he does suck, like, a lot. I know the principled libertarian thing gives him a few sympathy points but my god is this guy a pathos laden idiot
This dude is like Forrester for MTBs if anything. Actual Forrester was way too urbanism-headed to think of "bicycle to cross wilderness border" as a use case
I mean I'll hand it to him on that one that if you do the non-public transport stuff like roughing it through the wild that's probably really doable
Every 1 in 1,000 libertarians seems to realize bicycles are good even according to their principles and then you get a post like this.
If you don't know Hickman, I think he'd best be described as a sort of primitivist-nostalgic liberterian for settler times in the USA. To fulfill his dreams he moved out into the boonies of upstate new york and ever so often hates how it's full of uncultured swine, by his definition.
You'd probably be correct, the basic premise has been around since 2013
https://news.mit.edu/2013/new-system-uses-low-power-wi-fi-signal-to-track-moving-humans-0628
incredible, there's 2 guys who think trump has the mandate of heaven and they're at odds as to why
the mfer was wearing glasse and he still couldn't see how that'd've made a better example. People write and draw with straight up charcoal you hack fraud
nope sorry hope he gets sued for enviromental crimes
I swear to god if the IT people built infrastrructure for ten thousand people the way software gets built we'd all be dead
The problem with getting the BBQ dads over to stalinism on the grounds of meat prices is the blowback when you do climate stalinism and ban meat
the swiss have solved this issue by calling it a velo. we could also return to velocipéde. Not the bicycles fault everyone got that one wrong
Going by the 1968 vienna contract definition which is still in effect: yeah
"any vehicle which has at least two wheels and is propelled solely by the muscular energy of the persons on that vehicle, in particular by means of pedals or hand-cranks."
caveat for the electric motor that only supports you pedaling and up to speeds of X with Watts of Y and all but yeah, that's a bicycle.
I don't even think this is amazon skirting regulations, unless you up-end the entire system you can't really define a bicycle any better. There should be more bicycles like this.
I freely admit from an manufacturing perspective it is somewhat impressive
Picture from the german wiki article
Being fast on a bicycle has a lot to do with aerodynamics so you go build an aero chassis around a recumbent and bam, fast as fuck boy.
If you do 200 Watts on a regular bicycle on a windless flat and a regular road, you're looking at going about 30kph. With this? 50kph. Obviously generalizing a lot here but you get the point.
They suck ass on hills though, because they weigh ~30kg with the chassis. not so much a problem in motion on the flat, kind of sucks uphill where aero doesn't matter. From my experience you don't see a lot of e-bike variants so far because with EU regulations the motor'd cut out at the speed you'd go for a leisurely ride on a normal bicycle, but maybe it'd be interesting to make them more hillclimbing capable.
Fun fact: in 1968 some dude did 100kph in this with by himself with no outside help.
Chassis are usually some sort carbon fibre or fiberglass and built monocoque, which means you better not ding them babies because repairs are gonna be expensive as fuck.
Prices run around 10k€ and then up to whatever you feel like paying for a new one. But they do look like old timey racecars which is fun. From personal experience of having chatted up a few of the local velomobile riders I feel like there's about a 50:50 split between buying one and somebody going fully "dad in the shed" and just building the entire thing from scratch
carbrain is "this is the fault of 3 million parallel, separated, individual actors" a lot
I jest, of course. Become xbikers
this is in jest, it's the top comment to this post
not much to tell beyond the picture. Some of them are hand cranked, others include e-motors with throttle either because there's legal modes for it or maybe you're at a bikepark where usual public regs against that don't apply.
Mostly niche-builds, so custom things adapted to specific customers or small scale lines
is it