Wow! Only 2600 dollars!
I have a 2006 civic that I paid $1500 for. A full car with a roof, seats 5 adults, 4 wheels, air conditioning, heat, stereo, a trunk, could double as a home if I were down on my luck.
I am so confused how this is worth that much money. Small bike $300, battery pack $100, motor $50. So $2100 profit? Fuck that.
I think I’ll wait until the novelty wears off on e-bikes. Or try my luck at some diy options before I drop $2600 on an electric bike that will likely get stolen.
For what it is worth, Trek bikes are expensive. You are probably not buying a new adult Trek bike for $300. I went to their website and they have an electric bike that is $14k and they have cheaper bikes than this one that has a throttle. I think your price estimates in your math are low but I agree with your point. One reason that can make it hard to justify an e-bike is that they cost as much as a beater car but will get stolen pretty quickly in a lot of places if you are using it to commute/run errands/do anything that means your bike will be locked up for a long period of time.
One thing that I forsee helping in the future is having 18650/21700 batteries be interchangeable like normal AA batteries are.
If devices had sufficiently smart BMS modules then we could stick any batteries into them without any added fire risk and they could simply alert us when one was bad and needed to be replaced. Also with regards to fire risk there are mitigations that should be standard (like what tesla does).
If there were no “batteries included” and they were easy to add it would cut the cost and the e-waste by a ton.
New battery tech in the next 5 years is hopefully going to make lithium ion obsolete. Fingers crossed.
I’ve been hearing that my whole life and it hasn’t actually improved much in the last 20. But yeah it would be great if you’re right.
But smart BMS with easily user-replaceable batteries is tech we could use today. Furthermore you can buy packs like that off aliexpress right now.
Also, wanting to reuse batteries from an old device after upgrading will always be a problem.
Bro, a lot of shit was still using NiMh batteries in 2003. I know a lot of the advancements haven’t been very sexy, but charge discharge cycle count, energy density, rapid charging, high wattage discharge, these are all important. I’m going to stay hopeful.