greenspark
100 W
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2011
- Messages
- 176
I began a post asking about the accumulated loss of power (Watts) from the motor display to what actually is happening on the road. In my most recent reply, I realised I was moving to another subject, thus thought it better to start a new thread.
Essentially, we are in the Model T era of ebikes. The regulations in some countries are thin, the police do not know how to enforce the rules, and generally one of two things happens. Either the police do nothing until there is a crash, whereupon the prosecutor decides what the rule means, and the hapless bike rider may discover they are an unwitting criminal, or a particular policeman decides to get tough (usually because of some punk kids [i.e. immature aggressive persons] who discover motors and ruin it for everyone) whereupon perfectly harmless ebike owners get caught up in a dragnet, and in worse case, the local politicians stage a public crushing where they use a 20 ton roller to crush a few confiscated ebikes, including your $5,000 custom titanium bike that happened to test 3W over the limit.
Good leadership will not come from the industry, nor from bureaucrats. It will come from the most knowledgeable group, which happens to be us, the members of this forum. So here is the challenge. If you were to write rules that were clear, easy to measure, easy to enforce and really did hit the sweet spot between safe and dangerous, what would they say? It also would be very important to maintain the freedom we have now. No registration, no inspections, no licenses, no insurance, no obnoxious rules, and for safety a commitment that road builders make the roads safe (like in Europe), not vilify the bike rider because of bad road design.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_bicycle_laws for the mess we have now.
How should the rules read?
After trying twelve different motors, I can tell you what the sweet spot is for my country, my conditions and using my style of bikes but even then I am challenged to put that into regulatory words.
The Bafang Midmount BBS01 hits the sweet spot. They sent us 23 motors, and one of them was the oddball (it was one sent to replace a warranted hub motor, hence they took the liberty to send me a slightly different configuration). Supposedly, it was set at the factory for 300W to be legal in our country. But it also gave me enough information to wonder... it is a 300W motor that displayed actual wattage, which I will explain below. But first, let's look at the law (in my country) as written now.
It is simple, defining vehicles where the ebike is a class AB vehicle:
AA (Pedal cycle) A vehicle designed to be propelled through a mechanism solely by human power.
AB (Power-assisted pedal cycle) A pedal cycle to which is attached one or more auxiliary propulsion motors having a combined maximum power output not exceeding 300 watts.
So what does maximum power output mean? And is 300W the right number? If I were to tweak the rule, I would say, continuous rated power not exceeding 350 watts as set by the manufacturer, noting that this still may be too vague.
First, no motor maker offers a 300W, it's either 250W or 350W. And this rating varies by maker. The Cute100F we first tested was a 350W that was gutless. CellMan's MAC 350 was a completely different beast.
In fact, as we all know, it's not the motor rating, it's the controller that decides how many watts will be consumed to move the motor. The motor can handle a lot more, where it is the beefiness of the design that determines how much for how long before things start to melt.
Obviously, the easiest would be to say a class AB cycle cannot have a motor larger than say 350W as printed on the side of the motor, and in the specifications provided by the manufacturer, but this would then need to be qualified as to controller settings. And those controller settings would need to have on-road and off-road variables, because riding safely on the streets may require 350W, but hill-climbing off road may require more.
With the special BBS01, instead of the standard C961 display that showed the speed, it came with a C695 display that also shows actually wattage, although I do not know where it reads that. Using the pedalec going up our 15 degree test hill, in "full" mode, setting 3, the display would show about 300W, which felt a bit gutless. Yes it got me up in first gear, but it seemed a bit underpowered. If the goal is to get up the hill without releasing too much lactic acid into the leg muscles, it was barely at the threshold (I will do a digression on that subject next). However, when I pressed the Thumb Throttle (TT), the power meter doubled. It sure did not feel like double the power, but it was just enough to make the uphill more comfortable. On the flat, I found pressing the TT still put it up in the 600's and I was getting some fairly strong speed out of it... up to the low 30's although there were enough variables in slope and curves to not be a good test. I need to find a flat road on a windless day. But it seemed to me that for hills, the rules should allow 650W with the rider adding reasonable pedal (I reckon about the same pedalling as riding on the flat), but once on the flat, well under 300 is fine.
