this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Wait, what? I drain my battery every day. I need more energy density, not less. I do use my bike for long trips, driving a car during rush hour sucks, parking fees are insanely high and parking spots are rare. I sold my car and do everything by electric bike. But after 2 hours of cycling at 32km/h I need to charge.
I meant the ~300 mile ranges common in electric cars. That’s a long trip. Plus if the car rolls to a stop by the side of the road you just gotta have it towed or charge it up in the field somehow, electric bikes have pedals.
It sucks to pedal a heavy ass ebike but you can do it in a pinch to get where you need to go.
Yeah, have fun peddling a heavy as fuck ebike when you're 1 hour 32km/h drive away from home. That's over 2h of super heavy cycling because you're going super slow.
I have. It sucks but it’s possible and because I live in a mountainous area I avoid that problem by using less assist so everything lasts longer.
The broader point I was trying to make is that If you’re trying to allocate the limited raw materials to the types of transport that benefit people the most then pushing e-bikes to lead acid makes a lot of sense. Yeah, the bikes could benefit from a more power dense battery, but they have backup pedals and ultimately their rider is the majority of the loaded bikes weight.
Electric cars and trucks weigh at least ten times what a person does and are generally used for longer distances than e-bikes so it makes more sense to use very energy dense batteries in them.
Again, I’m speaking from a position that recognizes the proliferation of electric vehicles in China and recognizes that the raw materials used to make lithium batteries are finite and in high demand, not from the position of trying to optimize the e-bike.
Seems like cars don't all need 300 mi range, but a 5 lb weight difference in a bike is huge.
Five pounds is the grocery bag dangling off my flat bar.
Anyone who actually has done that knows that it always ends up swinging around and ending up in the spokes if you go fast enough.
Also 5 lbs is not a big deal when it's detachable, but it matters a lot more when it's part of a large 30+ lb object you're carrying up the stairs to your apartment.
Wait so would you leave your groceries outside while you carried in your bike?
Personally I use a backpack ever since the groceries in the spokes incident
So you carry the groceries upstairs at the same time as your bike?
Have you heard of torque by happenchance?
How much does torque come into play when you’re carrying your bike upstairs?
The part where lifting a mass on a long lever is not easier than carrying it close to your body
Yeah when I had to take my bike upstairs I would just hoist it over my shoulder then hold the grocery bags in the same hand so it’s close.
Weve gotten far afield and I’m genuinely thinking you made that comment thinking a person might leave their Walmart bag hanging off their handlebars while carrying the bike in…
What are you talking about?
I'm talking about how a heavy bike is worse than a car with less than 300 mi range, relatively speaking.
Okay but you’re not lifting the bike by its chainstay and swinging it around like a claymore or something, you lift at the center of mass, which in an e-bike is at the battery or damn close to it. It’s why they’re all in the triangle or under the rear rack and in the latter case manufacturers get away with it because you put the bike over your shoulder and use your hand on the bars to stabilize it thereby reducing the impact the battery weight makes on the bikes portageability through the use of the same lever whose fulcrum is your shoulder.
A lot of what you’re saying seems to me to be dancing around the point of “I want an incredibly light, fast e-bike, not a 50lb grocery getter”, and I truly understand that desire. But the reality of the e-bike buying public is that people want those 50lb grocery getters.
It’s the same as the car market. I want a manual everything, decently high displacement inline four with a manual transmission, manual 4wd, crawler gear and enough ground clearance that dirt roads aren’t an issue. Everyone else wants maximum fuel economy and lots of features so all the cars accommodate that set of desires instead of mine.
I would say I'm something of an expert about lifting bikes because I've lifted hundreds and hundreds into storage hooks on the ceiling at the shop I worked at, as well as at my own place. It absolutely is worse having to manhandle a heavier bike. If the average ebike is 50 lbs no way would it be workable for me on a daily basis, and no way would it be feasible to pedal home if the battery dies. A single hill and you'd be out of energy.
The distribution of weight matters a great deal. You can easily say that 5 lbs is the weight of groceries, but 2-3 lbs of heavier wheels would be much worse for getting up hills.
I don't see why you think I want an incredibly light and fast ebike. I just think it's more important to have a lighter bike, say 35 lbs vs 40 lbs, then it is too have 250 mi range than 300 in a car. I'm not going to get close to either number except on road trips, but I'll deal with the extra weight of the bike daily. It's ok if you don't share this opinion, we can agree to disagree.
Your preference in cars seems fine too, I don't see anything wrong with preferring one thing over another.
So I don’t think you don’t have the experience to say the stuff you do, I just have wildly different conclusions from my own experience.
I live in a place that’s 100% hills all the time. I am fat even after spending years cycling to get around. Sure everything below the waist is decent but the orthodontist gut ain’t going nowhere. Almost my entire adult life I’ve smoked cigarettes. I quit and it makes a difference but most of my saddle time is with a smoke hanging out of my mouth.
I carried over fifty pounds of groceries, garbage, equipment, camping gear and anything else you can imagine all the time.
Just about the only time I pushed the bike was when dimensional lumber was too wiggly to ride with.
The hill: checkmate, libtards!
Me, drooling, trying to fit a square block into a round hole: good luck, I’m behind 16 bar ends!
Now e-bike gearing is dogshit for pedaling and I think getting a drivetrain that can actually be operated by hand (or foot) is one of the factors people don’t consider near enough compared to top speed under throttle, but even then it just means you might have to get off and push sooner, not that the bike is unusable and most people around here realize what hills they need to hit at speed in order to make it after a few trips.
I also think your bringing up wheel weight is misleading though probably not on purpose. The wheels inertia has to be overcome before it can be translated into going some direction, so the wheel literally exerts a mechanical advantage against the rider and therefore isn’t comparable to increased weight tied to the frame like a battery.
I don’t think it’s an intentional error of comparison though because focusing on wheel weight is common to do. Its like the number two way to get better acceleration.
It’s doubly tough to defend because batteries aren’t stored in the wheels!
It’s triply tough to defend because at least one ebike wheel has a very high mass to begin with!
The point I was trying to make oh so long ago was that if you have a population that does a lot of cycling, have a bunch of public transportation and need to balance between allocating scarce resources for high density batteries to bikes with a low weight and inbuilt backup drive system or electric vehicles with a high weight and no backup drive it makes perfect sense to push a less energy dense solution on the bikes.
You say it’s better to have a light bike than to have fifty miles more range on an ev, but I think that’s incorrect. There are gonna be applications where the ev is the right choice and evs get more out of that energy density and bikes just don’t.
Just get rid of cars and fix proper biking and public transportation infrastructure. No need for that many cars, electric or not. Lithium is finite, the mines are horrible. But we're getting nuclear diamond batteries soon, they are a massive upgrade.
China has very developed bicycle infrastructure and massive public transportation compared to almost anywhere else. There are fewer car owners per capita than other countries. It’s still a smart play to use the hand of state to take steps to allocate the more energy dense batteries to applications that require them.
As I said before: Maybe these better chemistries that will replace lithium are just around the corner. I certainly don’t count unhatched chickens.