Bandit

All words are English words - as a language it has very eclectic tastes. This makes it much richer than almost all others, while still managing to convey the same information in dramatically fewer syllables. This richness shows itself all the time. How do the Welsh and Irish manage with no word for entrepreneur, to quote a classic example.

Do you work it from "battery nominal content" by seeing how many miles it takes to exhaust the battery, or do most people have some kind of instrument like a Cycle Analyst?

How are we measuring wh - from the battery or from the wall. We get about 10wh/mile from the wall from our e-Motions, but not knowing the efficiency of the charger I don't know what the "true" figure is. As a comparison point, the electric buggy we're testing is managing about 120 to 150 wh/mile (from the Cycle Analyst on the buggy) when driven by electric cyclists, and 160 to 175 when driven by car drivers. We're hoping to be at Presteigne if you fancy a run.

Terrain will certainly point up the difference between the relative efficiencies of the two kinds of drive system, and it's difficult to compare the performance of the two fairly, since the Panasonic system requires a rider input that could not be guaranteed on any hub motored bike. I'm guessing that the reason for price difference between the Panasonic drive batteries and the others has more to do with the battery management system, which must be difficult for a clone manufacturer to emulate. Unfortunately for the consumer, the market is probably too small to justify the large investment necessary. It will be interesting to see what the Bosch system's battery prices are.

And if not, at least there will be someone you can sue for damages, who will be wary of negative publicity. The difference in price is called a "brand premium" and it pays for better product liability insurance (hopefully, but not necessarily, among other things).

How difficult is it to remove and replace the wheel of a hub-motored bike? I'm glad I have never had to do it - I have enough trouble with punctures on our crank drives. All this talk of punctures reminds me that it is puncture season here in the country - the annual event where hedge-cutting farmers seek to block the roads to cycle traffic until the cars and vans have cleared the carriageway of hawthorn traps.

If it was a puncture on a hub-motored wheel, you could understand why a regular bike shop might be nervous, but the Dover is a Panasonic-powered bike, isn't it?

I guess if you're skilful you can (with either type of drive) arrive at a balance between the watts you can (or are willing) to contribute and the watts the motor can contribute to achieve any particular speed. What less skilful riders like me might find helpful is to be able to fix the speed - like a cruise control on a car - and the effort we're willing to put in to achieve it so that the motor and controller are seeking to "top up" our effort as described. This could then be made to work in reverse, enabling the controller to recover energy on a descent that would otherwise exceed the set speed. The amount of energy recovered would (unfortunately) still be pretty small, but it irritates me that my wife achieves better range than I do on an otherwise identical bike by virtue of a 15kg difference in weight. :-)

That was certainly our experience when trialling both types over the course of a few months in our very hilly area. Despite being harder to explain, the Panasonic system seemed to require much less thought to operate "efficiently" than a hub motored bike (once you have mastered the counter-intuitive need to change up rather than down when you want more help from the motor). To climb a steep hill with the hub motored bike (an EZee sprint) we found that as well as pedalling harder (duh!) you seemed to do better by laying off maximum throttle use (which if true is even more counter-intuitive!).

It ought to be close, because the un-motorised bike is widely said to be the most efficient, and that has a not terribly efficient engine. According to MacKay's chart, the closest thing to a push bike is a "cross country" type electric train when it is full. This has something to do with being long and thin (thus sharing the same air resistance with the maximum number of people) and not going too fast (which high speed electric trains do, if efficiency is your main concern).

He might, but he'd also have to change his diet. I think if you subsist on, say, Walker's Crisps, you extract less energy from the food than was embedded in its production, and the production process itself would be pretty fossil carbon intensive. We're doomed, I tell ya.

In terms of energy efficiency (kWh per 100 passenger km) e-bikes come out pretty well. The Vectrix scooter reportedly needs 2.75kWh per 100p-km which compares well with the 80kWh required by a single passenger car. My e-bike seems to require about .65kWh per 100p-km, but that doesn't include my input, of course. An unassisted pedal bike is said to require about 1.6kWh per 100p-km at 20km/h (which is better and faster than walking), so whether an e-bike can compete with an ordinary bike for efficiency and carbon footprint depends on how much the rider has to put in and what his or her source of energy is. It's entirely possible that an overweight rider on a high fat diet would have lower fossil carbon emissions on an e-bike than a non-e-bike.

Good. I hope you can help. We had to insure two bikes ourselves for a trial we were running, and it was very expensive because it included liability for anything that happened to people while they were using the bikes. This is the same risk a bike hire company takes, hence the hefty premiums. I think it cost about £400 for the year for 2 bikes. We didn't continue it after the trial, and now we loan out the bikes with a disclaimer and require an indemnity. These are the curses of the litigous society we're fast becoming. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that if you lend your bike to someone else as a favour, you can in some circumstances be sued if they have an accident, and I doubt a normal policy would cover you.

Mine allowed our 2 bikes to be added last year for nothing, but they now added about £85 to the renewal premium. Still a lot better than specialist bike insurance, though I doubt very much the cover is the same. The ultimate insurer on this policy is Legal and General. Speaking of bike insurance, it is getting prohibitvely expensive to insure hire bikes or (because the risk is the same) community shared bikes. Here's a bit of bad news - these Kalkhoffs were our first introduction to e-biking. We'd never have believed they could climb hills without actually pedalling up the Long Mynd, and it was a great way to try the experience.

It depends on (a) whether you believe insurance fraud affects premiums and (b) whether an illegal electric bike actually poses a greater risk for the insurer. Unfortunately, the insurance market has gone way beyond its high-minded original idea of the many banding together to share the cost of misfortune hitting the few. Now it's just a cross between betting and anxiety therapy, and both sides abuse it.