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Comment by cbuq | Hacker News Reader

From the end of the article, Uber explains why they recycled the old bikes not transferred to Jump in the sale,

> But given many significant issues - including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment - we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them.

Unfortunately seems to most responsible way to handle these bikes. I see the charging issue being a major problem. Trek just switched their rentable bikes to electric in my city, I wonder if they face the same fate.

And settle down everyone, they are being recycled, not dumped in a hole.

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>And settle down everyone, they are being recycled, not dumped in a hole.

Recycling is only slightly better than throwing away.

There is no conceivable reason these could not have been re-sued.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - is in that order for a good reason.

> There is no conceivable reason these could not have been re-sued.

These seem like fairly conceivable reasons to me: maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment

Why sell people a product when you can offer them a service and make even more money? Reduce and Reuse are bad for business, making Recycle the only economically viable option.

EDIT: @downvoter, can you tell me how our business climate doesn't suck this way?

You are absolutely correct.

Upvoter.

You're getting downvoted because this is a capitalist forum and your comment goes against the grain.

Correct, and furthermore the environmental gap keeps decreasing with each step to the right: in terms of impact, recycling is much closer to landfilling than it is to reusing.

Why on earth would a bike battery need some special charger?

Yeah I thought that was weird too. All you need for a DC source is a few diodes and a capacitor, after all

Charging batteries is usually a bit more complicated than pumping DC into them.

In this case one assumes the battery itself isn't odd, but it uses a different type of cable or similar (Don't know what the capacity is but I assume it would be high enough to need serial and sense lines on the charging cable)

You need actual charge control logic for a modern rechargeable battery so that it doesn't overheat or malfunction, but you can get multi-amp Li-ion/LiPo chargers online for ~$25 if you're able to find and attach the right connectors.

This also seems like a situation where the maker community could easily open source replicate whatever the custom connector to the bike requires.

You can't just hook up any lipo charger. They need to be able to charge and balance the cells individually, which could be simple or extremely difficult depending on the arrangement and connector.

LIPO chargers require logic because they have to switch from constant voltage to constant current. Also, while required, you probably want to monitor temperature as well both because charging when it's too cold will damage the battery and LIPOs have a tendency to thermally runaway when they start to fail.

Read: catch on fire, sometimes leading to a pretty violent explosion if they are packed tightly into something like a bike frame.

Having worked with high amp LiPo cells I have developed a unique appreciation of both their peak current output and their ability to strike fear into the everyone around them if you accidentally short them or start to see them ballooning/bulging.

My only run in with said fire was thankfully fairly minor, I spotted the pack looking a little buldged and summarily ripped it off the charger and dipped it into a 44 gallon drum. After about 60-90s it started smoking and caught on fire.

Don't fuck around with LiPos.

To reduce incentives for thieves.

I must say, you have a good point.

Because they are a series connection of LiPol cells.

Fast LiPol chargers for series cells are not simple.

The best (read fastest) ones monitor the state of the individual cells in the stack and will shut down the primary charge and charge an individual cell if it gets imbalanced.

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