Quiet everyone, Ford North America Product Communications director has an opinion about e-bikes.
Quiet everyone, Ford North America Product Communications director has an opinion about e-bikes.
"Bikes are unsafe" says Mike of the Ford company, known for its "ChildCrusher (tm)" trucks.
Look.
Just because pedestrian deaths went up 70% between 2010 and 2021, much of which is attributed to light trucks, and just because trucks have gotten significantly larger and more geared towards NOT doing the things they were designed for, that doesn't mean Mike here is a clueless jackass who is also complicit in making life more unsafe for pedestrian-wait
I'd rather my kid cruise around on an e-bike than kill someone in it's Maibatsu Monstrosity.
How many kids does it get per gallon?
20mph
Omg this is so dangerous, I am so much safer with a 2 tons machine that goes 180mph and needs the driver to pass a exam that a monkey would pass.
I wish a monkey could pass the test, then maybe I'd be able to. I keep failing it because I'm disabled. That's why I need and love accessible infrastructure.
Also, it's not particularly hard to reach that speed on an acoustic bike.
I think in some states you can even do the test online.
I think there's some merit to this, but:
-Saying teens should just ride regular bikes in a country that, for the most part, has shit cycling infrastructure and a car-centric culture that is hostile towards sharing the road with cyclists is a non-starter, unless you are also advocating for changing that.
-If you want to whine about how dangerous it is for teens to ride e-bikes that can go over 20mph then surely you would have a problem with the states that allow teens to drive vehicles that can go much faster than that and cause way more damage to those involved in an accident with them.
modified to go more than 20 mph
Pretty sure e-scooters can do that without modification already
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Reasons why E bikes are actually better than presented here
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My knees like the support of E-bikes, after having argued against them for more than a decade for similar reasons to yours.
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I also take them when I am exhausted, since I can tune in some support if I need it.
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My friend with MS does use her E-bike and when that isn't possible her electrical wheelchair.
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I use the bike even for hilly and steep routes since then I can add a bit power
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I have more control over when I get to some points, meaning that I ride the bike more (since I can add/reduce the power that is supplied by the motor)
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long trecks and tours are much easier with a group of five when everyone got E-bikes (as long as no wheel gets hurt). In our case that involved kids who we normally had to curate routes for very well. Now we have an ease of use that wasn't there before.
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the overall product quality of the E-bike is higher and that means it is much easier to ride and the components do last longer than what I would've bought instead. The maintenance though is slightly more expensive.
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driving in cities is much less a problem since I am not angry having to stop in front of signals and also getting speed is much faster, meaning I can cut a few minutes from most distances
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transporting heavy things is actually much easier (this includes material from shops, food, but also bike trailers for kids
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I feel much more save with E-bikes next to cars. For various reasons, one is that the base speed I got is good and when I use a short muscle power burst I can get the 28-33km/h that are at tempo 30 zones usual. Couldn't ride that speed the whole distance though.
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I just use the bike much more than my non E-bike during similar times and get more distance covered with it.
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Yeah, even on an E-bike...going over 35km with motor is getting dicey. Luckily where we are they are already illegal (though the government is looking at moving to slightly more permissive NZ standards that allow 300w motors up to 30kph.
Regular bikes are good.
E-bikes are also good but not as much as mountain or road bikes.
auto execs get the wall
I commute in my child crusher™ gigatruck that somehow has a worse mpg than if I were to chug diesel and walk the same distance by foot
ebikes are 'gay' or something idk
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the "Rap Band" of vehicles
cars, dead pedestrians, unwalkable cities and communities, >42,000 deaths/year from car accidents in the US: freedom
threats to car manufacturers' net worth: danger
Okay, then change design and zoning to make bycicle transportation feasible for more people.
"we can't because biking isn't currently feasible for enough people." –local politicians
rinse, lather, repeat.
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Oh man, when I was growing up, kids used to ride all sorts of weird things, like fucking gassed up go-karts. An e-bike would have been a relief.
Yeah, kids were all about the terribly, terribly illegal petrol scooters, though I was a bit young for that fad.
