mid-drive e-bikes like this one are generally more expensive also but more efficient than rear hub motor systems. They also provide better overall weight distribution.
a full suspension e-bike, 500+Wh battery, with a belt drive for $4,500 is honestly a really good deal. There is a shortage of options when it comes to full-suspension bikes that are good for commutes. Compare this to any e-bike with the Bosch e-bike system. The big risk here for consumers if whether they can match the service, support, and reliability that Bosch has. There appears to be a class-2 e-bike option which is something that significantly differentiates it from bikes with the Bosch system.
I was in the market for a commuter recently and my runner-up was this bike from Bulls (German brand trying to break into the US market) with full suspension, a Bosch motor, and coming in at a staggeringly light 58 lbs (battery included) for $3300. Extremely tempting, if I hadn't managed to snag a heavily-discounted Aventon Level 2 instead. https://bullsbikesusa.com/products/iconic-evo-tr-1-750
I really don't get what the point of the pedals on a thing like this, though. I guess mainly to satisfy some sort of regulations which separate bikes and motorcycle like vehicles? Considering that they aren't even connected to the drivetrain...
In the U.S., there are 3 classes of e-bike:
Class 1: pedal-assist only up to 20mph (helmets optional for adults)
Class 2: same as Class 1 but with optional throttle to 20mph
Class 3: pedal-assist only up to 28mph (helmets required, adults only)
There's also a maximum power rating of 750 watts for all of these. I'm not sure where the "pedal by wire" feature is from a regulatory perspective, but to me this fits into either class 2 or 3 depending on what option you get.
My state doesn't even require helmets for motorcyclists. I am guessing any regulations on e-bikes date back to the days when 2-stroke "moped" bikes were briefly popular.
Based on the video and rivian history I think they wanted to redesign from the ground up a bike to match the packaging success they had at rivian and companies like lucid vs how legacy automakers approached it. The problem is the current laws about bikes and ebikes limited them and they had to make many tradeoffs which is what we are looking at. I guess we will find it if it was worth it to go ground up vs more off the shelf. As a rivian owner I'm concerned about repair-ability and maintenance.
The way I read it is if you use throttle-only you can reach 20 mph, but then if adding pedal-power you reach 28 mph. The pedal is probably not generating sufficient force to add 8 mph, but it’s telling the control system to do that.
class 2 and class 3 are mutually exclusive. You cannot legally have an e-bike that supports throttle up to 20mph that can also continue to e-assist if you pedal up to 28mph. While it's technically possible in software to switch between these modes, consumers aren't supposed to be able to do this on their own.
No consumer GPS is precise enough to reliably distinguish between a bike path and an adjacent regular road, especially if there are any overhead obstructions nearby. Many bike paths don't have a 20mph speed limit anyway.
It's an e-bike. The competition is stiff, better looking, and better priced.
If they're lucky, this will appeal to university professors and over achieving parents of unsuspecting kids who want a cool bike but got an expensive dorky one instead.
The e-bike market has multiple tiers/segments. This is not priced to compete with brands like Rad Power Bikes, Lectric, or Aventon. It's likely going to compete with brands like Tern, Benno, Gazelle, Trek, etc.
edit: ask yourself why the median new car in the US sells for over $50k when you can easily find cars for less than half that price.
I find it hard to imagine what the overlap between this and e.g. ebikes from Trek, though. Besides the price of course... It's an entirely different product.
you can get a high quality 4khw 20kw electric dirt bike for $4500... oh right, maybe not the best for commuting. they were fun before the cops caught on.
this isn't necessarily true. While it generates less direct revenue, it increases nearby land value in two ways: 1) business activity which would have taken place on that parcel "overflows" to nearby parcels, ie, the demand for those other land uses doesn't go away and increases prices in the surrounding area. 2) the park provides real value to its users and access to that value also increases nearby ground rents.
Also, it's possible to have businesses in a park (rented sports fields, coffee stands etc). I know a park nearby with a pottery studio in it.
Generally Americans don't think of this because they think public services "shouldn't try to make money" and interpret this as they need to be designed to lose money as hard as possible. So public transit stations have no vending machines and activists are constantly trying to ban them from charging fares.
The camera systems are also superior from an infrastructure maintenance perspective. You can update them with new capabilities or do re-striping without tearing up the pavement.
Yep... If I didn't mask while at work and home, I'd probably be annoying my family and coworkers with state and local land use politics issues all the time.
One of the issues that AC Transit (SF East Bay bus agency) has is that it purchased a lot of Hydrogen Fuel Cell busses which have issues which dramatically impact their reliability. It's also very expensive technology. There's a decent argument that public agencies _should_ invest in early emerging technologies like that but the costs should not be borne by the transit agency alone, at the cost of poor service for its riders.
Make the argument why the bus company that provides bus-based transportation near one's home/work should spend marginal income on fancy emerging technologies instead of on higher-quality service (or lowering ticket prices if somehow service quality has reached an upper limit)?
Sure if the state or feds want to pay the extra costs to get such technology out there into production, make them an offer as the local bus company how much they'd have to chip in for you to deploy that.
This comment is one of the things I refer to in my top-level comment. People have just enough of an education in economics and an understanding of personal finance and budgeting to be dangerous. They conflate economics with federal budget politics, have a one-sided and incomplete view of what debt is (especially US national debt), and then build a whole model of a system called "debt-based economics" which is based on political observations instead of fundamental economic understanding.
I mostly think economics education is fine... most high school graduates in the US come out with a good basic understanding of supply/demand and labor/capital basic inputs to businesses, etc. But that doesn't mean that people are prepared to talk about economics on a daily basis, especially when it comes to politics. People confuse personal finance and budgeting with economics in general and don't know how to correctly think about the difference between legal and economic incidence of taxes like tariffs on imports.
Do I think economics in higher education needs to change? no. But the base level of economics knowledge and principles are very lacking for the everyday person, to the detriment of society at large.
surveys show that if you ask most people what happens to the price of X when the number of X available increases, people correctly understand that the price falls and vice versa. There are some things though, particularly housing, where more people think the opposite happens.
> People confuse personal finance and budgeting with economics in general and don't know how to correctly think about the difference between legal and economic incidence of taxes like tariffs on imports.
Or like treating the debt of a country in a similar fashion to household debt.
This goes back to my top-level comment: the assessment of your property should not be based on sales of nearby property but on observed rental values. Just because your neighbor has sold their plot and the new owner has the intent to build 99 houses on is so far inconsequential ... we have yet to observe any actual rent increases and likely will not until those houses are actually constructed and rented/sold themselves. Only then can we accurately observe the potential rental value of your adjacent land.
