I’m assuming Machine Learning
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Monster® Latte, colored green.
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Mother Lovin’… as in, “this mother lovin’ piece of technology is terrible/great!”
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Can someone explain to me the point of performance E-bikes? Is it just to sell more expensive bikes to MAMLS? Bikes with dozens of sensors that need certified technicians to replace them?
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There are “performance” categories in every hobby that exists, and within those hobbies are lots of people buying whatever the “best” is.
Maybe I am misunderstanding the question?
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I guess I see the point of E-bikes as transportation. For folks who want “the best” it seems like adding E to the cervelo would cheapen the experience, but I really don’t claim to understand.
It just boggles my mind that aero carbon gofast ebikes exist and I’m struggling to process it. I’m still totally baffled by robot shifting too and mostly ride a 9 speed, so I think you should just ignore me.
Hell, I’m not really sold on the idea of indexed shifters or carbon either. I’m very much a cycluddite
I may be totally wrong in this metaphor, but when electric guitars were invented, did folks go around saying they corrupted the experience and sounds of an acoustic guitar?
E-bikes aren’t bicycles and folks buying e-bikes aren’t trying to have the best bicycle experience, they are trying to have the best e-bike experience.
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A friend in the UK got one of the Ribble e-gravel bike to use as a commuter at the height of COVID. He didn’t want to take the train, doesn’t drive, and it’s about 25 miles each way. He tried riding to work a couple times on his road bike but was just wrecked at the end of 50 commuter miles and a full workday. Now he rides in to the office a couple times a week on the ebike. At least in this case, he’s using a “performance” ebike primarily for utilitarian purposes, but it’s also getting him out riding more for fun and opening up options for longer rides.
Also I think people ride bikes for many different reasons. Fitness is only part of it. Maybe for the aging MAMILs, as their fitness wains they want to continue to ride with friends and the camaraderie is more important than the purity of pedal-power? I hope to be far from needing to consider that any time soon.
See also: NYT editorial by Jenny Finney Boylan.
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I suppose the ultralight, incremental gains mentality makes sense to me for a bicycle - human’s only create so much power and it’s an optimization problem to make them go as fast as possible within UCI rules.
thanks @earwig for helping me understand the use case a bit better. I was having trouble distancing myself from the mentality that performance e-bikes were just another optimization problem within UCI rules and within the legal definition of a bicycle.
I guess I’m still not quite grasping why e-velomobiles aren’t a trendy thing instead - why do performance e-bikes need to conform to UCI rules if folks will never even pretend they might race them?
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I’m sure there’s also a class of more-dollars-than-sense MAMILs chasing ultralight incremental gains with ebikes, likely to ultimately end with disastrous parts failures. I suppose that’s what the bike industry marketing folks show us, in the same way that they show us racers when most people who own road bikes are using them for a tarck century on a MUP.
Good question about the velomobiles. Perhaps because velomobiles are considered odd-looking? Perhaps because that’s not what the bike industry is building/marketing? Also, they’re probably harder to park, especially indoors, than a bicycle-shaped object, especially if they’re the fully-faired recumbent variety.
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Ask Bob Dylan about this one
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I rode our ebike to work today. Not sure why, because I couldn’t face riding a real bike I think. It was 12 mins faster but I still had to deal with mofos in articulated trucks passing me with a 1.5 metre gap at 100 kmh. Shoulda brought the Prius.
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Correct.
ML is just a way to create a “model” or an algorithm that interprets something. It can be useful in a lot of ways, but the difficulty comes in understanding the model.
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Re: performance Ebikes
I would 100% ride a lightweight carbon ebike to do some back to back to back massive alpine days in France/Italy.
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I really appreciate all of the knowledge in this thread. Whenever I have a Shimano question @adem is the first name that comes to mind, but really everyone in here is killing the game.
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bikes are great because they’re small and you can ride around with your buddies and go faster than walking. Ebikes are great because they can go faster and farther than you can and they help get up the hill at the end of the day.
Ebikes in the shape of normal bikes are great for people who like bikes but for some reason need the ebike boost. I’d like an e-dew because at the end of a long week doing physical work and riding my bike to work I’m fucking beat and it’s a big hill to get home from the ferry at the end of the day.
I’m not willing to buy some rad power abomination yet.
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Right now I am more into dithering than riding. I would love to build an E-dragster. Iv’e only just found out that the Tongsheng TSDZ2 has a proper torque sensor, unlike my bafang, which is all or nothing, to an extent. The cycmotor kits look like crazy fun. More of an E-moto than an E-bike tho. I was looking at the Paradox Kinetic kits last night but they were very noisy. https://www.cycmotor.com/x1-pro-gen-2
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I’m very into already integrated pedal assist units, like the bosch. Not gonna dither some terrible monstrosity together!
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i’ve seen e bikes get people into bikes. some folx in finance tried our classic bikes and were like “nah bikes are terrible, i don’t care if a $400 hybrid weighs half as much”. they tried one of our e bikes (which still really suck) and now they own their own $400 khs hybrid and do a lot of recreational riding.
i wanted to hate them for so long but they are pretty cool. if i had a forced commute of >~13 miles each way i would 100% buy one. just to have something for when thursday or friday hits and mama needs the car and public transit would take 50% longer than riding a bike.
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Kinda want to hate on e-bikes, but…
They get people out of cars and using bike infrastructure which creates demand for more bike infrastructure.
The last two times I’ve done the hilly loop from my house, I passed an old dude in kit on a nice lookin’ BMC e-bike. His belly suggests to me that he wouldn’t otherwise be tackling the hilly loop through a redwood forest. From my vantage point, that’s about the most optimal use for such a thing.
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