Bosch manager in interview: eBike over-motorization is a risk to our business, because eBikes with more than 800 Watt power will lead to much stricter regulations

European attitudes towards vehicle speed stun me. 30mph is fast?!

In the city yes, we have places that are older than your country, build when car were not even an idea. It is a necessity.

Guess the difference is that American streets are built for cars; straighter, wider and wider open on the sides. Even if you meander off a residential street, all you’re going to hit is a mailbox. That open space also gives pedestrians and bikers ample room to get out of Dodge.

Wait, European street are built for car too, just only were is possible. We don't destroy something old and valuable just to make room for the last Dodge.

LOL, 800 Watt power would be equivalent to a 49cc moped around here. Americans would laugh if anyone called that a “light motorcycle”.

Here a 49cc scooter is the entry point for riding a motorcyle and you can do it at 14 years old. It would make no sense to allow a 13 years old to be able to drive an ebike more powerfull than a scooter he cannot yet drive.

Because it is. There are plenty of single lane, shoulder less roads in the US with a driveway every 1000 ft with a limit of 40-45 mph and it's ridiculously fast.

Highway speeds in Europe are 80mph, 45-55-70mph for normal roads and 30mph for town centers.

Of course not everybody keeps the speed limit, which may be variably enforced.

30mph is FAST for a bike, especially when you consider that they often travel through pedestrian areas.

Yeah I am, too, always astounded about posts like https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/22333342 or https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/top/?sort=top&t=month .

Because we don't fall for whataboutism?

It's no question that car speeds in cities are going down - and need to go down for safety. And that's no reason at all to make e-bikes significantly faster and make things less safe.

And by the way: Further reducing the speed limits for cars, and making more space for normal bikes, including dedicated bike roads, would achieve exactly what most people which argue for higher e-bike speed limits presumably want: You get much faster to your destination. Again, the European bicycle capitals like Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris show how it is done.

And that will be a good thing.

In Germany, that's not the case. What's frequently allowed outside villages (but need explicit permission!) are mofas which are gas-powered vehicles which have a max speed of 25 km/h. The Netherlands are more permissive here but they do have far, far better cycleways.

Here's a non-YouTube version: https://podscan.fm/podcasts/the-urbanist-agenda/episodes/why-im-ebike-pilled-with-american-fietser it may have a nicer transcript (probably automatic), but I think you need an account to read it all.

There's the official YouTube auto-generated transcript, but I'm not pasting that here.

Caveats such as "they'll get stolen and require more money to replace"

In many surveys on bike usage and bike friendlyness, Amsterdam is a strong second after Copenhagen.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/09/19/cycling-in-europe-which-countries-and-cities-are-the-most-and-least-bicycle-friendly

The same way that limiting the work hours of truck drivers protects them and others. Without these restrictions, companies would simply demand even longer hours for less money.

The problem is infrastructure.

We have pavement for trucks/cars at >30km/h... We have pavement for pedestrians <5km/h

What we lack is the dedicated pavement for the stuff in between.

Regulating these light-motorized devices to be banned on the other two has been the real issue of acceptance and adoption of the tech.

But is there really a fundamental difference? If I build a throttle on my bicycle, it still has the same breaks, the same lights, the same driver, the same max speed. The only difference is that I do not have to pedal, everything else is exactly the same. There are countries where it is totally legal to do this and others where you get quite harsh fines. There is no reason for it to be a different thing.

I really can't see this in the traffic accident statistics. Yes, there are a lot of motorcycle accidents, but if you look deeper into them, those are in most cases "real" motorcycles and not those slower variants. And if you take a look at those eScooters, most accidents here are people driving those rental scooters while drunk. That's a problem, but that's also a problem you won't solve by regulating the dude going to the train station in the morning.

We want to reduce traffic and oil consumption and can't figure why people buy larger vehicles in North America?

number of fatal traffic accidents

Yeah, the issue isn't the light motorcycles/mopeds/etc....

So dude is right, a whole class of vehicle is being being held back by regulation, and the premise/reason is ridiculous for a society that would like to see less cars on the road.

Yeah, but those consequences are a direct result of poor infrastructure to facilitate the technology. Not the technology itself.

The consequences are more about these light motorized vehicles interacting with either cars/trucks meant to go faster and be larger, or interacting with pedestrians or non-motorized devices.

If they had their own dedicated pavement like the other two, most(not all) of those 'consequences' disappear.

The problem is that a licence is expensive as fuck here in Germany. If I wanted to upgrade my drivers licence to those 125 motorcycles, that will be around 800€. A full motorcycle licence is several thousands of Euros. There are also age limits in place. So a young person can just hop on a bicycle with a motor for free or "simply buy a small bike" with costs of several thousands of Euros. It would make sense if we bring the cost of thoses licences down.

The point is that a ebike and a bike are two separated things that follow different rules.

Yeah and that is exactly what I wanted to say: Why is a motor assisted thing that can go 25km/h a different thing from a motor assisted thing that can go 25km/h? I'm not talking about full motorcycles, but to give you an exemple: I own an eBike. There is a throttle available that would let me cruise at up to 25km/h without pedaling. That is totally illegal to install here, because that would make it a legally totally different thing and that would e.g. also prevent me from using my current brakes or to install the current tires. Which makes no sense - the risks are the same, brakes and tires are of course normal bicycling components which are totally fine to use at 25km/h, but the regulation is crap.