TIL that bicycles can't go faster than 20mph.
shown by the constant b
The only reason I ended up in the hospital from an ebike accident is because a fucking car hit me lol
On the flip side: some old dude ended up in the hospital because he rode his ebike into the back of my husband's car. No helmet, didn't even attempt to brake, bystander said it looked like the dude even sped up before the collision. We even declined the cop's offer to issue the dude a citation. Insurance auto defaulted to finding the car driver at fault. Inattentive morons on ebikes are still inattentive morons.
I have nothing against ebikes, but I think they deserve stricter safety requirements like required helmets and better brakes.
Insurance auto defaulted to finding the car driver at fault
You know what to do comrades, get to biking!
So let me get this straight: a police officer offered to provide paperwork proving the other party at fault for the collision, you said no, the insurance company sided with the party you chose to absolve of guilt, and you have a problem with that?
ACAB but when the pigs are involved, you need to make the system work for you.
I have nothing against ebikes, but
It's not like I'm any safer going 20mph downhill on my regular bike. Those shitty caliper brakes should just be outlawed and disc brakes made universal.
The sort of person this rhetoric appeals to doesn't even believe teens should be outside unsupervised in the first place. Electric bikes just encourage them to explore and learn about dangerous ideas like community.
Car accidents are famously a negligible cause of death amongst teenagers
How many children were killed by collisions with Ford vehicles last year?
Speaking as a curmudgeon, “Today’s Teens” will inevitably find a way to use any new technology for something stupid and dangerous, judging an invention by its misuse is the definition of bad faith.
Just limit the power then and let people figure out how to modify it if they want more power. Then it will no longer be able to go as fast.
That's already exactly how it works. The guy is just mad that people can have light electric motor vehicles for little money.
He's rather teens be killing younger children in the light trucks he hawks instead of killing themselves in radical 40mph bike jumps
There is an issue with people, especially teens, going like 40 on a MUP, but that's an issue of infrastructure and traffic enforcement any way you cut it.
Well, I didn't expect anything less from a Ford executive
this guy sucks but he's not entirely wrong. There's a memorial on my street from a bit over a decade ago when Chinese quads were really popular. All the tweens in a local neighborhood used to ride them around with their even younger siblings on them, usually 3/4 of them not wearing helmets, doing wheelies, etc. It was extremely unsafe, but for whatever reason (either ignorance or stupidity) their parents allowed them to ride them when they weren't home. All of that stopped after a little group of them were hauling ass on the side of the road in tall grass and one of them tried to outrun the line of them next to the trail in the tall grass. He ran head-on into a telephone pole, flat out, without a helmet, and died instantly.
They're not comparable. Average ebikes can't really go any faster than a fit rider on a good road bike.
I can easily go 50km/h on flat ground for a short amount of time in a mountain bike if I want to and I'm almost obese - an ebike that can go appreciably faster than that for more than 10 minutes is very expensive and very much looks like a motorcycle.
Just copying my reply to the other user here:
There's a lot of "ebikes" that are just electric dirtbikes with vestigial pedals. It's easy to modify them to put out way more power than they're sold with, too. There has to be some kind of grappling with this new category of things that can pretend to be a bicycle but still spin tires, rip past 30mph, etc. They need to either be hard limited or treated more like motorcycles than bicycles.
I understand, but quads and ebikes are quite different. They're much smaller and aren't gas powered, far less force. They can be modified to go up to like 30 miles an hour, but normally cap out around 15.
If mopeds and cheap quads like that can be driven and easily bought by children, ebikes are a form of harm reduction.
There's a lot of "ebikes" that are just electric dirtbikes with vestigial pedals. It's easy to modify them to put out way more power than they're sold with, too. There has to be some kind of grappling with this new category of things that can pretend to be a bicycle but still spin tires, rip past 30mph, etc. They need to either be hard limited or treated more like motorcycles than bicycles.
He ran head-on into a telephone pole, flat out, without a helmet, and died instantly.
Well...
Kids aren't equipped to make good decisions, the poor kid paid the price for his parents' mistake