Quote:
Originally Posted by raymo
Glen, being as manually operated scooters and bikes are already virtually silent, what artificial noise would you endow electric ones with? 
raymo |
Raymo, I actually own an electric mountain bike (a Leitner CrossX), which I was riding today. It is quiet, when coasting or braking, but it, like most EVs, makes some noise under power. I believe the ones with regenerative braking capability do have some deceleration noise but I doubt it is sufficient to disturb the phone zombies. You can now buy more serious electric motorcycle type bikes, which are road registerable in Australia, like the Sur Ron XR:
https://voltbike.com.au/product/sur-...ts-road-legal/
And there are some very serious road machines like the Harley Davidson Livewire about to hit the market:
https://www.harley-davidson.com/au/e...06pBRWO8VY2.97
So yeah, this maybe something that is going to emerge as an issue here. A simple single bell, as typical on push bikes, is not going to seem very serious on a Harley.
There are no ADRs that currently apply within Australia, so I imagine the EU regulation may get picked up here eventually.
A coasting and braking noise maker would be pretty easy to fit to existing pedal assist and hand throttle electric bikes, but how do you enforce it. Seriously it would be removed pretty quickly by a buyer. How do you require retrospective fitting on existing ebikes, which do not require registration? And an electric bike, travelling at its Australian legal speed of 25kmph, can still hit and kill someone if they walk in front of it, just as a push bike could.
And there are a fair number of Utube videos on how to hack ebike controllers to increase speed capability.
So i don't know Ray, but my mine is drawn back to the old playing card in the spokes trick that we used as kids, to make our old push bikes sound like dirt bikes.