Digression: Purists say that ebikes give less exercise. This is arguable. Somewhere I came across a stat showing the difference in annual mileage between a pedal bike and an ebike. The ebike was used to go far longer distances... about 1,200 miles a year as I recall. I can say that when we got into ebiking, I pulled out a Gary Fisher hardtail from the garage that I bought new in 1996 that probably had ten miles on it, but plenty of corrosion from sitting in the garage. As soon as I put a motor on it, its mileage jumped, as I began to use it every time I went into the village, or over to town on the ferry (bikes ride free). Part of the reason was that I was able to arrive at meetings dressed in normal street clothes and look sharp. No soaked t-shirt or wet patches under my arms. My legs got warm, but no lactic acid build up. Thus, the ebike standard should be to assist pedalling, so the rider gets good exercise, but not such difficult exercise that they need a shower or special clothes. The exercise value will come in distance ridden. I should also note that the Gary Fisher, on which I installed a CellMan Mac 500W and 50V A123 battery was too fast. It would get up to 53KPH (33 mph) at the press of the TT, and on our winding test road, I felt it would be easy to lose control and crash, whereas I was happy at faster speeds in my car or my motor bike. Its torque while waiting at stop lights was enough to do a wheelstand with little effort. Clearly, a bike like this in the hands of an ordinary rider on normal streets would not be safe. It should have disk brakes, DOT tyres, better road handling, a keyed on-off and a motorbike helmet designed for 50kph crashes. In contrast, the "300W" BBS01 with a Cellman 36V (41V) battery showing a reading of about 600W with TT on a standard 3-speed European steel bike with caliper brakes, upright bars, 700C/38 tyres feels perfectly comfortable, indeed a joy to ride and safe.
The rules should accomplish the following:
The rules should not
As a side note, we also need to reform some of the other rules related to all cycling.
The required helmet rule in some places is a good example. The bicycle helmet industry has effectively used fear to sell their helmets through regulation. This is business 101. For example, if you want to sell more refrigerators, require that a Federal Home Mortgage for a new home requires a fridge in the home. This may be smart business, but it also is a corruption of the legislative process (but so common we hardly notice).
In fact, I read that a bicycle helmet is designed only to provide protection for a slow-speed (under 20 kph/12 mph) crash which usually means the bike rider fell off the bike. Go to Europe, and you will see children wearing helmets, but not adults. Why? Because children fall off bikes. They are learning. Adults know how to ride bikes, and bikes are safe. Crashes between bikes and cars/trucks/busses will see the helmet instantly torn off and the rider killed or maimed regardless of the helmet. To protect riders from such dangers they need full body armor which is absurd. In Europe, they solve this by separating bikes and cars into separate lanes and now I read that 1 in 5 Europeans get around on bikes. Thus, as part of the job of coming up with regulations, we need to specify when a helmet actually becomes important, and what sort of helmet it should be... noting that the industry can be expected to grow sufficiently thanks to motor assist that it will require a proper set of specifications. We probably need a better "Class AB" rule for ebikes that require no further rules, and a "Class AC" rule for over 350W ebikes that specifies additional safety equipment (but again, no license, inspection, etc). So feel free to write both.
The objective here is to keep it simple. It's one thing to buy a bike that is properly set up; it's quite off-putting if then we have to don a uniform, keep up with the paperwork and pay money to various regulators, registrars, insurers and inspectors.
Let me ask that people more knowledgeable than me join in. I imagine a collaboration between those with engineering expertise and those with legal and enforcement expertise. The ideal would be to get a single global standard, or at least a global standard except Europe, which is too lost in the EU bureaucracy (unless they lighten up on their absurd numbers that are too low, and allow TT for rapid starts in what otherwise may be unsafe conditions). And as we write these drafts, remember that technology is moving at a rapid pace. Perhaps the rules could be programmable, meaning controller settings, so one can have a very strong motor, capable of 2,000 watts, with sophisticated settings that measure hill angle, total resistance (output, chain, gear, tyre, wind, temperature, etc) where the micro-computer then outputs the precise legal power. If such a rule were written, you can bet that the manufacturers would respond and offer certified complying controllers.
Note that I am asking for a serious exercise here with a realistic result. I live in a small country that punches above its weight. That means if a few of us go to the central government with better language, we will definitely get a meeting with the people who actually draft the language, probably can bring a sample ebike so they understand it, and if we do our homework stand a good chance of getting the rule changed. Then, once it has been adopted, other members of this forum can use it to press for a universal standard. To quote a line attributed to M. Mead "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
So with that long introduction... how would you write a regulation for ebikes that was fair, universal and adoptable? Please do this in a form where you begin with the actual regulation in bold, and then give your thoughts. In this way we will keep our eye focused on the goal.
