Compatibility and incompatibility.....
PCs were legendary for their backward compatibility - but huge developments within a short time scale have meant that unless you really know what you're doing what you buy today won't interface with what you bought only three or four years ago. E-bikes have a few incompatible directions - three places where (mainly) you can put a motor, several gearing arrangements, and batteries which quite often become unavailable as soon as the models for which they were designed for stop being made - to name a few which come readily to mind.
I suspect one of the things which happened with the PC market had to do with the sheer pervasiveness of them. Something which seems unlikely in the e-bike field was that the manufacturing volumes world wide pushed down the price of technology as well as resulting in huge research effort - cheaper and plentiful memory and storage, not to mention ridiculous amounts of 'grunt' from even relatively modest machines.
Will that happen to e-bikes? Regrettably not. In another post someone mentioned that we do have an image problem - the public perception of e-bikes and Zimmer frames as being closely related. I was a little kinder in noting the relationship between e-bikes and mobility scooters. So, it's always going to be a minority pastime, especially in this country. There are really no great economies of scale to take advantage of - anyone who, for example, might think a Wisper to be over priced hasn't considered the level of service offered to what is fated to still be a relatively small market. I feel sure that David and the rest of his small staff would not hope to be viable if they were not setting their sights on world markets.
E-bikes offer a lifeline to those who are no longer in the first flush of youth, or who have other physical limitations which may or may not be associated with advancing years. That's a very tough act to follow if as a manufacturer you want to break out of that 'niche' and appeal to the more athletic and fashion-conscious among us. There are only two real 'sport' e-bikes being sold as far as I'm aware, and I don't suppose there will be more than a handful of those in use in the UK. The cost of development and frame design to produce what amounts to a limited number of production prototypes can hardly be justified.
The price of a half-decent e-bike means it will probably not be considered by anyone not well-heeled enough to take the hit - a half-decent bicycle can be picked up for a fraction of that cost. Therefore most of the population won't ever look at e-bikes given that a cheap bike will probably have far more street cred than an expensive e-bike.
Rog.
I wish it were as simple as that. Power supplies and connectors have changed, not to mention the different variations on SATA and the case of 'hybrid' boards which support IDE hard drives as well as SATA drives - but not very well - different and incompatible CPU sockets from the SAME manufacturer - etc. That's only the half of it, and I'm only going on about it here because the parallels with the e-bike business are quite noticeable.Where I take your other points, on this I have to disagree, as if you want to upgrade to say a quad core CPU, then you simply have to buy a new mainboard with it. Due to the industry's careful support of legacy standards, you don't also have replace all your existing peripheral devices, and your chassis. An example of this was the fact that 16bit ISA slots hung around on modern mainboards for years, though entirely superseded.
Apologies if you think I'm being pedantic.
PCs were legendary for their backward compatibility - but huge developments within a short time scale have meant that unless you really know what you're doing what you buy today won't interface with what you bought only three or four years ago. E-bikes have a few incompatible directions - three places where (mainly) you can put a motor, several gearing arrangements, and batteries which quite often become unavailable as soon as the models for which they were designed for stop being made - to name a few which come readily to mind.
I suspect one of the things which happened with the PC market had to do with the sheer pervasiveness of them. Something which seems unlikely in the e-bike field was that the manufacturing volumes world wide pushed down the price of technology as well as resulting in huge research effort - cheaper and plentiful memory and storage, not to mention ridiculous amounts of 'grunt' from even relatively modest machines.
Will that happen to e-bikes? Regrettably not. In another post someone mentioned that we do have an image problem - the public perception of e-bikes and Zimmer frames as being closely related. I was a little kinder in noting the relationship between e-bikes and mobility scooters. So, it's always going to be a minority pastime, especially in this country. There are really no great economies of scale to take advantage of - anyone who, for example, might think a Wisper to be over priced hasn't considered the level of service offered to what is fated to still be a relatively small market. I feel sure that David and the rest of his small staff would not hope to be viable if they were not setting their sights on world markets.
E-bikes offer a lifeline to those who are no longer in the first flush of youth, or who have other physical limitations which may or may not be associated with advancing years. That's a very tough act to follow if as a manufacturer you want to break out of that 'niche' and appeal to the more athletic and fashion-conscious among us. There are only two real 'sport' e-bikes being sold as far as I'm aware, and I don't suppose there will be more than a handful of those in use in the UK. The cost of development and frame design to produce what amounts to a limited number of production prototypes can hardly be justified.
The price of a half-decent e-bike means it will probably not be considered by anyone not well-heeled enough to take the hit - a half-decent bicycle can be picked up for a fraction of that cost. Therefore most of the population won't ever look at e-bikes given that a cheap bike will probably have far more street cred than an expensive e-bike.
Rog.
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