> “because we think electric scooters are the most important vehicle innovation of this century.”
Perhaps.. if you've never experienced urban property theft. Which is what prevents me from buying an electric bicycle. Similarly the designers of these products seem to incorporate no anti theft technology into any of their products.
A scooter that goes blisteringly fast? Hardly an innovation on it's own.
> the company’s engineers left Formula 1 to work on scooters “because we think electric scooters are the most important vehicle innovation of this century.”
Oh, they left F1 to develop another exciting, high performance vehicle that will sell in similar numbers to an F1 car.
> It reportedly produces over 24,000 watts of juice with a high-power dual motor controller setup developed with partner Rage Mechanics, which is a French company making all kinds of high-performance electric microvehicles.
So they actually left F1 to resell a downsized version of someone else's designs (Rage Mechanics developed a 50kW version) with extra springiness in the steering to make it less twitchy at higher speeds.
The small wheels were blamed for people with street-legal scooters steering into a rut and falling. Seems motorsports is bringing massive improvements to regular people after a long time.
Scooters are just deceptively dangerous. The ease with which you can just hop on and go 20, 30, 40mph in instant is a false sense of security. There’s no drama, no warning, just pure speed standing upright, feet mere inches off the ground. Crashing on a 100mph scooter is sure to end gruesomely.
I like to look at these things in terms of kinetic energy. 100mph is roughly 100x more KE than at 10mph.
Assume I hit a car with enough energy to break my leg and the car's windshield. This seems plausible at 10mph. Now, we scale this by 2 orders of magnitude. You could cripple lots of people with this thing in one shot. Bollards wont stop a guy with a scooter.
> the company’s engineers left Formula 1 to work on scooters “because we think electric scooters are the most important vehicle innovation of this century.”
I laughed out loud. Start up PR is a competition for “what’s the most absurd thing we can say”
The most obvious comparison is an ebike, which would be superior in every way except one: portability. Where I live these scooters are popular, and people bring them in elevators and park them inside.
This is a real issue: bike parking is insufficient and insecure from theft in many cities. Plus, you need to charge it somewhere, and bringing a conventional bike to an apartment is often prohibitive. These make scooters much more attractive in practice than they otherwise should be.
To me, a foldable bike (with larger wheels and a seat) and a moderately sized battery pack seems like a better compromise between safety and convenience.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 31.9 ms ] threadPerhaps.. if you've never experienced urban property theft. Which is what prevents me from buying an electric bicycle. Similarly the designers of these products seem to incorporate no anti theft technology into any of their products.
A scooter that goes blisteringly fast? Hardly an innovation on it's own.
Oh, they left F1 to develop another exciting, high performance vehicle that will sell in similar numbers to an F1 car.
> It reportedly produces over 24,000 watts of juice with a high-power dual motor controller setup developed with partner Rage Mechanics, which is a French company making all kinds of high-performance electric microvehicles.
So they actually left F1 to resell a downsized version of someone else's designs (Rage Mechanics developed a 50kW version) with extra springiness in the steering to make it less twitchy at higher speeds.
Assume I hit a car with enough energy to break my leg and the car's windshield. This seems plausible at 10mph. Now, we scale this by 2 orders of magnitude. You could cripple lots of people with this thing in one shot. Bollards wont stop a guy with a scooter.
I laughed out loud. Start up PR is a competition for “what’s the most absurd thing we can say”
This is a real issue: bike parking is insufficient and insecure from theft in many cities. Plus, you need to charge it somewhere, and bringing a conventional bike to an apartment is often prohibitive. These make scooters much more attractive in practice than they otherwise should be.
To me, a foldable bike (with larger wheels and a seat) and a moderately sized battery pack seems like a better compromise between safety and convenience.
Re-invent the Penny Farthing perhaps. An electric version of that, with some funky way of lifting the rider up, would be amazing.
This is like the cronut of bikes, all the downsides of a scooter, and none of the upsides of a motorbike.