God bikeshare ebikes suck so much.

Hello, I’d like your worst frame with the cheapest motor, smallest wheels, wrong kind of tires, a sprocket with a non whole number of teeth and uhhhhh lemmie get two years of no maintenance other than a hose off and some touch up paint.

Honestly I think you’re right. A person making the choice about what to own free from any other constraints would be thinking like you. I think Chinas right to push people towards using lead acid on e-bikes in the face of lithium scarcity and trade restrictions too.

It’s just two different situations that indicate different choices.

Apropos of nothing, are you seeing usbc e-bike battery charging coming down the pike? I was seeing some rumblings a few years ago last time I built one.

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.

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.

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?

How much does torque come into play when you’re carrying your bike upstairs?

So you carry the groceries upstairs at the same time as your bike?

Wait so would you leave your groceries outside while you carried in your bike?

Five pounds is the grocery bag dangling off my flat bar.

China has very developed bicycle infrastructure and massive public transportation compared to almost anywhere else. There are fewer car owners per capita than other countries. It’s still a smart play to use the hand of state to take steps to allocate the more energy dense batteries to applications that require them.

As I said before: Maybe these better chemistries that will replace lithium are just around the corner. I certainly don’t count unhatched chickens.

What do you want to know how to do?

I have. It sucks but it’s possible and because I live in a mountainous area I avoid that problem by using less assist so everything lasts longer.

The broader point I was trying to make is that If you’re trying to allocate the limited raw materials to the types of transport that benefit people the most then pushing e-bikes to lead acid makes a lot of sense. Yeah, the bikes could benefit from a more power dense battery, but they have backup pedals and ultimately their rider is the majority of the loaded bikes weight.

Electric cars and trucks weigh at least ten times what a person does and are generally used for longer distances than e-bikes so it makes more sense to use very energy dense batteries in them.

Again, I’m speaking from a position that recognizes the proliferation of electric vehicles in China and recognizes that the raw materials used to make lithium batteries are finite and in high demand, not from the position of trying to optimize the e-bike.

I meant the ~300 mile ranges common in electric cars. That’s a long trip. Plus if the car rolls to a stop by the side of the road you just gotta have it towed or charge it up in the field somehow, electric bikes have pedals.

It sucks to pedal a heavy ass ebike but you can do it in a pinch to get where you need to go.

I’m a wet cell lead acid man myself.

There’s the monthly battery fluid level check to contend with but if you can make sure it doesn’t tip over too often or too long and you can bank on being able to get to civilization once every six or ten years then you’re in the low total cost of ownership ecosystem.

Of course, they’re not as good in the cold and if you screw up and let all the water leak out then you gotta fill it back up and hope it’s not too messed up.

Whatever you pick will be fine. Tbh if you’re not gonna have the trailer for longer than the life of the battery, pick the one that’s got more curb appeal or resale value!

The safety thing is 100% true but only part of the picture.

E-bikes don’t need maximum energy density because they’re not gonna be used for long trips and are significantly lighter than cars and trucks.

China has many, many more electric vehicles than any other country and a ton of electricity production to run them. At some point it’s gonna become important to save the lithium batteries for the stuff that needs that high density power.

Maybe these better chemistries that will replace lithium are just around the corner. I certainly don’t count unhatched chickens.

There are some possibly inaccurate and definitely confusing statements in the reply you got, but the first part, that agm is a physical structure of the lead acid battery that can be tipped over without making a giant mess and that deep cycle is another function of design as opposed to a function of the lead acid chemistry is correct.

What’s left unsaid is that lead acid batteries which are damaged and not working right anymore have a much safer and lower tech recycling process than lithium ones do and that’s saying something because one of the parts is lead!

It’s 孟子 for anyone wondering

Hexbear was right about downvotes.