Spending five large on a conventional bike would get you a status symbol—you’d come off as a cyclist for sure. For that matter, spending that dough on a Vespa w

Spending five large on a conventional bike would get you a status symbol—you’d come off as a cyclist for sure. For that matter, spending that dough on a Vespa would infuse you with an Aperol-tinged Italianate cool. You’d want to be seen arriving on your moped. But I don’t want anybody seeing me on my e-bike. It’s just kind of embarrassing. Vehicles have symbolic value, like it or not. Cars denote freedom; commuter bikes imply, for better or worse, jerkitude or tweeness; motorcycles are cool; e-scooters are for douchebros. But e-bikes bear no clear character. Even the sonic pleasures of motorized or nonmotorized two-wheelers are up for grabs. A motorcycle signals power (and maybe a caricature of outmoded masculinity) from its exhaust. But a bicycle makes no noise apart from the whir of its crankshaft and the chu-chunk of its derailleurs. My e-bike is pretty quiet, but the motor does whine at me when it engages. The battery, attached to the frame like a water bottle, also rattled like a jalopy before I strapped it fast to the down tube. At every moment, the e-bike reminds you that it’s not quite a bicycle, nor yet a motorbike. A certain Fran Blanche shouts "Get a grip, dude" when reading out viewers' comments like this, shakes her head and moves on to the next one. "A motorcycle signals power [...] from its exhaust", and the exhaust is where these power-signalling exhaust-tuners can go together with their deafening noisy, dangerous and pollution-heavy vehicles. as can this crap article that is predicated on an almost completely unreflected, superficial report of the author's irrational and arbitrary value perceptions. Earned a [flagged] for the right reasons IMO.