E-Trikes Are Coming to Rescue the Aging Suburbs
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The nanosecond something comes down in cost per performance enough to be a viable replacement or middle ground between a car and a bus pass the poor will adopt it in droves and then all the upper middle class types will find reasons to crap on it.
This already happened with mopeds. Many US states regulate them like motorcycles with the "we don't say the quiet part out loud" being that that drives up the cost making them not as viable for many potential users. We're starting to see the beginnings of this happen with e-bikes as they approach and sometimes exceed moped performance. I don't see why a electric trike would be any different.
I hope I'm wrong.
E-Bike is a performance limited category. If it's got more power than allowed it's a motorcycle.
In many places you can get away with riding an unlicensed electric motorcycle if it looks like an e-bike, but some jurisdictions are cracking down on them.
It sort of seems like tilting trike is a good middle ground in terms of battery efficiency to driver comfort/stability but then why don't we see them more often in this new personal electric vehicle revolution?
Of course laws are easily forgotten: once upon a time driving a golf cart on the public roads, without license plates or "slow vehicle" signs, would've been good for a ticket and probably vehicle confiscation. No one thinks anything of it today.
Because a lot of people put in a lot of work to legalize it.
> On June 17, 1998, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published a final rule establishing a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 500, “Low-speed vehicles,” and added a definition of “low-speed vehicle” (LSV) to 49 CFR 571.3 (63 FR 33194). This new FMVSS and vehicle class definition responded to the growing public interest in using golf cars and other similarly sized small vehicles to make short trips for shopping, social, and recreational purposes primarily within retirement or other planned, self-contained communities. These vehicles, many of which are electric-powered, offer comparatively low-cost, energy-efficient, low-emission, quiet transportation.[1]
> The definition of LSV established by that rulemaking was, “a 4-wheeled motor vehicle, other than a truck, whose speed attainable in 1.6 km (1 mile) is more than 32 kilometers per hour (20 miles per hour) and not more than 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles per hour) on a paved level surface.”
I've seen E-trikes during the summer but they would not be usable half the year winter here is almost half of the year. E-Trikes don't carry as much cargo or groceries as a side-by-side, though they are a lot more affordable.
They're a lot more nimble on unimproved roads than the massive trucks and SUVs people tend to drive now, but part of me supposes that if people just bought smaller vehicles they wouldn't need a side by side AND a megatruck to tow it places.
I'd always assumed tricycles had the same legal status as bicycles in pretty much every country, and likewise an e-tricycle and e-bicycle.
which notes that they're not actually banned anymore, either. I'm learning all sortsa things today.