Quote:
Originally Posted by readingaloud
From one point of view, the present system is just a silly mistake. It governs speed by measuring the rotation of the crank, which is only indirectly related to speed, rather than the rotation of a wheel, which is directly related to speed. If you can do one, you ought to be able to do the other.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I still think this is a foolish mistake. If you put flecc, the Panasonic engineers, and the Biketec engineers in the same room, you'd have an elegant solution within an hour or two. The trick, I suppose, is to get them to do it. And to understand why they haven't, you only need to look at flecc's list.
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There's another overriding factor in this, Panasonic only made this system for their own domestic market bicycles, no separate unit being available or ever intended.
When the world's largest bike maker, Giant, had failed with their own Lafree 1 electric bike, they begged Panasonic to make the unit separately available to them for the new Lafree, and Panasonic relented. Since that had happened, the Swiss bike manufacturer BikeTech also managed to join in by paying very high prices for the smaller quantities they needed, positioning theirs as up market quality items.
The failure of Giant to make a success of the Lafree underlined to Panasonic that they were right in the first place, but a couple of years later others wanted to take advantage of Panasonic's improved variant so we now have five in all starting to use it. I can understand Panasonic not wanting to get involved in design with any of them, given the history and the tiny potential market. Look at their latest TZ series cameras, already sold in their multi-millions around the world at £200/£300 apiece. Thats Panasonics sort of business, not a few hundreds of bike motors to export markets, peanuts to them and more of a nuisance than anything.
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