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Harley-Davidson Unveils Their First Electric Motorcycle
Major Blud writes Harley-Davidson has unveiled their first electric motorcycle called "Project LiveWire." The bike is currently not for sale and detailed specifications are scarce. Harley plans on taking it on a demonstration tour of the U.S. for the next year to gather customer feedback. "The new LiveWire won’t make the distinctive 'potato-potato-potato' chug that Harley once tried to patent. Its engine is silent, and the turbine-like hum comes from the meshing of gears. But electric motors do provide better handling and rapid acceleration — with the electric Harley able to go from 0 to 60 mph in four seconds. LiveWire’s design places the engine at the bottom of the bike."
Just take off the pirate outfit and put on a full face helmet and proper motorcycle safety gear. It will look natural I promise. ;)
People are the problem.
In particular, the people that ride bikes.
Don't be so mean. The world has enough of a donor-organ shortage as it is, without you going and discouraging nice, healthy, young specimens from doing things that not infrequently result in massive cranial trauma that leaves much of the rest of the body so usefully intact...
Firmware upgrade
Loud pipes are compensation for 75 year old technology
Incorrect. "Loud pipes" are compensation for a small penis.
You don't get it. The girl in back resonates at exactly 80mph. She really hums..
Back of the T-Shirt. "If you can read this, my bitch fell off"
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Harley Davidson is rebranding itself as Hardley Audible?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Loud pipes don't make a difference, riding defensively and not putting yourself in bad positions relative to other traffic is what makes a difference. Visibility also makes a big difference. Consider that most cars these days are very thoroughly sound-proofed, and most people have their radios up loud enough to be heard clearly from outside the car. They routinely fail to notice emergency vehicles until they're literally right in front of them. They probably won't notice the fart can on your bike.
My previous bike was a 1996 Suzuki Bandit 600. It had a completely straight-through "muffler" with all the wadding blown out from years of (ab)use. That thing was loud enough to wake the dead and cause cows to stampede when I rode by. It also spat fire when hitting the limiter and burbled gloriously under engine braking. In short, it was a fantastically antisocial mode of transport. I had a number of close calls while riding it, which I attribute partly to my inexperience, and partly to the fact that it was very dark green, almost black.
My current bike is almost completely opposite. It's a bright orange Yamaha XT660X with stock pipes, and in the two years I've ridden it, I have only had one "close" call. It was really that close at all, just some guy merging closely in front of me. All I had to do was close the throttle and beep the horn. We waved 'hi' to each other as I passed him, he did look a bit sheepish, but I guess he was chatting with his passengers, and I might have been in his blind spot.
And I promise you, I ride every bit as hard on my new bike as I did on my old one. I'm just a lot more conscious about making myself visible and not putting myself in dangerous positions in relation to cars. Exhaust noise doesn't even factor into it.
Eat the rich.
Here's my issue with the whole loud pipes thing. Take out a dB meter, pick an arbitrary cutoff, find a nice spot out in the open, and start your motorcycle. Now walk in front of it until you hit your target dB level, then walk around it maintaining the dB level and mapping out the distance you are from the motorcycle.
You'll find that loud pipes give you a quadrant behind the bike that's extremely noisy, noisy for a far longer distance than in other directions. But is that really the direction you want to be throwing off noise? Is that really the most likely direction for an accident to a motorcycle to come from? I really doubt it.
And let's be honest, are audio cues really the best cues? When people are driving along, they're not "listening for other vehicles", they're *looking* for them. If you really want to increase people's awareness of your bike, put little flashing lights or the like on them. But that'd "look gay" or something, right? It feels better to pick a "manly" way that makes you feel better about safety than something would have a lot more effect at getting drivers' attention, doesn't it? I'm not saying that sound doesn't play a role, but it mainly plays a role at the pedestrian level; pedestrians rely on sound cues far more than drivers.
My last problem is, picture what things would be like if everyone started driving their cars around with their hand on the horn at all times because "Constant honking saves lives!" Do you really have the right to create noise pollution so that you can get a greater feeling of safety for a means of travel that you yourself elected to take part in, knowing the risks? Does everyone else have to endure your pollution of the commons for your enjoyment? Do I have the right to jet-ski in a drinking water reservoir or offroad a caterpillar in a national park? The commons is just that - common. Everybody owns it and has a stake in it. Meaning you don't get unlimited access to dump into it without the consent of others, regardless of your intentions.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.