To be fair, nobody’s stealing that first bike

Definitely the Achilles heel of the concept. Also: luggage weight restrictions (but if that’s an incentive to go by train, I’m calling it a win).

Hilarious!

Wait. This is actually a genuinely good idea.

That means there’s only one word for it.

PlantNet or Seek can’t?

The EU-regs-respecting variant of that Engwe fat-tire job. Very popular among pizza-delivery riders. (Unlike them, I actually pedal.)

Interesting numbers. And good for you for getting out there. I agree: just knowing that the motor is there is a superpower in itself.

That’s interesting. On my 250W heavy-as-a-rock (38kg) bike I have done rides of >70km involving >1000m of climbs (mountains), with baggage on the rack, and arrived with a couple of bars of battery to spare.

This is why I’m wary of the word “need”. It’s true that I was a cyclist before an e-cyclist.

Personally I don’t understand why anyone would need even 750W for an electric bike, let alone multiple kilowatts.

Mine is an EU-regulation 250W and I never even use the top power level. In fact sometimes I forget to turn on the battery and (on the flat) don’t even notice.

This really looks like the same story of macho horsepower inflation that’s been at work with combustion motorbikes for a century. Look at those giant BMWs with 1.4-litre engines that are enough to power a sedan. Completely unnecessary and irrational (and non-existent just a few decades ago) but the biker-dude owners will always find a reason that they “need” it. And let’s face it, this really is a story about dudes.

There are lots of flightless birds and a few flightful mammals (i.e. bats). Not any truly flying fish as yet. But presumably a few million more years might produce a properly flying member of the Exocotidae family.

To be fair you went to the bike-lane capital of the world, where literally 40% of people go to work by bike. The rest of Europe (Netherlands excepted) lags somewhat. Don’t go to Athens if you’re nervous of cars.

As I recall, a major reason it didn’t take off was very simple: the new “Sunday” only came every 10 days instead of 7!

The best bit about it was definitely the evocative month names.

13! A prime number indivisible into anything. Ugh!

Meanwhile Brazil’s government is simultaneously doing a great job of slowing deforestation - and promoting the oil extraction that will one day cause all that forest to burn down.

Very desirable indeed.

What a nightmare. Seriously, this inadvertently reads as a very effective health warning against even buying a bike in the first place. Unfortunately.

Personally I share OP’s anxiety. My solution is simple: Never leave the thing in a public place for more than about 10 minutes, even locked. The fact that it’s foldable helps.

In fact, the popularity of foldables surely has something to do with this whole conundrum.

*!pigeon@mander.xyz

This is the kind of thing that’s gonna get vanilla e-bikes banned everywhere from bike lanes to trains. Very irritating trend.

I’m mortified :( It’s never been my goal to make others feel bad online. I had a quibble with the wording on a meme and clumsily worded my idea of “Our differences shouldn’t be minimized because they make us special” was seen as transphobia/TERF rhetoric.

Try not to take it personally. You waded into a subject which has become a sort of rationality-free zone. Perhaps more so even than Israel-Palestine, or immigration in Europe. On these topics there is almost nobody left who is interested in nuanced debate, it’s now only a question of identifying which “side” one’s interlocutor is on, and then unloading on them (or downvoting, or deleting, or blocking, or banning) as appropriate. You stumbled into sterile trench warfare, basically.

Soon after I joined Lemmy I was banned from a (somewhat serious) community for making the same mistake you made. I learned my lesson. With certain topics, genuine debate - open-minded, good faith discussion - is just not possible. I see it as a failure of Lemmy, yes, but mainly of the whole medium of text-based social media. It’s certainly not your fault.

Good, we’ve nipped that misunderstanding in the butt.