32 ms·

Not even more? For a commonly available technology, this should be far too many? > More than 660 e-bike battery fires have erupted across the city since 2019,

by hkwerf 2y ago

Not even more? For a commonly available technology, this should be far too many? > More than 660 e-bike battery fires have erupted across the city since 2019, killing 28 New Yorkers and injuring 400 more.

squarefoot 2y ago
Everyone wants an e-bike that weighs like a feather while being able to travel for long trips between recharges. This is how our corrupt advertising system manufactured people desires: everything is possible and there are no technical limitations, so as a result everyone thinks they can buy everything, and manufacturers are forced to cram all power to the last milliwatt to be able to put something on their ads. A more educated advertising system would help people to become less demanding, more critical and a lot more selective wrt what to buy and especially what not to. Problem is that educated people usually spend less, so I'm not sure there are many incentives in that direction.
- nickff 2y ago
  >”Problem is that educated people usually spend less” Where did you get this notion? In my experience, experts almost always have the best & most expensive gear in their area of expertise.
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    True, but I wouldn't underestimate the amount of money they don't waste in useless crap, or low quality products they have to buy multiple times.
  - CaliforniaKarl 2y ago
    Take something like work boots as an example: You might buy a $300 pair of Red Wing work boots that’ll last effectively forever. Someone who can’t afford that might buy a $100 pair of work boots from Walmart, which will need replacing more often. So, in the category of Work Boots, you are indeed spending less.
    - rout39574 2y ago
      The Vimes Theory of Socio-economic unfairness. https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots-theory-of-socio-economic-unfairness/#:~:text=Perhaps%20one%20of%20the%20most,managed%20to%20spend%20less%20money https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots....
      - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        I came here to say this.
    - newaccount74 2y ago
      Maybe shoes are not the best example, because even the most expensive shoes will only last a few years.
      - BadHumans 2y ago
        They are talking about boots. A good pair of boots while last you a long time and once they wear down they can be resoled and repaired. A pair of Red Wings can last you indefinitely if you maintain them.
        jajko 2y ago
        Stuff you wear 8h a day while sweating in it due to hard labor, every day? Unless you can magically change whole interior of the boots, that ain't a good proposition at all. I do hiking and other mountain sports a lot, wear top notch european stuff from ultra light to heavy full leather huge&heavy boots (sorry no good US products in this area sold anywhere in Europe that I am aware of), but happy to change them once every few years, the best I got on Meindl ones was 10 years. Its not just exterior that goes to crap over time, its everything and keeping them forever is unhygienic. Also don't understand your logic - people overall spend more on lower quality equipment long term. The phrase 'I am not rich enough to buy cheap stuff' is solid one and confirmed endless times across every aspect of existence.
    - 2y ago
  - Zak 2y ago
    I find that experts and enthusiasts are usually willing to spend more than the average person, but they often avoid products with high margins and are hard to convince with marketing. An e-bike expert won't buy a janky fire-hazard Alibaba white-label battery, but is also unlikely to buy a luxury brand with proprietary components.
  - jerlam 2y ago
    "Best" and "most expensive" are not necessarily correlated. Plenty of companies will sell you $100 worth of stuff for $500, especially in this era of fly by night brand names sold on no-liability marketplaces. There are plenty of people (I know a few) who will buy very expensive items that they don't understand in the hope it will solve all their problems or in lieu of skill. Experts often have a more nuanced take: match the requirements with what the product offers and no further.
- jrockway 2y ago
  So, I think that personal e-bikes are basically a small percentage of e-bikes in the city. Most of the e-bike users are food delivery drivers / couriers. As they talk to each other, I'm sure they all have the most cost effective option. (NYC has had e-bikes forever. They were illegal until 2020, but they have been a mainstay since the early 2010s.) The problem these delivery drivers face is that the battery doesn't last for an entire shift. As a result, they've almost all switched to mopeds. (A moped, as far as I can tell, is the world's loudest lawnmower engine attached to a drivetrain.) I thought it was over-regulating e-bikes that led to this trend, but I think it's actually an energy density concern. The TL;DR is if you see e-bike fires going down, it's because everyone ditched their e-bikes for fossil fuels. Very sad.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > So, I think that personal e-bikes are basically a small percentage of e-bikes in the city. Here in Munich, it's gone up a lot - you can clearly spot the e-bikers by them moving to the front at every traffic light and accelerating way faster than conventional bikers, and I jumped on the e-bike train a few weeks ago myself. Delivery drivers here tend to go to electric mopeds or s-bikes (45 km/h).
    - jrockway 2y ago
      I will say that we have a lot of e-bikers in NYC as well; but they're the bikeshare bikes. I see those zooming all over the place. I have ridden one and they are quite fast. Actually scares me a little bit.
      - mschuster91 2y ago
        yup, the acceleration of e-bikes tends to be quite surprising if you're not used to it. Here in Germany, the top speed is limited to 25 km/h, more than enough in urban scenarios.
        jandrese 2y ago
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > This is how our corrupt advertising system manufactured people desires: everything is possible and there are no technical limitations, so as a result everyone thinks they can buy everything, and manufacturers are forced to cram all power to the last milliwatt to be able to put something on their ads. Oh come on. Technical limitations are there to be overcome; everyone being able to buy (or get) everything is literally the point of the whole thing. We're far from what's physically possible, we're mostly hitting limits of economical feasibility, and those tend to give with increased demand, so a degree of advertising is, arguably, even justifiable in this context.
skyyler 2y ago
I'm not sure how to interpret this comment, are you saying that 28 deaths due to preventable battery fires is an acceptable number?
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  No amount of deaths is acceptable. That being said, something that kills 7 people a year in a city of 8.3 million can't be too far up on the list of preventable deaths.
- hkwerf 2y ago
  No, I'm saying the opposite.

