…are very much McLaren and not some rebadged catalogue frame. "Designed by the same teams responsible for supercars like the electrified lightweight McLaren Artura hybrid supercar…
I’m not sure whether that’s the flex they think it is. I’d rather have my bike designed by people who have a lot of experience, you know, designing and refining bikes.
I guess McLaren never heard of HPC they make a much more powerful E Bike that is fully compliant with US class 2 regulations. Which seems to be about the same and “trail legal” based on watts.
The HCP Revolution X comes with either a 6000 or 7000 watt motor which is a bit more than McLaren’s 852 watt motor.
Before anyone says the HPC must be an off road bike only. It is road legal in the US and McLaren’s bike wouldn’t be.
I actually like McLaren I just think it’s silly when top end car manufacturers do this kind of thing. Especially when they don’t bother to check if the PR hype is even true.
The Extreme 600 and Sport 600 models are hailed as the most powerful street-legal electric bikes, with up to 852W of peak power.
That’s really not that much. I’m sure it’s a very high quality bike, but for raw power, you can get several times that from Chinese ebikes. They don’t really care about the regulations, and there are bikes with several kilowatt motors. Although the line between “mountain bike” and “motocross bike” start blurring a tad at that point because the motors and batteries increase the heft of the bike a bit.
I’d still definitely take the McLaren, as I’m sure they’re engine is far superior and 500+ watts properly utilised is quite sufficient.
Maybe I'm blind because
with all this price I don't see any gears.
Also because off-road tires, and only 250w. My 250w ebike is similar (even in weight!) but was way cheaper (both in terms of cost and build quality) and I couldn't imagine it being even half-as-viable with single-speed. The folding design of this sure looks better that mine, though.
Said before, when I had my leg muscles built up I had thought about getting a smaller/lighter non-e bike. Like some tri-fold clone or perhaps some used Minivelo.
Many conversion kits available online do not include the battery, an essential component of any e-bike. The selection of a suitable battery and charger is left to the consumer to source and ensure compatibility.
This seems like a policy failure in the UK, if manufacturers are unwilling/unable to include the battery with a conversion kit. I think it’s fair to say that of the people looking for a conversion kit, many are looking to build an ebike to a particular price point. If the laws and regulations are leading to a situation where incompatibilities are likely and very hazardous, then it may be time to raise the floor of the market and require that all conversion kits come with a compatible battery – and probably a battery warranty.
If it’s a question of customs controls for cheap, imported goods, then that’s a governance failure. I’m informed that events in 2016 were meant to secure the British border re: goods and regulations, so we’ll see if that actually plays out.
The thing is, most of these “conversion kits” convert a bicycle into an illegal motorbike, not into a legal pedelec. There’s no way government will - or should - make that easier
I feel attacked by the statement that diy builds are the biggest risk. Mine is definitely better than the budget prebuilts I’ve tried and one of those while it wasn’t a fire did have a battery failure. I’d actually be tempted to go even cheaper on the motor. I got a cyc photon but I actually prefer the modded tzds2 on my brothers bike for a few reasons.
Stop trying to make hubless wheels work. A normal bicycle wheel is stronger, lighter, simpler, and the bearings only have to handle the lower speed at the center of the wheel, instead of the speed found closer to the rim.
Electric mountain bikes aren’t allowed on mountain in Colorado but keeping those asshats out is kind of a pain. They bought the expensive toy, now it’s everybody else’s problem because the money spent justifies that.
I’m guessing this is mostly about what are effectively electric motorbikes. In Finland you’re not allowed to drive motor vehicles on other people’s land without their permission but pedal assist eBikes with 250W motor and limited to 25kph (15mph) are considered bicycles by law and those you are allowed to ride anywhere.
Vehicle culture is just generally different here in the United States. Even if sane, rational rules for ebikes were to be established they’d be ignored out of spite. For any idea of the quality of individuals I’m talking about, yesterday I saw two separate vehicles enter the bus station by passing the “DO NOT ENTER” sign, realize that the road they were on wasn’t going to their fucking hotel or wherever they were heading, drive up onto the pedestrian portion of the bus station, turn around, and leave the wrong direction on a one way street. Speaking specifically for bicycles I’ve been doing trail maintenance and had a mountain biker come at me screaming because we were out there working and were in his way after he passed a sign telling him the trail was closed and climbed a fence we put up just after the sign as a result of previous and similar incidents.
Edit: I should probably clarify what I meant by ‘on mountain’ that’s just kind of shorthand slang for the property controlled by the local ski resort. Though the feds have similar rules, so buying an electric mountain bike around here is stupid since all you’ve done is spent at least another $2,000 on a bicycle you can’t legally use outside of your private property.
