A bit of background about e-bikes: There are 2 main modes of motor action. 1) throttle (No pedalling required.I don't like those, fat people ride those; pretty much just an electric wheelchair with 2 wheels) and 2) Pedelec, where you HAVE to pedal and the motor assists your pedalling.
I have no idea what the speed restrictions are on a throttle-type e-bike, but I'm sure bored legislators have come up with some numbers. But I know these numbers for Pedelecs.
If you buy your Pedelec in Europe, the motor stops helping at 25 km/h. If you want to go faster, it's time to pedal really hard.
If you buy your Pedelec n North America, that limit is set at 20 miles/hour, which roughly equals 32 km./h.
This is actually a big difference. If you pedal a European bike next to a North American bike, the North American bike will leave the European bike behind, not because it's a better bike, but simply because the motor assist threshold is set higher.
So the Europeans came up with S Pedelecs, in which the motor cut-off threshold is set to 45 km/h. And they produce conversion kits for the slower Pedelecs. That conversion kit is simply an electronic circuit that fools the existing motor control into thinking that it's going slower than it actually is.
The result? Exhilaration! I can't actually tell you what this does to a bike in city traffic. Because, being an extremely law-abiding I of course comply with the fact that the bike with the modification is not legal to operate off public streets, eh?
But I keep having strange visions of puzzled car drivers: "What the hell was that green thing that just passed me?"
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| Watch for it this June |
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