561–570 of 616 posts
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I specifically said supermarkets, not grocery stores. I acknowledge they're not the same thing, but Walmart absolutely is a supermarket. And I'll pass on visiting the US why y'all have armed police running around tackling people & disappearing them, and are demanding social media passwords only to refuse entry if you've been critical of Dear Leader. Sort your shit out, then maybe.
Supermarket and grocery store are basically synonyms in the US. Walmart would be called a superstore or box store.
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That’s completely unrelated to whether these bikes are safe. HN articles are not part of some zero-sum competition between the US and Europe.
Apparently, just this year, a total of 366 people have been killed and 1,668 people have been wounded in 374 shootings, as of October 31, 2025.
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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…
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I'm more fascinated by the question of whether it scales up... imagine much smaller and more efficient electric engines for cruise liners and cargo ships.
Your average cruiseship already has an electric engine, they just have massive generators onboard to power it.
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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.
All else held equal, I think so, yeah. If you have the same temperature differential, the same manner of heat dissipation, and a smaller surface area then that should mean smaller heat dissipation, yeah? 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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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…
If we’re talking about high powered e-bikes, I don’t want them on the sidewalk either. Once they exceed the current regulations they’re in the moped/motorcycle category.
> There's not much else to take away, and the rules right now are unreasonable enough that cyclists always break them.
So what’s your suggestion? Let people ride electric motorcycles on sidewalks? Change the laws so that high powered e-bikes don’t have to follow the rules of the road?
I don’t think the current laws are unreasonable. I live in a place where people routinely ride their e-bikes on the sidewalks and it’s absolutely awful, especially with young children. Every time we go somewhere I have to hold their hands and yank them off the sidewalk at least once to dodge another e-bike zooming past. I can only hope enforcement catches up and starts impounding bikes from people breaking the law and issuing large fines, because I don’t know how else to stop this.
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The problem for electric motorcycles is the battery weight.
That can be offset by not requiring the same sort of range that's typically assumed to be required. While I'll be likely be riding my ICE bikes for decades because one of the things I do on them is trips with 1000 or 1500km days, truth is the vast majority of my riding is sub 25km round trips from my place. Most of my friends places, a lot of the places I shop or socialise, and the office (which I pretty much never g…
Maybe what you want is a large electric bike like a Surron or similar?
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A basic BMW 5 series is over 2 tonnes, with the top spec model tipping the scales at 2.5 tonnes. I mean I agree with the general sentiment but it's not just SUVs that need to go on a diet. Everything is getting heavier and heavier and heavier.
I see the same trend. My thoughts: 2 tonnes of shit sells for more than 1 tonne of shit. 650 HP entices a lot more people than 1,200kg. I usually have to dig to find the weight of the vehicle. It's a consumer education problem more than anything imo.
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All else held equal, I think so, yeah. If you have the same temperature differential, the same manner of heat dissipation, and a smaller surface area then that should mean smaller heat dissipation, yeah? 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.
We only know that the large and the small motor deliver the same power. I don't see how we can conclude from that the temperature differential is also equal. In fact I would expect a smaller motor to have a larger temperature differential, because the heat is produced concentrated in a smaller volume.
The other assumption I probably should have stated is that the two motors are made of similar materials with similar temperature limits. We know the ambient temperature and we know the maximum temperature of the materials used. So for a component made of those materials, existing in that ambient temperature, with an additional heat load proportional to the waste heat in the motor...
The ability to shed heat (assuming similar forced fan cooling, as we were) determines the amount of power we can deliver to the device without increasing its temperature.