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Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

jacquesmattheij.com

481–490 of 626 posts

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I specifically did not choose the word disingenuous. I asked him to be more ingenuous. His assertion was "there is absolutely no way you are going to sustain 40 Kph+ for anything but a very short period". I disagree, and I think minimizing the capabilities of these machines in the rhetoric is counterproductive to converting skeptics. In the US it's 100% legal to go 28MPH on them for as long as you can - which for me…

The full sentence was: “ The problem is that s-pedelecs are technically lumped in with the scooters, even though there is no throttle and there is absolutely no way you are going to sustain 40 Kph+ for anything but a very short period.” He is explicitly talking about S-Pedelecs which are the fastest legal E-Bikes in most of Europe. He never said that you are generally not able to sustain 40+ MPH in general.

He said KPH. That is about 25MPH. Legal in the US is 28MPH.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#482
post #38

Awesome project Jacques! I saw a comment of yours on an article a day or two ago and was hoping to see this pop up soon. I've found the most difficult thing about riding an e-bike is the other motorists have no idea how to react to you. You're not really a regular bicycle anymore due to your speed, but you're also not a motorcycle that deserves its own lane. I have at least one car turn in front of me almost every tr…

Cars misjudging the speed of oncoming bicycles is a huge problem, even without pedal assist. I have added significant length to my bike commute to avoid places where cars turn across my path. I can take a 1% risk once in a while, but not twice a day.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a JuicedBikes CrossCurrent X. They only made my particular configuration for a short amount of time around early 2018 - it has a massive battery, a 52v system, a 750W Bafang hub motor, and location tracking within the battery (though I stopped paying for it since I moved out of the city). Their newer models are just as, or even more capable. Yeah, that is the legal limit but I turned it off in the bios. When c…

"I disagree with your assertions about sustained speed because I turned off the assist limit." Okay, you should have said that in the first post. If you're not using the class of vehicle the comment was talking about, your experience isn't really relevant.

These vehicles are capable of doing so - they simply have a limiter on them. It's like saying an NVidia card can't mine cryptocurrency because they added a limiter in their drivers or something. Or that a truck with a governor on it could not go faster than that with the governor removed and no functional changes to power output.

Even so, I can go at least 4MPH greater than OP's suggested maximum speed legally.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I specifically did not choose the word disingenuous. I asked him to be more ingenuous. His assertion was "there is absolutely no way you are going to sustain 40 Kph+ for anything but a very short period". I disagree, and I think minimizing the capabilities of these machines in the rhetoric is counterproductive to converting skeptics. In the US it's 100% legal to go 28MPH on them for as long as you can - which for me…

A side pedantry note, in the hopes that it's appreciated: Usually "more ingenuous" would mean "more naive" or "more childlike" or "less capable of deceit", none of which seem to be what you intended.

Ah, I did not know of the naive/childlike connotation. I was simply using it as a synonym for something like candid, frank, truthful.

Thanks.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#485

> I hope this article will inspire people to look at e-bikes as potentially commuter car replacement, to send Bosch and other e-bike technology manufacturers a message that if they won’t supply what people need that they are going to have to live with people hacking their stuff and to get people to comment on the way the thing works, what they would do with it and how it could be improved or how I could work better/s…

LOL I built the first version of their android app back in the day. Can't speak to why they've been going after modders, but it's likely from a liability / legal standpoint. At the end of the day I still love their products and currently own an XR (may upgrade to a GT next spring!). At least for the earlier versions all the info was published as standard BLE descriptors, so building a third party lightweight app for…

Is it really liability? Because I really doubt that. People modify vehicles all the time and it causes unsafe driving that can lead to collisions. The car manufacturer doesn't get sued because somebody made a stupid change. Maybe it could be a super minor thing they use as an excuse to prevent modding, but I think the actual answer is what the other commenter mentioned. They don't want their own product competing with their newer products.

Someone won't buy their new product if they can just mod their existing product to get the same capabilities their new product gives.

