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.

It's a cultural polarisation. Many (but not all) e-bikers treat their bikes as a mode of transport - a means to an end. Many (but not all) leisure cyclists regard biking as an activity to be conducted for its own sake. Those cyclists regard use of auxiliary power as degrading their activity, just as a dinghy sailor would look down on someone who used an outboard. Environmentally, I have no doubt that functional e-bikers (as a group) have lower impact than leisure cyclists (as a group). Mind you, this forum represents a pretty broad spectrum of e-bikers, some of whom would no doubt regard an electric scooter as "cheating".

The issue for electric cars is how best to generate, store and replenish the electricity. Fossil fuel is a hard act to follow in respect of storage and (relatively) safe and rapid replenishment, but burning it certainly depletes a finite resource, and possibly changes the atmosphere in undesirable ways. Meanwhile, electric propulsion is still efficient, even when the electricity comes from on-board generators, so short-term attention will be on the problems of electrical storage and refuelling. So while the industry, the market and the consumers work on improving electrical storage and refuelling, perhaps governments can make a start on electrifying motorways and trunk roads so that electric cars can travel along them without depleting their on-board batteries. These can then be used for "local" journeys and replenished wherever and whenever they are parked, (where they can also provide valuable grid backup).

I suspect this may be more of a problem in the UK, where the cycling isn't (if we're honest) regarded as a mode of transport by enough of the population. Leisure cycling enthusiasts have, for the most part, little use for power assistance (why would they?). It isn't really practical to operate a bike, electric or otherwise, without engaging with some of its technicalities. For the leisure cyclist, this is part of the appeal, like mucking out ponies is for Pony Club members. For a potential user looking for a reliable mode of transport, it's just another disadvantage. And while it is broadly true that consumer maintenance of an e-bike is no more complex than consumer maintenance of an unpowered bike, either way it is a skill most of us no longer have (just as most of us don't monitor oil and coolant in our cars and hope we never have to change a wheel). I'm an e-biker who can just about fix a puncture (though I couldn't on a hub motor wheel - certainly not "on the road") and I use my bike regularly for operational trips. I like the exercise and the fresh air, but I rarely bike for the hell of it. I live in an area very popular with leisure cyclists and encountered one last weekend who asked (at our village shop) where I had come from. He had come from hundreds of miles away, carrying his bike on his SUV, to experience our invigorating hills and scenery. When I told him that I had come from 2 miles away, he said that he would never get his bike out for a trip like that. Given how he was dressed, you could see why.

I like Presteigne - and not just because it's nearer for me than Bromsgrove. I'm not sure that e-bikes are ever likely to be a mass market in the UK, because mainstream cycling here is largely a leisure activity indulged in by enthusiasts, who are no more on the lookout for power assistance than dinghy sailors. Meanwhile non-cyclists are difficult to get on any kind of bike, electric or not. So I see no imperative to hold the festival in a major population centre - this isn't the World Cup final. Besides, it makes a change to go somewhere small and rural with clean air and lowish noise levels.

While I'm sure that powering the pedals in this way would "assist", surely the amount of assistance is going to be quite small, and/or very short lived. It's hard to see how such a system can provide comparable assistance in either power or duration to one with batteries 10 to 20 times the weight.

I talked to him about it years ago - they were (I thought) a bit expensive (£2500?), and he hadn't sold many. They were a big hit with local special needs and blind schools, because they enabled able-bodied volunteers to take less able kids and adults out on trip where the less able weren't just passengers. But he maintained they could be pretty high performance vehicles on and off-road, and had an idea about electrifying one. I guess two wheels adds quite a bit of complexity and weight.

This always looked the biz, though I don't know if they actually make them any more. http://www.2cancycle.co.uk/pictures/gallery/simple%202Can/real%20pictures/real2Can_g05.jpg

That would be good. Presumably the motor should also do a much better job of sticking to the EU regulation about the maximum speed at which the motor can continue to assist the rider. If the speed sensor uses wheel rotation to calculate speed, then perhaps the the rider will be allowed to configure the bike for different wheel diameters, about which he can lie - the software equivalent of installing a non-regulation cog on a panasonic.

That was always a nightmare when we had our e-Zee, because it's not clear what you'd need to do on the road if you had to remove the motor wheel complete with disc brake. Fortunately, it had Marathon Plus tyres and hasn't had a puncture in 1700 miles of use by 100 different people over the last year. Even so, during the annual puncture season, when the hedge-cutting farmers round here attempt to remove cyclists from back roads using blackthorn calthrops, we've been grateful for the Panasonic drive configuration which leaves most of the bike accessible to the only kind of puncture repair I can manage on the road: replacing the inner tube!

There is certainly a balance of risk, but you will struggle to find a genuine safety argument against helmets. I don't wear one, but I probably should in front of my grandson, and I hope I would never kid myself that not wearing a helmet made me ride more safely. The most persuasive argument I heard during the time when they were debating making motor cycle helmets compulsory was that helmets create quadraplegics out of people who would otherwise have died! My father hated car seat belts because of a fear of being upside down in a crashed and burning car, with both wrists broken! But "you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into".