Posted on 05/18/2023 4:33:11 AM PDT by FarCenter
Visit Asia's emerging megacities and you’ll quickly notice that scooters and motorbikes vastly outnumber cars. Before long these fleets of two-wheelers will become battery-powered, always-connected, semi-autonomous machines that offer an even more potent alternative to their four-wheeled rivals.
The reasons powered two-wheelers dominate nations such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam – with a combined population over 1.75 billion – are simple: cars are unaffordable on local wages, few urban homes have space to store them, and warm climates make two-wheelers viable year-round. Plus, many of them sell for less than the equivalent of $1,000 apiece.
The industry has decided many will soon be electric and it looks like drivers will buy them.
"Electrification of micromobility can be adopted at a faster pace than cars, mainly because the motor and batteries are much smaller," Fook Fah Yap, a director at Singapore's Nanyang Technical University's Transport Research Centre told The Register.
Evidence of the shift is not hard to find. Earlier this year Honda announced it will start to sell by ten battery powered bikes in 2025. Yamaha expects 90 percent of its sales will be electrified by 2050 and Toyota is expected to announce an electric two-wheeler this year.
I don’t expect these to really catch on in New England.
So the government will have more charging stations built?
Alrighty then! More coal-fired power plants coming up!
“many of them sell for less than the equivalent of $1,000 apiece.”
Not the ones I’ve seen......nice try though. 👍
Nor in the south.
Americans will not use vehicles that do not heat them in the winter and cool them in the summer.
Check out the care info.
Toyota is going to sell a two-wheeler? Has there ever been a Toyota motorcycle produced in the past?
Toyo, a subsidiary, produced motorcycles from 1949 to 1960.
There is a relationship between Toyota and Yamaha.
“I don’t expect these to really catch on in New England.”
They don’t have to catch on with the masses, only the government dictators need to be sold.
https://www.samsclub.com/s/E%20Bike
Two e-bikes under a thousand at Sams Club.
They are starting to sell Down in Florida. You’ll see them at college campuses and McDonalds. Affordable for students.
I absolutely despise the concept of electric cars. Bikes however seem to have a purpose. A couple months ago I was in San Antonio for ten days for work. Having hurt my foot, I wasn’t looking forward to a lot of walking and used Bird scooters a lot.
They were handy and remarkably quick and nimble.
“Check out the care info.”
Yep, I read it. It basically says sit there and watch the battery charge, and then pull the plug the moment it reaches 100% (if you need to charge that high), as leaving it plugged in will degrade the battery.
Seems to me that it wouldn’t take much to write a few lines of code to perform that function without requiring some guy to look like an idiot staring at his scooter for hours.
I live in New England, and I had a friend who purchased an electric bike.
He wasn’t using it at all, and lent it to me for a week. I had so much fun riding it, I got one for myself, and one for my wife. I purchased the Lectric Bikes (2.0) and an extra battery for each of them.
They are built like tanks. Really strong and tough, though it makes them quite heavy, nearly sixty pounds each. The newer ones are less heavy. They have nice shock absorbers in the front, fat knobby tires that make the ride better, and a wide seat with a shock absorber in the seat post.
I got into an accident last year when I was riding on the bike trail that goes around the Charles River in Boston, and a guy stepped in front of me causing me to swerve and hit big tree root. I was doing about 15 MPH (and had given him warning probably 20 yards before I came on him that I was approaching, but for some reason as I came up he stepped in front of me. I went off the trail, hit that tree root, and flew about 15 feet through the air, landing in a heap. Not hurt, just rash from the dirt on the side of the trail. And the bike had no damage I could see, which surprised me as it fully somersaulted through the air and crashed into the ground. I had stood up on the pedals as I left the trail, so I suspect that helped in some way. But I picked it up, dusted it off, no more than a scrape. That thing, as heavy as it is, is really tough. At my age, that could have turned out far worse. But I am even more cautious now.
But here is the thing: This electric bike is for fun and enjoyment.
Not work.
Not transportation.
Wholly for fun.
Honestly, I stay off the roads. People are too distracted by their cell phones for me to feel safe in any way, and when I do get on a road, I drive extremely defensively, even pulling over and stopping to let cars pass. If I come to an intersection where a car is pulling out, it isn’t uncommon for me to simply pull over far, far ahead of the vehicle so as to not even enter into their decision to pull out or not.
We live near a bike trail. Ride through our neighborhood to get to it. Neither one of us is fit enough to ride a standard bike, though we can.
We fold them up and put them in our car and drive to different bike trails.
We putter along, probably doing 10 MPH, we have bluetooth helmets so we can converse as we ride one in front of the other (not side by side, blocking the trail)
It is nice, a lot of fun. It is something we can do together. We get to ride, feel the wind in our face, enjoy the scenery, and yak to each other conversationally.
I 3-D printed a lockable battery box about two feet long that I bolt to my bike, and carry an extra battery for each of us.
If I go by myself, I can do 60 miles with the extra batteries. When I charge the batteries, I do so in my shed, away from the house.
If we ever got into a gas crunch, I would explore using it for getting around town and not commuting (since I expect to retire soon) It has baskets I can attach to the front and back of the bike if I wished to carry groceries.
But that isn’t why I have it. I have it solely for entertainment.
I purchased it a year ago last November, and since then, I have put nearly 1,200 miles on it. I took my wife on a fifty mile ride on Cape Code, but she won’t do that again. She was uncomfortable being on the seat that long.
And I did ride it in cold weather, into November, and even once in March. But I am in no way hard-core about this. I see people on bikes in January, and still think they have a screw loose.
I admire people my age tooling around on standard bikes, but...it isn’t my thing. My days of humping a bike up a hill are over. Sure, it would be good for me, but so would eating margarine instead of butter and balancing my diet better.
The bikes I have cost $999 each. The penalty on them is weight and range. The pros are a quality product at that price range, and built like a Sherman tank.
I considered other bikes, and sure...I could get ones that go twice as far and weigh half as much, but...not as tough, and four times the cost.
Why?
I’ve been thinking of building my own out of junk. I have an old Schwinn 5 speed bannana seat bike and a 36 volt motor from a kids go cart. Run it on two 18 volt DeWalt batteries.
I’ve just started seeing a $1500 EV motorbike advertised on Newsmax. Still, even in the commercials, rider is shown peddling a lot. I don’t remember ever peddling my old Yamaha rice-burner.
Fat tire E-bikes are good for getting out to the ponds and to your treestand. It would be a funny sight to have a deer on the trailer. The northeast libtards wouldn’t know what to say. They sell them at BassPro. My fishing buddy has one, he loves it.
A motor bike with an enclosed side car are the vehicle solution in the Phillipines. The combo is both in expensive, highly decorable, ans small. The hybrid is the best solution for city spaces lacking parking The vehicles for hire have replaced the ubiquitous jeepney
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