by hkwerf 2y ago

squarefoot 2y ago

Everyone wants an e-bike that weighs like a feather while being able to travel for long trips between recharges. This is how our corrupt advertising system manufactured people desires: everything is possible and there are no technical limitations, so as a result everyone thinks they can buy everything, and manufacturers are forced to cram all power to the last milliwatt to be able to put something on their ads. A more educated advertising system would help people to become less demanding, more critical and a lot more selective wrt what to buy and especially what not to. Problem is that educated people usually spend less, so I'm not sure there are many incentives in that direction.

nickff 2y ago
>”Problem is that educated people usually spend less” Where did you get this notion? In my experience, experts almost always have the best & most expensive gear in their area of expertise.
- squarefoot 2y ago
  True, but I wouldn't underestimate the amount of money they don't waste in useless crap, or low quality products they have to buy multiple times.
- CaliforniaKarl 2y ago
  Take something like work boots as an example: You might buy a $300 pair of Red Wing work boots that’ll last effectively forever. Someone who can’t afford that might buy a $100 pair of work boots from Walmart, which will need replacing more often. So, in the category of Work Boots, you are indeed spending less.
  - rout39574 2y ago
    The Vimes Theory of Socio-economic unfairness. https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots-theory-of-socio-economic-unfairness/#:~:text=Perhaps%20one%20of%20the%20most,managed%20to%20spend%20less%20money https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots....
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      I came here to say this.
  - newaccount74 2y ago
    Maybe shoes are not the best example, because even the most expensive shoes will only last a few years.
    - BadHumans 2y ago
      They are talking about boots. A good pair of boots while last you a long time and once they wear down they can be resoled and repaired. A pair of Red Wings can last you indefinitely if you maintain them.
      - jajko 2y ago
        Stuff you wear 8h a day while sweating in it due to hard labor, every day? Unless you can magically change whole interior of the boots, that ain't a good proposition at all. I do hiking and other mountain sports a lot, wear top notch european stuff from ultra light to heavy full leather huge&heavy boots (sorry no good US products in this area sold anywhere in Europe that I am aware of), but happy to change them once every few years, the best I got on Meindl ones was 10 years. Its not just exterior that goes to crap over time, its everything and keeping them forever is unhygienic. Also don't understand your logic - people overall spend more on lower quality equipment long term. The phrase 'I am not rich enough to buy cheap stuff' is solid one and confirmed endless times across every aspect of existence.
  - 2y ago
- Zak 2y ago
  I find that experts and enthusiasts are usually willing to spend more than the average person, but they often avoid products with high margins and are hard to convince with marketing. An e-bike expert won't buy a janky fire-hazard Alibaba white-label battery, but is also unlikely to buy a luxury brand with proprietary components.
- jerlam 2y ago
  "Best" and "most expensive" are not necessarily correlated. Plenty of companies will sell you $100 worth of stuff for $500, especially in this era of fly by night brand names sold on no-liability marketplaces. There are plenty of people (I know a few) who will buy very expensive items that they don't understand in the hope it will solve all their problems or in lieu of skill. Experts often have a more nuanced take: match the requirements with what the product offers and no further.
jrockway 2y ago
So, I think that personal e-bikes are basically a small percentage of e-bikes in the city. Most of the e-bike users are food delivery drivers / couriers. As they talk to each other, I'm sure they all have the most cost effective option. (NYC has had e-bikes forever. They were illegal until 2020, but they have been a mainstay since the early 2010s.) The problem these delivery drivers face is that the battery doesn't last for an entire shift. As a result, they've almost all switched to mopeds. (A moped, as far as I can tell, is the world's loudest lawnmower engine attached to a drivetrain.) I thought it was over-regulating e-bikes that led to this trend, but I think it's actually an energy density concern. The TL;DR is if you see e-bike fires going down, it's because everyone ditched their e-bikes for fossil fuels. Very sad.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > So, I think that personal e-bikes are basically a small percentage of e-bikes in the city. Here in Munich, it's gone up a lot - you can clearly spot the e-bikers by them moving to the front at every traffic light and accelerating way faster than conventional bikers, and I jumped on the e-bike train a few weeks ago myself. Delivery drivers here tend to go to electric mopeds or s-bikes (45 km/h).
  - jrockway 2y ago
    I will say that we have a lot of e-bikers in NYC as well; but they're the bikeshare bikes. I see those zooming all over the place. I have ridden one and they are quite fast. Actually scares me a little bit.
    - mschuster91 2y ago
      yup, the acceleration of e-bikes tends to be quite surprising if you're not used to it. Here in Germany, the top speed is limited to 25 km/h, more than enough in urban scenarios.
      - jandrese 2y ago
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> This is how our corrupt advertising system manufactured people desires: everything is possible and there are no technical limitations, so as a result everyone thinks they can buy everything, and manufacturers are forced to cram all power to the last milliwatt to be able to put something on their ads. Oh come on. Technical limitations are there to be overcome; everyone being able to buy (or get) everything is literally the point of the whole thing. We're far from what's physically possible, we're mostly hitting limits of economical feasibility, and those tend to give with increased demand, so a degree of advertising is, arguably, even justifiable in this context.

skyyler 2y ago

I'm not sure how to interpret this comment, are you saying that 28 deaths due to preventable battery fires is an acceptable number?

Workaccount2 2y ago
No amount of deaths is acceptable. That being said, something that kills 7 people a year in a city of 8.3 million can't be too far up on the list of preventable deaths.
hkwerf 2y ago
No, I'm saying the opposite.