I like that the author hit it right on the head, with regards to the “hubless ebike”:
The futuristic-looking eBike doesn’t save any weight by not having hubs with it hitting the scales at a claimed 26kg/58lb.
For those not familiar with the design of conventional (read: acoustic) bicycle wheels, they’re not really any different than ebike wheels; the physics are mostly the same. Save for maybe that ebikes draw more from fat-tire and MTB wheels than road bike wheels, they all draw from 200 years of converging innovation. To that end, today’s spoked wheels and rubber pneumatic tires are highly optimized for the application. The late Sheldon Brown wrote this about the bicycle wheel:
A tire, then, supports its load by reduction of downward pull, very much the same way that spoking of the wheel supports its load. The tension-spoked wheel and the pneumatic tire are two examples of what are called preloaded tensile structures, brilliant, counterintuitive designs working together remarkably to support as much as 100 times their own weight.
Airless tires have been obsolete for over a century, but crackpot “inventors” keep trying to bring them back. They are heavy, slow and give a harsh ride. They are also likely to cause wheel damage, due to their poor cushioning ability. A pneumatic tire uses all of the air in the whole tube as a shock absorber, while foam-type “airless” tires/tubes only use the air in the immediate area of impact. They also corner poorly.
Adding ebike technology does not overcome the problems of hubless and airless wheels, and barring some sort of specific need for the wheel centers to remain clear, this is pure gimmick.
A pneumatic tire uses all of the air in the whole tube as a shock absorber, while foam-type “airless” tires/tubes only use the air in the immediate area of impact.
This makes no sense to me. All that matters is how much the tire deforms from an impact, and at what speed. Using “all the air” isn’t some magical benefit. Ultimately it’s the rubber of the tire that has to deform to absorb the shock. It’s good that there is air behind it because solid rubber wouldn’t deform properly and the fact that air compresses means the rubber will deform deeply. There’s nothing saying a properly engineered foam wouldn’t behave exactly as well.
The cells of the foam are all touching each other. Shock will propogate from the are of impact and travel through the entire tire. That’s true no matter what material is used.
This guy is a cyclist, not a physicist or materials engineer. I would take anything he says with a grain of salt.
His website looks like it was made in 1990. Not that that’s a criticism of his person. But damn.
There’s nothing saying a properly engineered foam wouldn’t behave exactly as well.
I posit to you that a pneumatic tire is exactly the “properly engineered foam” you describe: a closed, single cell foam with a substantial enclosed volume, leveraging the high tensile strength and toughness of its steel or Kevlar threads for the cell walls.
I’m also no physicist, but minimalist engineering would tend toward reduction of mass and surface area. Multi cellular foams need to expend material for the inter-cell walls. A single cell of equal volume and similar material has only its single, outer cell wall. Plus, just because a cell encloses a smaller volume doesn’t make it any stronger than a larger cell, so no advantage is gained nor lost by having a single cell.
Can a multicell foam be used as a tire? Of course we can press it into that use. Humanity has made concrete float, after all. But will foam be superior in cost, strength efficiency, weight, rotational intertia, roadside repairability, or in-field tunability by changing the air pressure? No. Instead, as the renowned cyclist described in the earlier link, an airless tire would have to compete on its strength of damage resistance:
They might make sense is if you commute a short distance to catch a train, and a flat tire would mean missing the train and being very late to work.
This type of scenario is no different for an acoustic or electric bike, and so there’s no apparent reason that ebikes should necessarily prefer airless tires. The pneumatic tire’s speed and range benefit still make it the preferred wheel technology for most automobile, bicycles, and airplanes. In space, that’s a different question altogether.
Eventough you are getting downvoted I’m going to have to agree with you.
Not to say air tires aren’t currently better than foam because they probably are. But like you say, there is probably some foam that can be better than air. Air isn’t magic, but it is good at its job.
Bicycle means two wheels, so a motorbike technically is a bicycle, too.
But e-bikes are closer to non-e-bikes than to motorcycles in terms of components, looks and propulsion.
as you said: a motor bike is technically a bicycle. ok. then the feature that makes a different name is the motor, isn’t it? then a bicycle with a motor is a motorbike.
If you're talking about specific models, sure. But if you ask a group of people "Who's here by bicycle today?" the ones that came with an e-bike would raise their hands, too.
sure because bicycle is the generic for e-bikes too but this is not the discussion
the discussion is about changing the name for the bikes that doesn’t have a motor just because now the e-bikes are popular in some countries despite the fact that bicycles historically don’t have a motor and the number of bikes without motor is largely superior than the ones with
even the term e-bikes is incorrect! an e-bike should be a bicycle with a dynamo that produces electricity again a bicycle with a dynamo was invented earlier and I suppose there are more bikes with a dynamo than bikes with motor
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