I’m considering making landing gear for a 2-wheel e-bike. The base bike will be a Lectric XP 3.0. By landing gear, I mean something like training wheels, maybe without the wheels, that deploy when the bike stops. When the bike begins to move again, the landing gear retracts.
The deployment needs to be automatic, so an accelerometer and a deployment motor or a solenoid are needed.
The attachment points need to be above and in front of the rear wheel.
The 2 sides of the landing gear need to be connected by an axle
, but the axle doesn’t need to be solid. One axle from each side can meet the other with a U-joint or gear connection. The axis of each axle can be horizontal, but diagonally pointing front to back. IOW, looking from the top, the vertical bar represents the rear wheel, and the slashes represent the axles:
/ | \ (The true angles of these axles would be different. This just describes the idea.)
Thus, in the retracted position, the landing gears would be near the bike frame, while in the deployed position, they would be spread out.
On an unpowered bike, the weight penalty for something like this would be prohibitive. But on an e-bike, it’s doable. Incidentally, the weight penalty can be partially offset by deleting the kickstand.
I couldn’t find much on this subject through searching. If anybody has any suggestions, please contribute.
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Hi.
When I built the Zing, a fully enclosed plug-in hybrid three wheeler, I first built it as a two wheeler with outriggers I could deploy via foot pedals. The difficulties in using that system lead me to put the vehicle on three wheels. A little before I built the Zing, Ecomobile made a two wheeler with automatically-deployed outriggers, under the control of a computer. I preferred something much simpler, and less reliant on the electrical system. The Ecomobile was sold with a week-long training session, largely to learn how to transition from moving to still and back. It may be worth your time to find a few Ecomobile owners to talk with.
Issues I encountered:
- The outriggers, when deployed, need to be substantially wider than the vehicle, or the vehicle can tip over on crowned roads (which means virtually every road). This means that there may not be room for the outriggers to deploy without colliding with the next vehicle over or with a curb.
- The vehicle must be leveled with respect to gravity, rather than to the road surface, Otherwise, when starting out from a stop, the vehicle will be leaning and will lurch until counter-steering becomes effective to stabilize the vehicle. This can easily lead to a collision with the vehicle beside you, or cause you to veer into oncoming traffic.
- When there is a pothole where one of the wheels deploys, many undesirable things happen. The outrigger must change its length in near instant fashion, requiring some processing power and actuator power not likely to be compatible with a very small vehicle. Consider that Teslas (at least through 2024, when I sold mine) were remarkable poor in parking near curbs, resulting in many having scraped up rims. Few of the quasi-automatic functions of my Tesla worked correctly, despite having far more processing power than appropriate for an e-bike.
- The likely rationale for wanting outriggers is to maintain streamlining in a fully enclosed vehicle. If the sides are open, then using one's legs works so much better than a complicated system. If I were committed to two wheels, then I would have cut holes in the underside of the vehicle for stabilization via my legs. However, I decided that three wheels just made more sense for many reasons, not the least of were cost and operational simplicity. The Ecomobile was fabulously expensive, and offered very little in advantages over other motorcycles.
- I was aware that with the outriggers deployed, the vehicle would steer like a car (turn right, go right) when maneuvering slowly in close quarters. Then, at about 5 mph, it would steer like a motorcycle, via counter-steering (steer front wheel right, to cause the bike to fall to the left to bank into a left turn). That transition, which was intuitive for a normal motorcycle rider, became something to think about and prepare for. I was considering commercializing the Zing, and thought that if training were necessary before even offering a test ride, selling it would be difficult. It does not surprise me that I have seen only one Ecomobile on the road in the three or four decades that they have been available.
All the issues I encountered can probably be overcome, given some careful engineering, fast processing, solid software, powerful actuators, and the intestinal fortitude to see it all through.
Lit Motors has an approach that can work, although they have been at it for over 20 years without ever producing a production vehicle. Odd that they show patently unsafe driving simulations on their website, as well as a simulated side impact that doesn't even result in a scratch on the Lit but that could easily be lethal.
Our Story | Lit Motors
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