See the thing is; I think a genuine company would encourage a modding community rather than discourage it. This example may not apply, but take a videogame like Minecraft. They didn't have modding support built into the game but people hacked the game and built in their own modding support on top of it. This then allowed a huge amount of people to be able to much more easily mod the game using a modding framework. The game is hugely moddable on both the client side and server side. It was so successful that there are many companies that employ multiple people to run their Minecraft servers and code minigames for them. The game likely wouldn't have taken off as much as it did without these modding capabilities that Mojang let go on.

I feel like more companies need to take this approach where they allow or even encourage modding. It brings more people to the platform. Especially in such a new market, making anti-consumer business decisions just seems like a good way to start your companies slow death.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an e-bike and I disagree with your assertions. I'm a fat asthmatic and I have absolutely no problem maintaining 40kph for long stretches of time on my bike. The fastest I've done on it (on a large hill but still) is 42.7MPH (~68Kph). Average cruising speed on flat land can easily be 30-33mph(48-53kph). Not all e-bikes are capable of this, but they are certainly not some kind of rare expensive impossibility - m…

If something has that average speed capability, why is not licensed, registered, insured and held accountable as any vehicle would be? My 50cc scooter appears to have comparable speeds (maybe 10kph higher), and I wear proper armour & helmet, took the classes passed the test, am registered, licenses & insured. That's my massive pet peeve & safety concern: I WANT to love e-Bikes, and all those sorts of things; and like…

I know here in Ontario, Canada we do have regulations for ebikes. They are not allowed to exceed 32km/h (or ~20 mph). This seems like a somewhat reasonable limit. They also impose other requirements like minimum wheel widths, having two independent braking systems with stopping distance requirements. You can't even ride them if you got a criminal conviction that prohibits driving (such as a DUI).

Reference: http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/driver/electric-bicycles-fa...

I think the only problem here is that some of these things can be hard to regulate with making random enforcement stops. And people typically aren't much of a fan of random stops which is understandable, I'm not either. So I guess you'd have to happen to catch them by LIDAR, but I don't even know how accurate such a reading would be against a small bike. Not sure it would be admissible in a court.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#487

I am surprised velomobiles are never mentioned: they are much faster than traditional bicycles, have some protection from the weather and can be electric assisted too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velomobile

They are super dangerous too. Very low to the ground, nearly invisible from the perspective of a motorist and far harder to overtake with on narrow bike paths than regular bikes. We have a couple of them near here, also a few battery assisted ones. The velomobile would be an ideal vehicle if everybody rode one.

I haven’t yet ridden a velomobile (though I may purchase one soon and am planning on building one for riding round Australia and living out of for a year or so), but I’ve been riding a recumbent tricycle (Greenspeed GT3 Series II) since 2014, including various touring in Australia (Victoria and some South Australia), America (through California, and from St Louis to Philadelphia) and New Zealand (Auckland to Kaikoura¹).

People often assume that the trike is more dangerous than an upright bike because of being lower, and there is some truth in that aspect, but on the balance of things I consider and find it much safer than an upright bicycle. The increased width increases visibility again somewhat; the fact that the maximum width is at ground level rather than over a metre up means that you can’t ride in the gutter as bicyclists often do and have to be further out from the edge of the road, which makes you much more visually distinct (rather than blending in with the edge); the fact that you’re necessarily further from the kerb makes it so that in many places cars can’t sneak by you dangerously close and have to be more considerate in how they overtake; you the cyclist are far more aware of how traffic is flowing due to your posture (constantly beholding the world in front of you rather than craning your neck painfully from time to time, and with a mirror² in which you can also constantly monitor what’s coming up behind) and so can interact more usefully with it (which is a massive deal for safety). I always run at least one flag, and when heavily laden drape the back of one of my old hi-vis orange shirts over the back of my load. Combine all that with the inherent stability (which incidentally helps you to go in an actually straight line), the greater comfort, the low centre of gravity and a few other such factors, and I feel very significantly less safe when riding an upright bicycle (road or mountain), as I have a handful of times since getting my trike.

