471–480 of 616 posts
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So what? Not everyone wants to live in a communist hellscape where everything is regulated to death.
And like the NRA also says, "Unless you're attending an NRA convention, in which case please leave your firearms at home or use one of our provided lockers, because gun-free zones are a communist hellscape except here, and please pass through this metal detector too."
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I see kids blasting around at high speeds without helmets. Kids treat them like fast bikes you do not have to pedal. Wiping out on a bike at 13mph is a very different proposition to wiping out on a bike at higher speeds. I saw just a couple nights ago some kid doing what appeared to be about 40mph on an eBike. Wind in his hair, not pedaling, just blasting it. I am sure new regulations will come to speed limit them, b…
On a decent hill you can get a regular bike going >60mph. A dirt bike will let you ride off road at nice speeds over random terrain (no licensing required when not on public roads). In the realm of bikes, these are not an outlier. Limiters are easily overcome and speed limits are barely enforced on cars, let alone bikes. When you get a bike like this you deal with the danger and wear protective gear just like you wou…
Yes, I've done this before by riding all the way up a local mountain on a road bike, clad in lycra, then on the way down I went over 60mph. It was terrifying and the physical fitness required to get up there in the first place required months of riding to actually do it. Meanwhile literal kids ride these on pavements, in between people, in cities where pedestrians walk - it's simply not acceptable. And I do own and ride an ebike(limited to 15.5mph) legally.
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What is the issue? I've seen people on those bikes and they look fun to ride.
I see kids blasting around at high speeds without helmets. Kids treat them like fast bikes you do not have to pedal. Wiping out on a bike at 13mph is a very different proposition to wiping out on a bike at higher speeds. I saw just a couple nights ago some kid doing what appeared to be about 40mph on an eBike. Wind in his hair, not pedaling, just blasting it. I am sure new regulations will come to speed limit them, b…
Saw an ebike zip past me at about 40 MPH in a wheelie, little motor screaming, splitting a lane in traffic. (El Camino Real, Silicon Valley). If anything happens ahead of them, they're toast. Can't stop and can't evade.
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And here is the problem. They are already supposed to be speed limited if it's an e-bike. It's easy to tell the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle, but the difference between an e-bike and electric motorcycle is far more subtle. And most electric motorcycles lie and market themselves as e-bikes.
> And most electric motorcycles lie and market themselves as e-bikes. Because they have pedals which nobody uses. In theory, it's pedal assist, but kids aren't really pedaling eBikes, they are using them like electric motorcycles. You might think: Hey, how can you tell the difference between somebody using an eBike with pedal assist if so many of them look just like regular bikes? I don't really see young people peda…
Where do you live - over here(North of England) most kids ride bikes, especially to school. And not ebikes either - actual regular pedal bikes.
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I'm super excited to fly an electric plane, but a lightweight motor isn't what's gonna make that possible. My current plane carries 561 kwh of energy in a 100 pound/ 17gal gas tank. Even if you say the engine is only 30% efficient, I am still carrying an absolute shitload of energy compared to what I could get out of 100 lbs of lithium batteries. The actual motor only weighs 84 lbs. So I have a weight budget of 184 l…
Quoting myself: > Hybrid aircraft? What if there was a battery large enough for takeoff and landing, a small motor (or pair for redundancy) for cruising and to recharge the battery, and motors and fans or propellers wherever is best from an aerodynamic perspective. Would this be better than a conventional design? I don’t know, but availability of very high power-to-weight motors would help.
Take a modern small aero engine like the Rotax 912. It comes in an 80hp version that weighs 122 pounds and a 100 hp version that weighs 144 lbs. Hard to beat that kind of power/weight.
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Well, hood and grill shapes are mandated for pedestrian safety but everyone else is fucked.
Then how is the Cybertruck legal on US roads? It's got sharp edges both front and rear
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The other aspect is that a smaller motor with the same power generally has higher efficiency, by necessity, since it has less heat dissipation. So higher power and higher efficiency and lower size/weight all go together. It’s a great synergy.
Is it always true that a smaller motor with the same power has less heat dissipation? It doesn't seem all that obvious to me.
Obviously if you go from eg. a large air-cooled motor to a smaller water-cooled motor, then the smaller motor could potentially dissipate more heat, but that's a different scenario.
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I'm super excited to fly an electric plane, but a lightweight motor isn't what's gonna make that possible. My current plane carries 561 kwh of energy in a 100 pound/ 17gal gas tank. Even if you say the engine is only 30% efficient, I am still carrying an absolute shitload of energy compared to what I could get out of 100 lbs of lithium batteries. The actual motor only weighs 84 lbs. So I have a weight budget of 184 l…
Very curious about this because there are electric planes in testing, so how do they do it?
The Pipistrel is probably the best example since it is actually available for sale in both ICE and electric. The ICE version of the airframe has 5.5 hours of cruise fuel good for 650 NM. The electric version has a payload that is 60% less, a ceiling of 12k feet compared to 18k feet, and an endurance of 56 minutes.
Basically, they are sacrificing range and payload. It isn't that electric planes can't possibly fly, its that ICE powered planes have a pretty hard to overcome advantage until battery power density increases by an order of magnitude. There are already mass market brushless motors that could replace most aircraft engines at a lower weight.
The problem is that gasoline holds 30x or more energy than a battery by weight. It doesn't matter if I can get replace 100 lbs of ICE engine with 1 lb of electric engine, because the real issue is that I would need a literal ton of batteries to replace less than 100 lbs of gas.
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There’s no area in the world that allows e-bikes with more than 750w motors. A 3kw motor is illegal (cf Surron), unless you are talking about an e-moped requiring registration.
They are not allowed, but still commonly owned and used. The law needs to catch up. There are clearly good reasons for people to want extremely powerful e-bikes and they should be allowed to. They can't be treated like bicycles because they're too fast but aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles. We need a new category for light motorcycles. The real problem, IMO, is that the law is generally not deferential enough…
What a ridiculous statement.
I don't think there's any inherrent difference, but until the laws catch up the "powerful e-bikes" are clearly more dangerous. Riding a traditional motorcycle requires a license, passing a driving test, and following the rules of the road - none of which are true for e-bikes.
But I'd love to hear why you think the opposite.
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Maybe... I think it would definitely help. I think just driving a smaller car that puts you in control might cause a lot of people to switch. I know that when I've done the opposite; gone from a very performance oriented car to a random person's SUV, I've felt extremely unsafe comparatively in breaking, merging, changing lanes, parking, etc. etc. I think most people just have little experience to compare it to anymor…
>I know that when I've done the opposite; gone from a very performance oriented car to a random person's SUV, I've felt extremely unsafe Which two cars? I've gone from a 911 to a BMW X5 and the X5 was just as fun for what it was. They are completely different cars, I'm not sure what you would expect and why you judge others.