micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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Don't be an asshole or you will be permanently banned.
Respectful debate is totally OK, criticizing a product is fine, but being verbally abusive will not be tolerated.
Focus on discussing the idea, not attacking the person.
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You can't slow down with regen without putting the energy somewhere, and that's the point of brakes, they convert kinetic energy into thermal to slow you down.
The point of regen is to not waste the energy and put most of it back into a battery. At the scale of an ebikes, the additional components electronics, battery thermal management, and so on for regen are more expensive than just adding 20% more battery.
Unless you wanted to make an expensive, super efficient or very light ebike, it just doesn't make sense at the moment.
That will not likely always be true if we ever use different battery chemistry and the cost of regen electronics goes down.
I agree it doesn't make sense to pick regen for extending range. Just buy a bigger battery if that's the biggest issue, say a rarely used bike but long ranged when needed.
To me it's the brake pads that add up. Replacing two pairs of pads every few hundred miles is way more expensive than the system and any additional battery wear. $500 isn't that many sets of pads.
Considering I don't charge my batteries much beyond 80%, yeah, there's plenty of room to put that extra energy early in the ride. I'd rather charge a battery than to grind pads into dust.
Honestly I'd wonder if the wear on brake pads could be cheaper than the additional strain on the battery.
I have 1400 miles on my non-regen bike which has burned through three sets of pads (1.5 mm currently left). I'm slowly trying better/harder pads which won't eat rotors and don't cost as much. $25 every 500-ish miles isn't great (10k miles is $500 in pads) . Suggestions are welcome!
I think a key difference is my neighborhood is quite hilly. I've never smoked and glazed a set of pads before moving in. That was a quick learning experience for me.