Essentially, we are in the Model T era of ebikes. The regulations in some countries are thin, the police do not know how to enforce the rules, and generally one of two things happens. Either the police do nothing until there is a crash, whereupon the prosecutor decides what the rule means, and the hapless bike rider may discover they are an unwitting criminal, or a particular policeman decides to get tough (usually because of some punk kids [i.e. immature aggressive persons] who discover motors and ruin it for everyone) whereupon perfectly harmless ebike owners get caught up in a dragnet, and in worse case, the local politicians stage a public crushing where they use a 20 ton roller to crush a few confiscated ebikes, including your $5,000 custom titanium bike that happened to test 3W over the limit.
Good leadership will not come from the industry, nor from bureaucrats. It will come from the most knowledgeable group, which happens to be us, the members of this forum. So here is the challenge. If you were to write rules that were clear, easy to measure, easy to enforce and really did hit the sweet spot between safe and dangerous, what would they say? It also would be very important to maintain the freedom we have now. No registration, no inspections, no licenses, no insurance, no obnoxious rules, and for safety a commitment that road builders make the roads safe (like in Europe), not vilify the bike rider because of bad road design.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_bicycle_laws for the mess we have now.
How should the rules read?
After trying twelve different motors, I can tell you what the sweet spot is for my country, my conditions and using my style of bikes but even then I am challenged to put that into regulatory words.
The Bafang Midmount BBS01 hits the sweet spot. They sent us 23 motors, and one of them was the oddball (it was one sent to replace a warranted hub motor, hence they took the liberty to send me a slightly different configuration). Supposedly, it was set at the factory for 300W to be legal in our country. But it also gave me enough information to wonder... it is a 300W motor that displayed actual wattage, which I will explain below. But first, let's look at the law (in my country) as written now.
It is simple, defining vehicles where the ebike is a class AB vehicle:
AA (Pedal cycle) A vehicle designed to be propelled through a mechanism solely by human power.
AB (Power-assisted pedal cycle) A pedal cycle to which is attached one or more auxiliary propulsion motors having a combined maximum power output not exceeding 300 watts.
So what does maximum power output mean? And is 300W the right number? If I were to tweak the rule, I would say, continuous rated power not exceeding 350 watts as set by the manufacturer, noting that this still may be too vague.
First, no motor maker offers a 300W, it's either 250W or 350W. And this rating varies by maker. The Cute100F we first tested was a 350W that was gutless. CellMan's MAC 350 was a completely different beast.
In fact, as we all know, it's not the motor rating, it's the controller that decides how many watts will be consumed to move the motor. The motor can handle a lot more, where it is the beefiness of the design that determines how much for how long before things start to melt.
Obviously, the easiest would be to say a class AB cycle cannot have a motor larger than say 350W as printed on the side of the motor, and in the specifications provided by the manufacturer, but this would then need to be qualified as to controller settings. And those controller settings would need to have on-road and off-road variables, because riding safely on the streets may require 350W, but hill-climbing off road may require more.
With the special BBS01, instead of the standard C961 display that showed the speed, it came with a C695 display that also shows actually wattage, although I do not know where it reads that. Using the pedalec going up our 15 degree test hill, in "full" mode, setting 3, the display would show about 300W, which felt a bit gutless. Yes it got me up in first gear, but it seemed a bit underpowered. If the goal is to get up the hill without releasing too much lactic acid into the leg muscles, it was barely at the threshold (I will do a digression on that subject next). However, when I pressed the Thumb Throttle (TT), the power meter doubled. It sure did not feel like double the power, but it was just enough to make the uphill more comfortable. On the flat, I found pressing the TT still put it up in the 600's and I was getting some fairly strong speed out of it... up to the low 30's although there were enough variables in slope and curves to not be a good test. I need to find a flat road on a windless day. But it seemed to me that for hills, the rules should allow 650W with the rider adding reasonable pedal (I reckon about the same pedalling as riding on the flat), but once on the flat, well under 300 is fine.
Digression: Purists say that ebikes give less exercise. This is arguable. Somewhere I came across a stat showing the difference in annual mileage between a pedal bike and an ebike. The ebike was used to go far longer distances... about 1,200 miles a year as I recall. I can say that when we got into ebiking, I pulled out a Gary Fisher hardtail from the garage that I bought new in 1996 that probably had ten miles on it, but plenty of corrosion from sitting in the garage. As soon as I put a motor on it, its mileage jumped, as I began to use it every time I went into the village, or over to town on the ferry (bikes ride free). Part of the reason was that I was able to arrive at meetings dressed in normal street clothes and look sharp. No soaked t-shirt or wet patches under my arms. My legs got warm, but no lactic acid build up. Thus, the ebike standard should be to assist pedalling, so the rider gets good exercise, but not such difficult exercise that they need a shower or special clothes. The exercise value will come in distance ridden. I should also note that the Gary Fisher, on which I installed a CellMan Mac 500W and 50V A123 battery was too fast. It would get up to 53KPH (33 mph) at the press of the TT, and on our winding test road, I felt it would be easy to lose control and crash, whereas I was happy at faster speeds in my car or my motor bike. Its torque while waiting at stop lights was enough to do a wheelstand with little effort. Clearly, a bike like this in the hands of an ordinary rider on normal streets would not be safe. It should have disk brakes, DOT tyres, better road handling, a keyed on-off and a motorbike helmet designed for 50kph crashes. In contrast, the "300W" BBS01 with a Cellman 36V (41V) battery showing a reading of about 600W with TT on a standard 3-speed European steel bike with caliper brakes, upright bars, 700C/38 tyres feels perfectly comfortable, indeed a joy to ride and safe.
