cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16133154
Link to original Tweet: https://x.com/DavidZipper/status/1795048724021862898
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16133154
Link to original Tweet: https://x.com/DavidZipper/status/1795048724021862898
e bikes are real cool but i wouldn’t call them “innovative,” it’s kind of an obvious idea
from the perspective of USian treat demons who view as an affront any drop of sweat excreted outside of a private business that is legally registered as a gym, they are extremely innovative.
More seriously it’s just that battery power density & expense has reached the point where these can economically replace 99% of peoples’ transportation needs in a city.
On one hand they can be innovative in that you don’t just have to buy a whole new bike, there a loads of kits to convert your existing bike to be an e-bike and they are effective and pretty easy to install. That’s pretty innovative if you ask me. I also think for a lot of people who live in the right climate (most places) that an e-bike is most likely all they need for most of their travel/commute.
However, there is an aspect of it that I think is so American and that is - so would a little scooter like they use in most of SE Asia. But that’s seen as a vehicle for the “poor countries”. Also, we have had the trend in American since the automobiles conception to make ours bigger and more dangerous to everyone not inside it. So we have this situation where our roads and streets are designed for Armored Personnel Carriers that every drives and for everyone else its super deadly. And those APCs are a big element of our economy who have powerful lobbyists. So they pay for articles like this to be written and people love their APCs so much that they can’t stand that they might be slightly inconvenienced by having to consider cyclists, skaters, and pedestrians. The idea they might have to consider them is so egregious to their sense of travel entitlement that they would rather consider vehicular murder than accommodate them for even a moment.
You could’ve invented Karl Drais original velocipede pretty much any time after the invention of the (hollow) wheel, it is not a complicated machine by any means, and it still took us around 3700 years to do it.
Albeit, powered bicycles have been around for a good while, they just usually had 2-strokes. In the world of e-bikes there’s some arguably nifty innovation coming out now that power can be a solved issue for reasonable distances, like bicycle CVTs.
Who will invent ball bearings though? I would think with dogshit manufacturing precision plain bearings worked like shit. (But I would like to know more
)
Don’t really need those for the original velocipede any more than you do an old timey wagon, spindle or trunnion system works fine.
EDIT: I once got to rode a replica and it just had a spindle for the wheels and you really did notice they’re kind of loose but it’s pretty much whatever, you always have one foot touching the ground anyways, it still works out to be a lot faster than walking at about the same energy if you have some sort of solid ground that isn’t cobblestone.