The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
pogue.blogs.nytimes.com
The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
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Re: The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
#2That's pretty sweet. But $500 is where it'll catch on, not $3,600.
Re: The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
#3It'd feel awfully strange riding a bike without my hands out in front of me. Also:
* My crappy commuter bike probably costs between 1 and 5% of the price of this thing.
* How's it deal with rain/dirt?
* Sometimes I do want to just lock it up. Imagine going to the grocery store... at 22 pounds you don't want to haul it around inside. I have a lot more peace of mind locking up my cheap commuter bike outside.
Still, it looks like it's beautifully engineered.
Re: The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
#4It'd feel awfully strange riding a bike without my hands out in front of me. Also: * My crappy commuter bike probably costs between 1 and 5% of the price of this thing. * How's it deal with rain/dirt? * Sometimes I do want to just lock it up. Imagine going to the grocery store... at 22 pounds you don't want to haul it around inside. I have a lot more peace of mind locking up my cheap commuter bike outside. Still, it…
It was either going to be you or I who responded ;)
My biggest concern when I saw this originally was the emergency braking scenario. Which basically involves doing a face plant and using your nose and forehead to slow you down by embedding it in the floor.
One of the selling points mentioned in the article is, "you can jump forward off the bike in a crisis; there’s no hardware in your way". Which seems strange as every accident I've had or come perilously close to has been hitting something head-on (from the cyclist perspective... such as peds who walk out in front of you, or cars coming out from a side street).
The weirdest thing I find though is just the speed. These things tend to be speed limited as this helps classify them separately from the soon to be coming breed of electric scooters and motorcycles. Obv' electric bike manufacturers do not want to be forced in complying with that set of regulations and all that it entails. But the speed limiting is such that even a commuter on a cheap bike is going to be going the same speed, and a fit commuter will achieve a higher average speed than someone on this thing.
Re: The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
#5You can buy regular bicycles with little electric motors on them here in Japan for about $1,000. That seems a lot more reasonable than completely redesigning the bicycle...
Re: The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
#6Seems kind of overdone. You can barely use the sidewalk in Tokyo without getting knocked down by a middle-aged woman with a huge sun-visor, a bag of groceries and two kids strapped to something like this:
http://us.sanyo.com/Commercial-eneloop-bike
They're just like a regular bike but they assist you when you climb up hills or just plain get tired. The battery behind the seat-tube slides out for a recharge. I would say about 20% of the bikes you see parked by a train station are electric hybrids.
edit: I will say though, that the foldability part of this is nice, but I prefer the hybrid approach of a standard bike.
Re: The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
#7Bicycles enjoy a kind of special status in the US when it comes to tort law and manufacturer liability that is shared with many other older designs. People know they are dangerous and automatically accept this. Things like table saws, ladders, kitchen knives, and roller skates are other examples of things that fit this category.
Inventors of this type of device face a steep uphill climb in the litigious climate of today's United States because its so completely different than traditional bikes. I'm not saying its impossible, I'm just saying that things like this will be magnets for the lawsuit-lottery.
I wonder what the ratio of lawsuits/Segway vs. lawsuits/Schwinn happens to be...
Re: The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
#8Seems kind of overdone. You can barely use the sidewalk in Tokyo without getting knocked down by a middle-aged woman with a huge sun-visor, a bag of groceries and two kids strapped to something like this: http://us.sanyo.com/Commercial-eneloop-bike They're just like a regular bike but they assist you when you climb up hills or just plain get tired. The battery behind the seat-tube slides out for a recharge. I would s…
IMHO the foldability part is the main point. The typical usage seems to be home -> bus or tube stop -> public transport -> office. Here in UK you can't take bycicles in buses or tube. There are indeed foldable bikes (http://www.brompton.co.uk/) but they are a pain to (un)fold and they are not electric.
Still, price and limited autonomy are real issues. At 1K$ and 20 miles of autonomy I would probably buy one.
Re: The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
#9You can buy regular bicycles with little electric motors on them here in Japan for about $1,000. That seems a lot more reasonable than completely redesigning the bicycle...
I doubt many japanese take those on the subway though! I don't recall seeing standard bicycles on the tokyo metro at all, in fact.
To the person who said you prefer to lock it up outside a grocery store - what exactly stops you from doing that with this device?
The cost is a major stumbling block; mind you, I see a lot of heinously expensive road bikes around London, and I suppose their actual utility is lower (harder to take onto buses and rail services; harder to store at home, in the street or at the office; not electric)
I'd be interested to see a study done on the device's eco credentials; I've heard persuasive arguments that electric bikes are greener than pedal powered bikes when you consider the petrochemical requirements of a pedal bike's energy source (your food)...
Re: The Commuter Bike Redesigned and Electrified
#10Clearly someone hasn't read PG's The Trouble With The Segway: http://paulgraham.com/segway.html