Quote:
Originally Posted by samwichse
|
I think I read about someone with the nickname "Mr Fifth Wheel" somewhere. Perhaps this was the guy. His motor looks to be a bit more powerful than what I had in mind - which would have been little better than a two man car push type speed. I wouldn't even use it to pull off a stop light. Once I'm up to 20 mph or come to a hill I can use the car engine again, but for those annoying times when you have to go slower than even idling in first gear will do, this won't putter away the fuel as much. Just wondering whether the existing wheels could be used but to be honest any "wheel on a stick" would do. I'm not too concerned about torque vectoring with a couple of horsepower at most though.
As for electric bikes, I have no idea how energy intensive manufacturing batteries are, though the battery on an e-bike is considerably smaller than that of a car. About 20 laptop batteries worth at the most, or 120 x 18650 cells for a large size battery. I think mine is going to be 52V 17.5Ah, so that's 14 cells in series by at least 7 in parallel.
Now here's another silly (or not?) question - does the energy cost of a continuous string of cars decelerating and accelerating round a cyclist outweigh the energy cost of one more car on the road?