alt Hacker NewsYeah the assistance you get from a bike being light is huge. I wonder if expensive light bike > assisted bike in terms of saving human effort per trip.
Obviously if the e-bike requires no pedalling at all it wins but then that is not legal everywhere.
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saidinesh5 • today at 2:55 AM
I think the main difference due to weight boils down to you riding in one gear lower when not using assistance.
On flat roads, I usually ride on 3rd or 4th gear (out of 7), now i ride in 2nd or 3rd.
But where i ride, the road isn't even and has a lot of steep slopes. There I'm on 1st gear all the time anyway and the assistance i get totally saves my knees, and ensures I'm not all sweaty when i reach my destination. Even compared to the light weight regular bicycles i rode before, this is better.
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Human effort just isn't worth very much. The strongest humans on earth can manage about 400W for an hour. Even very small ebike motors are usually capable of 500w continuous/forever, so long as the motor does not spend too much time stalled or at very low speeds.
For a normal human, a "legal" 250w motor is easily doubling or tripling their normal power output, so hauling around an extra 20kg on top of the existing ~100kg body + bike is not a big deal.