Video Electric Bikes Get More Elegant Every Year (Video) 164
Tim:So Adam, here we are in the headquarters of Faraday Bikes. Talk about what is the thing that is standing next to you.
Adam:Well this is the Faraday Porteur. It is our flagship bike.It looks just like a frame right now, but it is actually going to be an electric bicycle. It has got a battery pack that is built completely into the frame.I won’t tell you where it’s going, our favorite game is to make you guess. As you guess, you may be surprised. And then everything else about it is like a bike, really high end nicely built bike to last a ride. It is comfortable.It is rough and light weight for an electric bike. And it is beautiful. And that was the point in the beginning as we sort of set up to say, “Electric bikes are great, they have a huge amount of potential to get more people riding bikes more often.” Which is something we want to see in the world. But how do we make that?How do enable that? How do we make them more attractive and appealing to people?
Tim:Speaking of attractive, you mentioned it is a Porteur.
Adam:Porteur, yeah.
Tim:Explain that phrase. That word.
Adam:So that gets mispronounced a lot.
Tim:By me at least.
Adam:Yeah, by everybody. You are not alone.____1:06Porteur a load carrying bike. One of the cool things about it is it has got this big rack in the front here. And it is a cargo rack. We meant for this bike as it goes it looks to be a workhorse. We want you to put your bag of groceries, or your laptop, or crates of coffee, or whatever it is in the front of the bike here and really use this bike for utility.And that is one of the cool things. It is attached rigidly to the frame here. We could shake the whole thing.
Tim:Show us a little bit how it is detached.
Adam:So this is a neat design. We basically have these bars on the rack attached to this bracket here in the frame, it makes it a really strong rigid connection. And so that means when you steer, the weight in the rack doesn’t affect the steering at all. So you can have a lot of weight in there, and it won’t wind up or swing around. You have a bike with a rack on the handlebars which is maybe more typical if you do it. It can really get erratic and hard to control. So this is really really stable.I like it a lot. The cool thing too is you can take the whole thing off. So three bolts come off and the whole thing just comes off.There is times you may not want this. Some people just don’t carry so much weight in the bike. It lets you customize the bike to your style.So that’s where the namesake ‘porteur’ comes from. We originally created this bike. It was part of a contest to sort of redefine the ultimate utility bike.
Tim:Jim, you are sitting here in the bully pulpit here where you get to design all the circuitry that actually goes into the Faraday bike.
Jim:This is my electronics workbench space, my electronic domain over here. As you noted, chatting about, there is a lot that happens electronically in this bike, and we’ve got to pack a lot of electronics in the small space to get that done. So there are some fascinating challenges that come along with that. I am spending a lot of time working right now on thermal considerations, there is a lot to power from more than just the motor powering the lights, powering everything on the bike—it generates a lot of heat. We have a lot of electronics crammed into a small space. That can be an interesting thermal mechanical challenge. Doing the whole design process from mechanical mounting to fixing things. Hugo, our mechanical engineer and I would go back and forth a lot just chatting across the room at each other—“Hey is it going to work like that?” , “No, let’s do it like it instead” things like that. So it has been good team integration.
Tim:Now as a background, explain what you did immediately before this.
Jim:I come from an engineering background stuff. Before this, I was making toys.I was working for a small design shop that would design children’s toys mostly for six- to twelve-year-olds age market, and doing more software and less hardware. So it is definitely more on the building of physical things side, building electronics side of things for me.
Tim:And also the hardware you were making also didn’t have to carry 200 pounds for 20 miles.
Jim:Right. Although it had to survive a six year old on Christmas day.
Tim:That actually sounds like a pretty tough challenge. So talk about the actual design of this, and the way you are interacting between electronics and hard physical environment—what do you have to do, is there anything different in designing what goes into a bike than what goes into a laptop?
Tim:Certainly everything needs to be reliable. It is a bike with an on button. And that keeps it simple from the user perspective. But that means that we manage a lot of details tucked away, hidden in that box there, that is in the bike frame. So a lot of it is just getting a lot of these systems, from the battery to the motor controller to the lights, to data logged in memory on the electronics getting all of these systems to play together nicely, and work as a single integrated bike.
Tim:Can you give us a quick rundown on some of the tools on your desk, and how they play into your day-to-day life?
Jim:Sure.You see as with any engineering, the laptop or the computer is the main design tool.
Tim:What are you using to program here?
