some cool image pop up on Google, wondering how soon it'll be out... and finding out it was announced as "coming really soon" ages ago. Case in point, Honda EV Cub, announced in 2009 for 2010 release. drat I would love one of these:  The way my career's building with this startup, I might end up based out of several difference cities in the world, and if e-bikes become affordable enough and non-lovely enough in the near future, and career picks up enough to be slightly baller, I would absolutely love to have a small ebike in Austin, in Bogota, in Istanbul, and just whenever I come to town go to whatever friend is holding it for me, take off the dustcover, and fire it up.
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Nov 23, 2014 18:15
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