Since gasoline because unusable after awhile, most cars will become obstacles and block up roads.
So we of course want something that can zip around the roads!
The main advantages I see are:
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Peddle when out of juice
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Peddling charges the batteries, so in an emergency you can turn on the battery
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The batteries can reasonably be charged by solar panels that a lot of houses have.
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Gets around all the blocked roads.
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Generally easier to repair.
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The distance travelled on a full battery is absurd
I don’t expect any movies to put their heroes on an eBike, but they should!
IDK just thought you’d appreciate my dumb thought XD Any other reasons why during an apocalypse you should find an ebike?
This is generally not a thing.
Regen is a fairly common feature in ebikes. It doesn’t work while you ride, other than as a brake going down hills, but as most are hub drive if you lift the rear wheel off the ground you could use the bike as a generator and charge the battery by pedalling.
However, it would in no way be energy (food) efficient compared to just using a bicycle due to the losses, but if you needed it for emergencies or for powering something else, it could be used.
It’s not a common feature.
It doesn’t make as much sense to do on an bike, mainly because regenerative breaking requires more expensive electronics and stresses the battery more.
My family has 7 ebikes, all different models and none has regen.
It also requires special frame dropouts consideration because of the back-and-forth torque. Typically a strong torque arm.
Regen is only really a thing with direct-drive hubs and not even with all of them. Yes you can weld the clutch of a geared hub, but this isn’t done in production. Some DIY shops like Grin do it on some motors but that’s not a widespread practice. And there’s definitely no regen on mid drives. To be clear, I’d absolutely use regen if I had a direct-drive hub, because the controller I use supports it, but yeah, it definitely isn’t common.
Grin is co-developing a mid drive regen. It has a neat design.
It’s not common, but it does make sense to do! No, not in charging the battery but in braking. Regen slows down the bike without wearing down your brake pads, which is extra important with a heavy bike. I cannot even manage 900 miles without changing my longtail’s pads. I have yet to replace the pads on my regenerating e-trike.
The extra 20% range is nice but I’m more happy about the money and hassle I’ve saved in not replacing brake pads.
You can’t slow down with regen without putting the energy somewhere, and that’s the point of brakes, they convert kinetic energy into thermal to slow you down.
The point of regen is to not waste the energy and put most of it back into a battery. At the scale of an ebikes, the additional components electronics, battery thermal management, and so on for regen are more expensive than just adding 20% more battery.
Unless you wanted to make an expensive, super efficient or very light ebike, it just doesn’t make sense at the moment.
That will not likely always be true if we ever use different battery chemistry and the cost of regen electronics goes down.