Jim:I am just writing in a text editor there. And that’s not a programming tool necessarily. It is not programming that works directly. But we have some software here that will let us program up these test boards that I had built.
Tim:What is the software environment that you are using?
Jim:It is just the standard AVR Studio tools.
Tim:And some of the other tools on your bench. What are you dealing with here?
Jim:The typical electrical engineering suite where you have a power supply, you have some multimeters, you have some solder irons, you have an oscilloscope that logs some data there, so the essential EE tools.
Tim:And you’ve also got this desk one of the interesting things, so that is a nicely elevatable desk here?
Jim:I got to alternate between standing and sitting right, just at the touch of a few key buttons, which is handy. I like to stand up sometimes while I am working on some things or to adjust different heights for when I am working at the computer or soldering some circuit boards, it changes my operating level as it were.
Tim:Over the course that this project has been in progress, what sort of changes have you had to see? What things as being a bike, and the realistic environment cause you to do differently?
Jim:A lot of it is just dialing small things in, changing the brightness of lights to adapt to the urban environment that we have here, how bright do we need these lights to be, what is the most visible, so we will make these small changes, we get out and ride, we do lots of riding, we just had a motor controller response to startup and things like that, just based on the subtle feel of how the bike rides.
Tim:Although the Kickstarter supporters are going to be getting their frames pretty soon, starting at least, how many bikes like these are out in the wild, or you have been able to actually put wheels and motors on?
Jim:Just the few that you have seen around here so far. We have built up a handful of test bikes that have been riding around San Francisco. It is starting to get spotted in a while, it is kind of fun, to see that go up on Twitter sometimes.
Tim:Is the software updateable?
Jim:Yes.
Tim:Can you plug in a USB cord when Faraday comes out with a firmware upgrade?
Jim:Yeah, we are making sure that you can get new versions of firmware as we release them and put them on the bike to make it even better as we go along.
Tim:Will it not be long until you will be able to drive your electric to ride, on your electric car, on the back of an electric powered train, is it?
Jim:Not too long at all.
Pretty cool but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that bike is pretty cool, and I've been lucky to never have a bike stolen, but at that price tag, they better have put a LOT of thought into security before I would consider buying one.
Also, is it just me or does that bike scream hipster?
Re:Still ugly (Score:2, Insightful)
Because nobody can see you in traffic and you will be killed. The same reason people do not ride recumbent bikes on city streets.
Re:Still ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't call road/racing bikes comfortable, i find an upright bike much more user friendly. Those racing bikes feel like my butts up in the air and my chin is about to scrape the pavement. How is that more comfortable? Besides being a man i prefer my, ahem, "manliness", un-squished, as happens every time on a road bike.
Re:Still ugly (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of battery life, there's no mention of regenerative braking on this thing.
Their FAQ claims "Regenerative braking may be great for cars, but it's not as good for bikes." Other e-bikes and the Copenhagen Wheel [superpedestrian.com] have regenerative braking, so I wonder if Faraday is making unfounded excuses.
TRY an electric bike (Score:4, Insightful)
The bending over you do to reduce drag isn't needed on an electric bike because even with just 250 watt, you basically got another set of legs pedalling. I got one myself and the biggest difference you notice straight away, apart from the insane acceleration (even mopeds have a hard time keeping up) is that WIND, the eternal enemy, is NO LONGER A FACTOR. Whoosh, GONE!
And the upright is not about BEING seen, in either position you are at the height of normal car windows, so plenty visible, it is about how easy YOU can see.
There just isn't a market for electric racing bikes. Not just because most racers don't want a support engine OR because the weight of engine and battery would triple the bike weight but because most build their own custom bikes and the best electric bikes use custom frames (mid-motor is where things are going).
The market for electric bikes simply ain't the health freaks, it is the people faced with a commute that is just to uncomfortable to ride themselves but who are not opposed to moving their legs a bit. People like me, I am neither fit nor unfit, I could ride 30 miles, I have done so when needed BUT I wouldn't do it of my own choice. I have a choice, go by car (longer commute and more expensive), cycle all the way (about 45 minutes) NO FUCKING WAY, go train + bus (extra waiting time kills commute time) or train + electric bike. WINNER! Fast, bit of excersize (downside, pants starting to fall down), cheap.
I am the target of the bike in the article. You are not.
This is no different from the eternal and rather boring debate about how electric cars don't have enough range to drive to another continent. NOT THE TARGET MARKET.