#!markdown
It really is a case where the business plan is at odds with the inevitability
of users making those modifications. Plenty of opportunities to get ahead of
the issue from the manufacturer side are going to be effectively missed
because of the rush to market, and trying too hard to obfuscate what an eBike
actually is.
An electric motorized pedal assist bike should be an awesome device. Think
about it - a relatively lightweight bike that can go a much longer way than
the battery alone would limit, and still retains a lot of the positives of a
bicycle. They're going to be totally rad pieces of equipment, but they won't
be bicycles. There. Simple.
Electric motors on a two-wheeled vehicle are not even a novel thing, but pedal
assist as a still fundamentally gimmicky way to go faster yet behave more like
a bicycle does create some interesting issues, but the presence of lobbying-
level monies into the advocacy system is ultimately what will drive the
advocacy picture, and in cases where MTB is already losing ground, this will
simply accelerate it.
I won't spend time on where minute amounts of firearm ignorance [unreasonable
to expect anybody who doesn't have NFA items to intuitively understand the
minutia and idiosyncrasies of the US NFA system; trust me it's dumb and makes
zero sense] - the parallel is pretty useful here.
Dec. 22, 2016, 11:24 a.m. - Tehllama42
#!markdown It really is a case where the business plan is at odds with the inevitability of users making those modifications. Plenty of opportunities to get ahead of the issue from the manufacturer side are going to be effectively missed because of the rush to market, and trying too hard to obfuscate what an eBike actually is. An electric motorized pedal assist bike should be an awesome device. Think about it - a relatively lightweight bike that can go a much longer way than the battery alone would limit, and still retains a lot of the positives of a bicycle. They're going to be totally rad pieces of equipment, but they won't be bicycles. There. Simple. Electric motors on a two-wheeled vehicle are not even a novel thing, but pedal assist as a still fundamentally gimmicky way to go faster yet behave more like a bicycle does create some interesting issues, but the presence of lobbying- level monies into the advocacy system is ultimately what will drive the advocacy picture, and in cases where MTB is already losing ground, this will simply accelerate it. I won't spend time on where minute amounts of firearm ignorance [unreasonable to expect anybody who doesn't have NFA items to intuitively understand the minutia and idiosyncrasies of the US NFA system; trust me it's dumb and makes zero sense] - the parallel is pretty useful here.