https://vhelio.org/

I personally think it could be a great alternative to cars and bikes for those who need to take a whole family somewhere or a decent amount of stuff.

Only modifications I would make would be ride-by-wire and an extra set of pedals (so you can have two people pedalling without the annoyance of normal tandem bikes having to pedal at the same rate), and a more powerful motor (only 250W is legal in France, where this was designed, whereas 500W is legal here in Canada)

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    Honestly?

    Seems kinda dumb, batteries weigh a lot, so I would assume that most of the energy used here is just to move the batteries along.

    The solar panels panels provide highly limited ammount of recharging.

    Having to pedal to make it go means needing either a generator or a transmission, both quite heavy, wasting more energy.

    I would get rid of the pedal part, and just use it as an electrical cart.

    The solar panels are not totally crap, they will be able to provide some charging when everything else fails.

    I would rather see a concept I saw in Taiwan, where they have electical mopeds with quick change batteries, the range would be lower, but you would just go to a charge point, check in your used batteries to recharge and checkout freshly charged batteries.

    • OtterA
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      1 year ago

      Yep it looks like it’s trying to do 4 different things, and it’s doing all of them badly

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      I would rather see a concept I saw in Taiwan, where they have electical mopeds with quick change batteries, the range would be lower, but you would just go to a charge point, check in your used batteries to recharge and checkout freshly charged batteries.

      Ohh I saw a video on that recently, think it was called Gogoro or something. Really neat system. One of those batteries would be pretty heavy compared to a normal ebike battery though, about ~25kg vs 5-10kg

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        It was Gogoro I saw!

        But the bike I saw used two smaller batteries rather than one large, presumably for to reduce the weight of each battery making the systwm accessible to more people.