595 while we're waiting


Guys, I promise I have stuff to talk about besides ebikes and batteries. 

Or maybe I should spin "Bike and Battery" off into it's own blog, with a proper URL?

Because somehow these screenshots keep popping up on my phone.

The way fold-down beds keep popping up on concept trucks.

Wait, what kind of bike blog is this?

One that enjoys thinking outside the box, and appreciates engineering creativity. Here's a Toyota truck concept. It's based on the HiLux platform, which is also the Tacoma platform and the Tundra platform. How are they going to turn a $50k truck into a $10k truck?

The answer: leave out all the gizmos and gadgets. And give it a flat bed.

Back to bikes. Think this bike train will be under $10k?

I do.

It probably also won't feature automatic lane detection.

Here's a nice looking bit of micromobility. The Envo Veemo. We live kinda close if Envo would like to invite me to do a review.

You know how I'm always bitching about walking and cycling paths designed by car drivers? Here's a visualization of what I'm talking about.

And here's a visualization of going in the other direction.

If you need it, probably awesome. Basically, this X-OTO looks like a high speed mobility scooter. 

Enjoy the day.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

603 Cyberbike Mullet R eMTB review

Image
Hello friends, welcome to the most exciting dispatch from Bike & Battery ever. It's such an exciting dispatch, it has taken me almost two months to start. Why?  I've been busy. I wish I could say I've been busy riding our new ebikes, but that's only partially true. Mostly it's been other stuff. But we do have new ebikes, and that's the story we're here for.  At top, the 2024 Cyberbike Mullet R. This is bike number one. After having an eye on Cyberbike for a few years, we pre-ordered this unit last December as part of their Black Friday/Launch sale. It arrived 2 months later, in mid-February, a couple weeks after promised. We paid $1995, including shipping. It's the second or third generation of the Cyberbike Mullet. The full retail price is supposedly $3295, but they're still "on sale" for $2495 as of this writing. "Mullet" means the front tire is larger than the rear. This is a thing in mountain bikes.
Read more

589 thumbs down

Image
We're in San Francisco.  The picture above is Valencia Street, where the city has moved the bike lanes to the middle of the street.  When I first moved to the city, I lived around the corner from here. In the past thirty years, I've watched this street evolve.  First, it was four lanes of traffic, two in either direction, with a curbed median and fairly skinny sidewalks. There was a bus line, the 26. The street was already gentrifying, but it was pretty well dominated by cars. Then they put Valencia on a "road diet." They got rid of a lane in either direction, axed the bus service, put in a center turn lane and bike lanes on either side. So it went sidewalk-parking-bike lane-traffic-turning lane-traffic-bike lane-parking-sidewalk. It was this was for many years, and the street grew very popular with bicyclists, diners and shoppers. In the pandemic, entire sections of the street closed to traffic. The parking
Read more

588 quadricycles of the future, today

Image
You might be wondering why this is another Bike & Battery, when WakeBlake posts are more engaging. The answer is: screenshots. Screenshots and a clean phone ethic. Yes, there are apparently more interesting things going on in my life than screenshots of micromobility, but goshdarnit, they're in the photos area of my phone and first I need to get rid of these screenshots. That screenshot at the top was from a video I watched after my friend Mr. Snake spotted these quadricycles on a trip to Europe earlier this summer. The photo above is one I took in Amsterdam at the end of the summer. What does that mean? They're pretty cool looking. And our collective travel resources have evolved.  The Fiat Topolino/Citroen Ami at top, limited to local road speeds and driveable by anyone over 14, no license required (at least in France), is just one example of the exploding category of micromobility. While I've heard of at lea
Read more