248838 Resource 106832 108325 108325 1263920276695 1263920276695 Controlled Electric Scooters and Motorcycles

Musing on Sound and Safety

I had a few minutes to look at Vectrix electric scooters/motorcycles this weekend.  By coincidence, the next day I happened to read an article on accidents and deaths in China from electric bicycles. The Vectrix is interesting.  Claimed 0-50 time is 6.8 seconds, and claimed range between charges is "up to" 55 miles.  Cost is almost $11,000, which seems high for a vehicle that takes six hours to charge every 55 miles.  Since most motorcycles get around 40 miles per gallon, it certainly is not cost effective if the only goal is to avoid buying gas. The article on Chinese motorized bicycles noted that they have been increasing the number of these vehicles since 1960.  They are not great from an environmental standpoint, because most of them use lead batteries, and most of the electricity comes from coal powered plants. The big problem, however, is that the bikes are fast and quiet, and there are a ton of them in the cities.  Riders of these motorized bicycles typically ignore the rules of the road, and they are causing a lot of deaths. The Chinese experience makes me wonder how really environmentally sound electric motorcycles are.   By coincidence, I watched a documentary on Harleys at Sturgis. This made me wonder what the accident statistics will be for essentially silent electric motorcycles, compared with the loud pipes on the big v-twins.  This would provide real data on whether loud pipes really do help with careless drivers of cars who don't pay attention to motorcycles. It is obvious that electric motorcycles have a lot of appeal for city dwellers looking for inexpensive transportation that can cut through traffic, and that avoids a lot of parking hassle and expense. That said, it is important that we look closely at this market so that we honestly assess the environmental benefits, and the safety issues of swift and silent rides. Technology changes quickly.  People change slowly.  Safety requires that we look carefully at the new choices available. Electric vehicles will continue to improve, and the appeal of electric two wheelers will only increase.  We need to use the information that becomes available to increase rider safety. 10 application/xml false Accidents batteries Death Electric Bicycle Electric Motorcycle Electric Scooter Silent vehicle Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 mpadway 69.17.49.44 false true false false true 201650 false false true false false false true 106832 blog blogsite/MichaelPadway/web