Recumbent bicycles (as you seem to be showing talking of in part) I have no experience with; they indeed have some notable problems for casual use, and are more suited for racing. When talking of velomobiles, make sure you’re considering their tri- or quadricycle basis, as distinct from two-wheeled speedliners which have a tendency to amplify some of the problems or hazards of recumbent bicycles even further. Of velomobiles in general compared with recumbents, I have heard some people reporting that traffic sometimes interacted with them more like a strange small car than like a strange bicycle, and that they felt slightly less safe.

—⁂—

¹ At Kaikoura just a couple of weeks ago I suffered unexpected and unexplained sidewall failure in my rear tyre, upon which I discovered that literally no one in the entire country stocks 349mm tyres—the national Schwalbe distributor, for example, doesn’t import anything below 20″. So instead of cycling the rest of the way to Christchurch I took a bus, and on returning to Australia last week equipped a spare I had, and I can buy more.

² On uprights, mirrors don’t tend to work well for lack of suitable attachment points and techniques, but on recumbent tricycles they work much better, and on recumbents in general mirrors are nigh essential as seeing behind otherwise takes leaning forwards out of your seat a fair way in order to twist your body enough to see behind adequately.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#488
post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's what I thought. I had fallen many times with recumbents and never the slightest problem, because you're so close to the ground. And then my foot hit the ground, ever so briefly. And that's a failure mode I never really considered but what happened next went pretty quick and irreversible once it starts: your foot hits the ground, the bike moves a little bit forward, this puts more pressure on your foot, so…

That's a well known issue and why people are generally advised to only ever ride recumbents with cleats (or heel slings or similar). And in any case it doesn't affect velomobiles for obvious reasons.

The very first thing I did on getting my recumbent tricycle was to swap my cleat pedals in (rather than the ones it came with, with a plastic foot cage), and I shudder to imagine the result of feet falling to the road at 30km/h.

Of velomobiles, remember that they normally have foot wells; if uncovered, the harm of feet falling will still be reduced, but not absent.

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#489
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious - what ebike do you have that can easily cruise at 48-53 kph for extended periods? In most countries that would be far above the legal limits imposed on ebikes. As a result, the ebikes available for purchase are all limited to 25-32 kph max and typically have power limits of 250-300 W. Since ebikes are a lot heavier, exceeding 32 kph for more than a few seconds is generally very difficult. I don't think G…

> I'm curious - what ebike do you have that can easily cruise at 48-53 kph for extended periods? Those speeds sound like bogus. I can maintain about 40kph on my ebike on a flat surface, but that requires pedaling in addition to the motor and is a fairly energetic exercise. Also, pushing beyond 45kph, you really start to feel the air resistance and it becomes exponentially harder to go beyond 45kph for any long period…

> you really start to feel the air resistance and it becomes exponentially harder to go beyond 45kph

Nitpick: it becomes cubically harder. ;)

Re: Show HN: Long Range E-Bike

#490
post #268

Ha awesome! Sorry if I missed it, but I didn't see a mention of the weight of the battery pack by itself, how much does the custom pack add?

It adds about 7 kg.

So that’s 7kg extra for your 2150Wh, over the original 500Wh battery? So around 250Wh/kg?

I’ve been planning a velomobile that I can live out of, and I’ve been interested to observe that by the time you get to one kilowatt hour, I can’t find any Li-ion batteries at all: they’re all LiFePO₄. https://au.renogy.com/renogy-smart-lithium-iron-phosphate-ba... is then about 1280Wh (12.8V/100Ah) for 11.8kg, 110Wh/kg, around half the specific energy (though I haven’t excluded the weight of the controller electronics or any differences in casing). But I understand LiFePO₄ will live longer, and is generally safer (less prone to thermal runaway and whatnot).

I’m guessing you were going with Li-ion because you were working in the Bosch ecosystem (and potentially for weight as well), but do you happen to have any wisdom to offer about the differences between Li-ion and LiFePO₄?

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