The Ebike Revolution
By: Aubrey Stafford
Jim Stafford, 57, of Mission Hills saw his first electric bicycle at Earth Fair 2006. An overlooked development in our quest for Earth-friendly transportation, the electric bike (or ebike) caught his eye immediately and he was infected with the notion. Next came the inevitable step in any person’s grasp at a newfound intrigue—internet research. He looked at the various designs, the specifics of the motors, the history of the concept. The interest quickly grew into a vague idea for a side business: something fun and interesting, something that would be a step in the right direction for our environment. “I have a heavy carbon footprint,” Stafford says, “and I’m ashamed.” Stafford had a vision of a little shop tucked away in the folds of San Diego somewhere that would sell ebikes and light electric vehicles (LEVs), which is an umbrella term for smaller, electricity-powered means of transportation such as electric scooters, electric skateboards, and electric motorcycles.
Recently, Stafford made his actual purchase: an E+ brand electric bicycle from a company by the name of Electric Motion Systems, LLC. “My bike is a fancy bike,” Stafford remarks, smiling. It comes equipped with electronic cruise control, regenerative braking (a system that charges the battery when the rider brakes), an electronic display and control panel with an odometer, a trip odometer, a speedometer, and a function that tells the rider both the state of charge and the remaining range. Stafford’s entrepreneurial career in construction doesn’t allow him to use his ebike for commuting. As durable as the bike is, it simply doesn’t have the capacity to tote around all the tools, materials, and heavy machinery Stafford needs handy on a daily basis. “I use it for recreation,” he notes. Stafford enjoys being able to extend his range—to take the long bike rides of which he’s so fond, and be able to physically manage the long extents and steep hills. It’s hard to argue that these ebikes aren’t impressive.
Before sitting down for this interview, earlier in the day, Stafford took the bike for a spin. He rode from his home in Mission Hills, down Pacific Highway to Rosecrans and out to the Point. Round trip, he probably covered around 25 miles, and when he returned home, the bike still had about twenty percent of its battery left. Stafford explains that the route he took included many hills, and that he employed only “moderate pedaling” over the course of the ride. Ebikes can reach up to 25 miles an hour, easily, without any pedaling at all. With pedaling, they can go as fast as 30 miles an hour. “Which is as fast as you’d want a bike to go,” Stafford offers, “unless you’re a twenty-something who’d just strap two motors to [the bike] and do 50!”
These seemingly complex machines actually work very simply at their core—when the rider wants electricity to run the bike, they engage the handlebar throttle, which sends power to the electric motor in one of the wheels. Some bikes have a hybrid system, in which the bike can sense how much the rider is having to pedal and will add electric assistance. Others, like Stafford’s, are designed so that the pedals and the motor are completely independent of each other—the rider can pedal as little or as much as he or she wishes, or not at all. Although Stafford has found little use for the bike in relation to his workday comings and goings, he feels that ebikes are a great asset to the everyday commuter. They have endless advantages over cars: they are classified by the DMV and the highway patrol as bicycles, so one wouldn’t need a license, registration, insurance, nor gas, to operate one; to recharge the battery costs a few cents from the wall socket, and parking is suddenly not an issue. This is all without mentioning that the bikes are zero-emission vehicles—the effect on the environment alone is enough to make these mechanisms attractive to consumers. But there’s the added bonus of being able to commute up to 25 miles one-way and get to work without sweat or fatigue. Stafford observes that the bikes are perfect for commuters who aren’t “gung-ho, spandex, racing bike types.”
Each of these bikes comes with a battery pack (usually sealed lead acid [SLA], lithium ion, or nickel metal hydride). These battery packs have chargers that plug into a standard wall socket and recharge the bike’s battery. Stafford muses that in order for the bike to genuinely be a zero-emissions vehicle, one would have to get the charger off of public utilities and use only independent sources of energy. “I totally own up to taking power off the grid to charge the bike,” Stafford says. “It’s not good, but it’s still better than people out there burning up gas. It’s easier to control one source of energy than a million.” Stafford intends to purchase an array of solar panels that would attach to his roof in an experimental attempt to charge the bike without the use of a power plant. When Stafford was asked about the bike, he was wary of getting too technical. He explained that the motor on his particular model is a Brushless DC electric motor that is microprocessor controlled, with hall sensors to detect speed and demand. The microprocessor can reconfigure the phasing in the motor to automatically switch from high torque for acceleration to a high-speed configuration to always run in the most energy-efficient manner.
A standard motor can’t accomplish these kinds of stunts due to fixed timing, but the computer gives the system much more flexibility. This is generally referred to as an “electric transmission.” The explanation, it turns out, is quite technical. Another purchase Stafford has made recently (for his wife) is a conversion kit—one that can turn a standard bicycle into an ebike. These kits are found mostly on Ebay and come most often from China, which is, incidentally, the country that’s on the forefront of the market for these kits, due to their heavy dependence on bicycles for transportation while simultaneously facing longer commutes. The kits consist of basically an entire wheel, either the front or the back, with a motor built into the hub. They are inexpensive and a great way to introduce an ebike into one’s life, but require a lot of research to allow the buyer to obtain a quality kit. “For me, this is a trial,” Stafford elucidates. “I wanted to try it out, to see if I like it, to see if people are interested. I take it to pretty much any gathering of people, and I always get one or two who stop me and want more information. So far, it works. It’s quite fun.”
He has a notion of possibly selling these ebikes to San Diegan’s one day. “That’s my justification for buying one,” he says. His daughter, Olivia, 18, chimes in, “Meaning, that’s what he told Mom.” A decent-range electric vehicle to get commuters from A to B—no internal combustion engines, no emissions, with automobile quality at a percentage of the price. A true revolution among today’s failures, and definitely a concept worth looking into. For more information or technical specifics about ebikes, email Jim Stafford at jim.stafford@yahoo.com.
