John in CR said:
Miles said:
Nice article written by someone who seems to get it.
reely??
funny, i had quite the opposite reaction.
see if i can convince u why i think he's full of it.
because i have to wonder if the guy has ever sat his a$$ on an ebike.
it sounds as if his experience is strictly limited to the "idea of electric bikes".
or if he actually has ridden one, then probably not more than few times around the block.
either way he seems to think this sufficiently qualifies him to pontificate & wax 'safe'-like on ebike matters.
chris matthews said:
Over at Eurobike this year, I saw a lot of ugly bikes. And they were all electric.
I’m excited by the idea of electric bikes, and I am even more excited about their potential. But as the market expands, I’m concerned about three big things:
First, if the world is introduced to electric bikes with such blockish, frankensteinish designs, we’ll miss an important opportunity to get people excited about them. if the first iPods resembled a homemade bomb with a battery bolted to a logic board, connected by exposed wires, they’d hardly have gained a solid footing with the fashionable crowd. These bikes have every opportunity to look f@#king cool, to be a fashionable and hip addition to an urban lifestyle, a non-douchey and practical alternative to the fixie. I’m thinking here about Vespa, about electric motorbikes like the zero, and about matching helmets and bags accented by a Burberry tartan scarf. But with few exceptions, the e-bikes I saw resembled at best an unremarkable cheap bike, and at worst, the something tantamount to fashion suicide, right up there with recumbents.
r-i-i-i-ght, fashion.
that's the big missing piece of the puzzle.
that's why advancing ebike fashion is at the forefront that everyone here on the sphere is feverishly working on, not.
everyone here gots plenty excited even without fashion just fine.
for me, as soon as the 'fashionable crowd' gets involved is how i'll know when it's game over.
fashion is always a last resort to lure clueless buyers once the tech has stopped advancing & sales turn stagnant.
amberwolf, pls send this guy a few pix of ur handywork along with Neem's Pride of Pakistan.
CM is sure to crap his shorts when he gets an eyeful of these beauties of innovation.
don't forget to drape it with a Burberry tartan scarf tho to make it look all nice, nice.
the rest of the article isn't much better with the flawed analogies to automobiles which only serve to undermine his own argument.
i.e. the Ford model T comparison, not exactly a fashion icon.
it sports the very same blockish look that he's now complaining about on ebikes.
the model T's lack of fashion didn't keep people from getting excited about cars or slow down their progress any.
then there's his touting the Tesla as a shining example of a purpose built design, is he even aware that it's an off the shelf Lotus??
and what's with the out-of-the-blu swipe against recumbents & fixies?
don't own either myself, not my cuppa T, but even i feel a little insulted by that.
just another example of his narrow viewpoint & how he's writing on subjects he's only superficially familiar with.
definitely worthy of nomination for the 'safe' award in writing.