The rules should accomplish the following:
- Enable a rider to go up a hill at no less than 18 kph (11 mph) but no more than 32 kph (20 mph)
- Assist a rider at speeds up to 32 kph on level ground, but not result in an infringement if the bike is going faster under pedal power alone
- Perhaps have different standards depending on bike equipment. The faster the speed, the more need for better brakes, bettery tyres, etc.
- Differentiate between safe riding and unsafe riding. In effect, give the police the ability to spot and prosecute the abusers without limiting the safe riders
- Perhaps have specific requirements for unsafe roads, such as a 1 meter wide plastic stick on the back of the rack that signals to drivers to keep their distance
The rules should not
- Be "gotcha" rules that are hard to work out in advance. Buyers of gear should be able to buy a configuration knowing it is legal
- Be expensive or complicated. No registration, insurance, licencing, inspections, taxes (other than sales tax) etc.
As a side note, we also need to reform some of the other rules related to all cycling.
The required helmet rule in some places is a good example. The bicycle helmet industry has effectively used fear to sell their helmets through regulation. This is business 101. For example, if you want to sell more refrigerators, require that a Federal Home Mortgage for a new home requires a fridge in the home. This may be smart business, but it also is a corruption of the legislative process (but so common we hardly notice).
In fact, I read that a bicycle helmet is designed only to provide protection for a slow-speed (under 20 kph/12 mph) crash which usually means the bike rider fell off the bike. Go to Europe, and you will see children wearing helmets, but not adults. Why? Because children fall off bikes. They are learning. Adults know how to ride bikes, and bikes are safe. Crashes between bikes and cars/trucks/busses will see the helmet instantly torn off and the rider killed or maimed regardless of the helmet. To protect riders from such dangers they need full body armor which is absurd. In Europe, they solve this by separating bikes and cars into separate lanes and now I read that 1 in 5 Europeans get around on bikes. Thus, as part of the job of coming up with regulations, we need to specify when a helmet actually becomes important, and what sort of helmet it should be... noting that the industry can be expected to grow sufficiently thanks to motor assist that it will require a proper set of specifications. We probably need a better "Class AB" rule for ebikes that require no further rules, and a "Class AC" rule for over 350W ebikes that specifies additional safety equipment (but again, no license, inspection, etc). So feel free to write both.
The objective here is to keep it simple. It's one thing to buy a bike that is properly set up; it's quite off-putting if then we have to don a uniform, keep up with the paperwork and pay money to various regulators, registrars, insurers and inspectors.
Let me ask that people more knowledgeable than me join in. I imagine a collaboration between those with engineering expertise and those with legal and enforcement expertise. The ideal would be to get a single global standard, or at least a global standard except Europe, which is too lost in the EU bureaucracy (unless they lighten up on their absurd numbers that are too low, and allow TT for rapid starts in what otherwise may be unsafe conditions). And as we write these drafts, remember that technology is moving at a rapid pace. Perhaps the rules could be programmable, meaning controller settings, so one can have a very strong motor, capable of 2,000 watts, with sophisticated settings that measure hill angle, total resistance (output, chain, gear, tyre, wind, temperature, etc) where the micro-computer then outputs the precise legal power. If such a rule were written, you can bet that the manufacturers would respond and offer certified complying controllers.
Note that I am asking for a serious exercise here with a realistic result. I live in a small country that punches above its weight. That means if a few of us go to the central government with better language, we will definitely get a meeting with the people who actually draft the language, probably can bring a sample ebike so they understand it, and if we do our homework stand a good chance of getting the rule changed. Then, once it has been adopted, other members of this forum can use it to press for a universal standard. To quote a line attributed to M. Mead "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
So with that long introduction... how would you write a regulation for ebikes that was fair, universal and adoptable? Please do this in a form where you begin with the actual regulation in bold, and then give your thoughts. In this way we will keep our eye focused on the goal.
want full on downhill bikes
