neptronix said:
50 horsepower in a velomobile sounds like a very cool way to die :lol: 8)
Only if you wreck. The other vehicles on the roads with orders of magnitude more mass are the biggest risk factors pertaining to this.
Racing kart operators safely push their machines to the limits all the time. There's no reason an electric-assist velomobile couldn't be designed with similar principles and performance in mind, and such a thing could even be much safer than an upright ebike. If most of the cars were hypothetically removed from the roads, such vehicles may even end up being safer than cars due to the reduced kinetic energy involved in crashes.
You'd be surprised how much of the impact a body will absorb to reduce the impulse suffered by the rider. Take a look at the following horrific crashes of automobiles with velomobiles where the velomobile riders actually survived:
Milan sideswiped by Ford Fusion at 35 mph:
http://www.bentrideronline.com/messageboard/showpost.php?p=1564017&postcount=21
Alleweder A2 T-boned by a car:
http://www.velomobiles.co.uk/2012/09/velomobile-crash-safety/
Quest hit by truck at highway speeds:
https://www.bentrideronline.com/messageboard/showthread.php?t=113466
Quest hit by driver at intersection:
http://www.bentrideronline.com/messageboard/showpost.php?p=1395402&postcount=28
Without these body shells covering the riders, it is doubtful they'd have survived the collisions.
If only the smaller motors in our size range were built in such an efficient manner though.. I think the new GNG X1-pro or whatever it is might be worth buying. Apparently it is 90% efficient at the least. at 3.5 kg or ~8lbs for the entire drive, it has an amazing power to weight ratio per dollar.
https://www.cycmotor.com/x1-pro
The major problem with mid drives is that bicycle chains aren't built to handle the kind of power they can deliver. I like hub motors for this very reason, because the human power drivetrain components can have their loads isolated from the output of the much more powerful(and potentially destructive) EV drivetrain components. The problem is that most hub motors are so inefficient that they have to be large and heavy to make decent power, the inefficiency introducing all kinds of losses to the pedal-only output even when the electric motor's output is not in use, requiring yet more rotational mass to be accelerated as a result, turning what should be fun and useful exercise into a chore. With a hub motor, it needs to be light with minimal losses so that with the motor de-activated, the bike can still be operated under pedal-only with as close to an imperceptible amount of drag as possible to the rider. A vehicle that can run on either electric only, as a pedal assist, or human power only when desired is versatile and reduces any risk of the operator being left stranded or suffering any range anxiety. Then there's the issue of regen; it adds versatility to the vehicle because if the battery is drained, the rider can always choose to ride up a steep hill or mountain, then use regen to recharge the battery on the way down if needed, which could then be used to keep the vehicle's lights/signals on or charge personal electronic devices, or provide the small amount of power needed to reduce motor cogging losses to next to zero.
No-one sells a hub motor ideal for an ebike application that is still 'easy' to operate with the motor disabled but is capable of providing dangerous levels of power. There's definitely an opportunity there, and I know enough to put a prototype together(I've built a custom AC generator before for a wind turbine). If I had the money and tools, I'd try to build something approaching my ideal motor, but I don't, so until then, that kills that idea on my part.
Don't mind chalo, this behavior is completely normal for him.
I've noticed.
He did once say he likes it when people try to build cars out of bicycles.
Given that there are nearly 8 billion people on this planet, projected to reach 11 billion late this century, with nearly all of them desiring personal individual rapid transportation that isolates them from the elements, every single one of them owning and regularly using a normal sized car is neither possible, tenable, or sustainable. Some sort of solution is needed to fulfill this desire in a sustainable manner. An electric velomobile built as a functional hybrid between a car and a bicycle, could still be capable of highway speeds like a car, offer similar comfort, with orders of magnitude less resource/energy use and environmental impact.
The following vehicle was built by an endless sphere forum member that gives a glimpse of what is possible:
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=235&p=1464663
10 Wh/mi @ 37 mph, without pedaling. That's over 3,000 MPGe, or about 1/20th the energy consumption of a Tesla Model 3 under similar operating conditions.
The technology is there to do it, but the auto industry and fossil fuel companies have a stranglehold over the world's individual transportation paradigm and use economies of scale and their capture of government to cement their advantage, using our tax monies to subsidize the destruction of our planet and ultimately, ourselves. Being that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, nature will have the last laugh.
Since it could be made to work with the existing infrastructure meant for automobile traffic while inducing far less wear and tear, such a vehicle could become the future of both the car and of the bicycle, but people will have to want it, governments will have to stop regulating/taxing/controlling transportation, and business will have to accept disruption. Make it able to haul ass and be able to pick on high end musclecars, or do tire smoking donuts in an intersection at 3AM, while costing literal pennies per few hundred miles to operate, and a large number of people WILL certainly want it. This leaves the source of the problem of our current transportation paradigm driving our collective trend towards ecocide: "leadership" in government and business. Cars and fossil fuel consumption make a small group of people a lot of money, mainly business executives and politicians, while simultaneously destroying everyone and the planet they live on. Cars and fossil fuel consumption have been encouraged by society's policy makers to the exclusion of all other alternatives BECAUSE this small group of people can take our money in the process of us getting around. This is why America's mass transit system was gutted in the 1940s and why the automobile and airlines combined receive literally trillions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to this day. The rich fux feel entitled to our money, and feel we don't have a right to exist if we aren't making them a profit from everything we do, acting as if planet Earth's bounty as well as our lives belong exclusively to them and them alone.
Electric cars are somewhat disruptive to their reigning paradigm, because they cut the oil industry execs out and reduce the "need" for resource wars and are a little bit more difficult to tax with regard to energy use, which is why the leadership expended effort to suppress the technology when it started becoming viable.
An electric velomobile "car" that gets the equivalent of thousands of miles per gallon and can even be pedaled like a bicycle if there's no "fuel" available, while using roughly 1/100th the resources as a full sized fossil fuel powered car, would be even that much more disruptive, but so far, such a thing probably doesn't register as much of a threat to leadership because humanity's engineers haven't proven creative enough to make such a thing reality(Mochet is arguably the closest we've come to such a concept on a successful commercial basis, 80+ years ago, but it is a far cry from what I describe due to the disparity in technology between now and then, and it was during fuel rationing in the middle of a world war and foreign occupation that the product thrived, and then only for a brief period), as the policy makers deem waging endless resource wars, maintaining a sprawling surveillance state, building more than enough nuclear armaments to destroy humanity, globalizing mass consumerism and resource wastage, all as more "worthy" uses of these engineers' collective talent. Being that the necessities of life are withheld from those who aren't born with a silver spoon up their ass unless they work for these rich fux, the rich fux are directing the future of the human race, along with its demise, as our best and brightest are generally too busy making the rich fux more money in order to survive instead of having time to truly change society for the better.
Such a waste.