this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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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.
I still disagree, and here's why. I've ridden an electric bike share bike with no battery up a hill, with no extra load, and it was undoable. You couldn't stay on the bike. It was more sensible to return the way I came than to keep going. Yes better gearing would have helped, but why was it necessary? Because the battery ran out. Why did it run out? Because capacity is limited by weight.
300 miles is way too much for most people to ever come close to in an ev unless they're commuting 100 miles daily. Those people can get an extended range car or something. Whereas the battery capacity of ebikes and scooters is often met or exceeded especially with bike share. And then the bike is unrideable. Same with electric "push" scooters - they become unrideable when they run out.
People have range anxiety and I don't fault people who want to be able to do long trips someday with their personal vehicle, but to me, it's way more important to have better vehicles I'll actually use daily.
If it was the difference between 150 miles and 200 that would be a different value judgement because then it does start to affect the car's ability to function as a car in winter temperatures and normal distances.