My sarcasm went a bit overboard perhaps but impediments to charging curtail the utility of ebikes and that must affect their uptake.
Anyway, what's the public's take on battery fires where you are (presuming still Austria) and how are the authorities responding? It's been said that our fires are concentrated in the low cost delivery sector and that European countries run theirs differently.
The only reports I have seen regarding bike battery fires was one shop in a city a few years ago where what you might call conventional ebikes are used. Up here in the mountains hub drive bikes don't exist and mid motor conversions are extremely rare ( I haven't actually seen one). All of the Ebikes here are Bosch, Yamaha or Shimano.
I have a friend who owns a bike shop with about 50 hire bikes who occasionally works with another shop that has over 100 bikes, another hire shop in our village has 20 bikes, there is another unmanned hire space with 10 bikes and many of the hotels either have their own fleet of bikes or use a delivery service that has over 500 bikes. In high season most of these bikes are in use most days often returned with fairlylow batteries, none of these have had any fires.
I don't know about private delivery sectors in the cities but can say the post service uses many small road legal electrically propelled delivery vehicles in larger flatter towns / cities.
The other big difference here is you can ride a moped at 14 so all of the Surron type bikes are registered / insured (you can only get a number plate by taking your insurance docs to the local government office which supplies them) and therefore used properly.
www.pedelecs.co.uk
