With me working remote these past two years my wife and I have found that we don’t necessarily need to be a two car household. I bought a reasonably nice ($1200) scooter last year and have been doing all my errands on our city’s great bike trails. I have maybe 3-500 miles on it now and while it’s not as nice or as fast as driving it is a wonderful experience every time I take it out.
Here in bangalore after fuel prices shot up everyone is buying electric scooters and bikes left and right. I used to only occasionally finding electric vehicles but these days I see a lot of them and none of them are cars. E-bikes, e-scooters, E-trikes, E-buses, E-minivans but no electric cars
Cars are difficult to electrify without the cost of the battery being very high. They have to meet all the expectations set by gas cars. The brilliance of Tesla is taking that gamble and making it work for a lot of people who would otherwise buy gas cars, mostly at the high end of the car market.
But that makes a lot less sense in sense Asian cities in warm climates that have a lot of road congestion. A scooter costs a small fraction of a car, gas or electric, and gets you there faster. I suspect that as EVs become pervasive, most of them will be scooters and ebikes.
Plus, gas scooters are very dirty. The Chinese wouldn't allow gas scooters to proliferate in cities.
Curious to see how this trend plays out. If gas prices ebb would the sale of pev’s go down? Would they stay the same? Or has this opened peoples eyes to the fact that, while not yet optimal, electric vehicles are pretty good at most errands. Solar charging is getting better. Batteries are getting better. Electric motors are getting better.
I don’t think we have reached the tipping point yet here in the states on electric vehicles but it seems it’s heading that way. Ford spun off their e-vehicle devision. GMC, others, and committed to making electric cars and trucks. I feel there’s this tidal wave revolution going on in transportation. Supported by the energy sector. The biggest hurtle is big oil trying to corner solar through legislation to tax the power of the sun. :( but I do think as more people have and use electric modes of transportation that more people will want to join them and thus, tipping the scales.
Where I am, people love their OneWheels and electric bikes. I myself have tasted pavement on my OneWheel pev. RadBikes and others make electric cargo bikes that are like tanks. It’s really cool to see this unfold within the last few years.
Can u share some (final, retail) prices of e-bikes or e-scooter.
In my (mediterranean) country, prices have been creeping UP over the last 3 years, mostly due to lack of competition and importers somehow cornering the market ;/
Prices are now more expensive than when i bought my first ebike 5 years ago.
We met some guys in San Diego who ran a (definitely illegal) business doing this with scooters. They wanted to sell us one of them for $200 (against market price of $6-700); we declined.
Basically, around about 2016 (maybe?) the number of electric scooters in San Diego exploded. We had like 6 different companies dumping them by the pallet load, I guess as an availability tactic.
I imagine what they were doing was taking them off the road and into someplace where they looked accessible on the GPS but couldn't actually be accessed, depleting the battery by winding them down, and then deconstructing them enough to get them into Tijuana, where they would be stripped and the brain of the scooter replaced. Apparently, they had a guy in TJ who could basically "de-GPS" the scooters. Then, they would ship them back up and sell them cheaply.
Nice project! The unknown wires everywhere brought back memories. I did a similar project, hacking an escooter to add Bluetooth functionality in order to control it via a smartphone app:
You see them here and there in the eastern US. But many cities don't allow the rentals. Even in those that do, it seems they were a fad for a while and now they're pretty occasional. Once the novelty wore off, there isn't great infrastructure for them in a lot of places and the cases where they're genuinely useful as a transportation option is pretty limited. When they first came out, they were scattered all over the place in Raleigh for example but last time I was there, they were few and far between.
Yes you can still rent them in San Francisco and Oakland, but less than there were a few years ago.
Electric scooters are limited to 15mph, you can get a speeding ticket for exceeding 15mph even going downhill. And they aren't really safe to ride faster, they can't stop quickly. You need a drivers license. You are required to ride in the street or bike lane, not on the sidewalks or paths shared with pedestrians. Technically you can't make left turns in the road either, you need to ride straight across in the bike lane or road then stop and walk through crosswalk. Also not allowed to ride in a crosswalk at all, but many of these rules are not strictly enforced.
Compared to ebikes where the motor can provide power up to 28mph with pedal assist, up to 20mph with throttle only. No drivers license needed. Ebikes can legally use many multi use paths shared with pedestrians. No problems making left turns in traffic. No need to walk in crosswalks because you can ride on the road/bike lane. It isn't surprising they aren't as popular.
Here in LA the fad seems to have ended around the start of covid in 2020. I used to see dozens of people a day riding them and now I rarely see any, and if I do it's usually a personal scooter not rented from Bird, Lime, etc. I still see scooters from those companies clogging up the sidewalk, I just never see anyone actually ridings them.
You definitely see fads with things that aren't terribly utilitarian for getting from point A to point B. Inline skating/Rollerblading was very popular at one point and now it's rare to see anyone doing it.
Bird, Lime and Spin are still operating throughout the US but the market’s stabilized over the years; you don’t see tons of new stock or them dumped absolutely everywhere and they’re less of a novelty now, most cities have gravitated towards one or two of the major companies while the others have pulled out and concentrate on other locations.
The share programs didn’t really take off in the north-east, but I see a lot of personal e-scooters in NYC. (I just got one myself and it’s a great fit for the city)
Crikey, 250W motor... they are handy and certainly better than everyone driving a car everywhere, but somehow the combination of power and low barrier to entry invites a particular type of road (and pavement) assholery I could really do without. At least in my locale.
I’ve got a Xiaomi Mi Scooter Pro 2, which is not super beefy, but it does peak up to 600W. You actually do need it for hills, I still don’t make it up some without kicking. It is speed limited to 25 km/h generally but some of these bigger ones that are much less “consumer” you see going 50-60 which is crazy (and illegal here).
250W continuous is not that much, and very much necessary (and possibly not sufficient) to handle even middling hills.
For reference, 1HP = 735.5W. The worst 50cc you'll find are around 3HP, or above 2100W. Child-class go-karts generally start around 5hp, and the most common engines are the 6.5HP GX200 (or harbor freight's copy).
A tour de france stage winning cyclist might only average 219 watts over a 5-hour stage [1] although with bursts where they use more power - 20 minutes at 330w, 15 seconds at 1025 watts.
250w is quite a bit of power for something on the sidewalk or bike lane :)
(Of course, who knows how trustworthy these numbers are? I suspect scooter manufacturers know bigger numbers mean bigger sales, and choose their testing methods accordingly)
