I’ve been asked more and more to review eBikes coming online, so in the interest of time here’s a quick comparison of two that caught my eye:
2023 Lynx. Source: QuietKat
QuietKat Lynx (cafe moto) — $3,999
Motor: 1000W 2 Speed Hub Drive (Variable Power Output)
Range: 63mi
Battery: 20Ah/48V/960Wh
Power: 83Nm Torque/1440 Peak
Max load: 300lbs
Top Speed: 28mph
Weight: 100lbs
Regenerative: No
2023 xXx. Source: Sur Ronster
Talaria xXx (stunt) — €2.400 ($2,500)
Motor: Interior Permanent Magnet (IPM)
Range: 60k (40mi)
Battery: 40Ah/60V/2400Wh
Power: 45Nm Torque
Max load: 165lbs
Top Speed: 46mph
Weight: 125lbs
Regenerative: Yes
There are a ton of eBike reviews floating around already. They never seem to appeal to me, so maybe that’s why I’m being asked to add mine to the growing pile. I’ve not yet seen these two compared. Here goes:
A simple bake-off had a surprising result for me because the winner turned out opposite to first impressions:
Weight: Lynx 100lbs
Speed: xXx 46mph
Strength: Lynx 300lbs
Range: Lynx 63mi
Cost: xXx $2500
3 for the Lynx vs 2 for the xXx, and if I properly weight (pun not intended) the categories I care most about the Lynx is much further ahead.
I mean on first glance (maybe it was price tag) I felt the pull of a stupid-fast and light xXx. It’s powerful and nimble for fun rides, perhaps too much fun. I could see myself breaking it.
Where the Lynx shines is engineering for things more relevant to my interests: practicality, offering durability and distance. It hints at something more like “slow and steady” Dakar and much, much less at kids doing “endless burnouts in high school parking lots” or… *shudder*, tokkers cruising Palo Alto.
Notably, the xXx has reliability issues with its motor cutting out without warning. That’s ok on fun rides, maybe. NOT acceptable for basically everything else. A dead 125lb bike at intersections or on trails… nope. Riding wheelies on the xXx and… ugh, why am I even looking at a bike marketed as xXx?
When you’re ready for real life with responsibilities, the Lynx seems to be thinking about much more rational features for respectable long hauls (not the LOOOONG 200 mile haul of the new Buell but 63mi is plenty).
One nagging detail that kept me on the fence is regeneration of energy. Given the utility of eBikes for remote mountainous terrain (somehow I always end up on) a regen all the way down sounds great. Really great. Speaking of which, allegedly one of the reasons a xXx motor quits and requires reset is trying to regen over 90% causes thermal trouble. I’ll take a working engine over any regen one that abruptly quits, natch.
Even so, lack of any regen feels like oversight from QuietKat, especially given how they reference a Colorado mountain test environment and promote mountain this and that in their specs. Getting up to high elevation campsite is no bother if you know you have the option of charging back down.
As a final note, linking to a trailer seems like something Talaria doesn’t even think about, yet Lynx has a beefy cargo rack already setup behind the saddle and then offers options like their “Cargo Trailer”.
100lb capacity in a sizeable trailer. Source: QuietKat
If they spell cat with a K and they call a bike the Lynx, shouldn’t this be called something more creative like the “KatBox”? I’ll be here all week.
The cargo trailer doesn’t say it works well with NLAW mounts but you get the idea. QuietKat otherwise doesn’t hide the fact that they market towards “scout ahead” and the toughest “protect and serve” riders who “mount guns, bows, and more”. Maybe they should offer a decal set for riders to show how many helicopters downed or turrets popped? On a similar note their “Game Trailer” with the picture of a deer carcass doesn’t say it can be an ambulance gurney or extract wounded… but again, you get the idea.
All of this brings to mind military-grade engineering, regulated (in a good way) with long-term dependability for quiet professionals. The xXx however says race-to-the-bottom throwaway nuisance toy.
Between these two eBikes I might use an xXx for a few light-duty recreational trips, as a quick replacement for gas, but the Lynx seems far more likely to be the kind of infinitely useful bike I’d want to ride and ride and ride.
Ontario, Canada. This seems like yet another case of Tesla software failing to see children and stop signs.
Halton police pulled over a Tesla that allegedly “passed a school bus that was stopped, had its lights activated and children were loading onto the bus”
A 30 year old woman ignored a stopped school bus loading children, because she bought a Tesla. Of course the first thing that comes to mind is this recent news:
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Friday said it will probe the March 15 crash in North Carolina that injured a 17-year-old charter school student. The State Highway Patrol said the driver of the 2022 Tesla Model Y, a 51-year-old man, didn’t stop for the bus, which was displaying all of its activated warning signs.
March? Let’s also talk about the 16th of May, when a Tesla plowed into a school bus in New York.
Tesla ignores school buses and puts children at risk of death? Yes, it’s a long known problem that shows no signs of being addressed.
We’ve done tests over past years. “For a school bus with kids getting off, we showed that the Tesla would drive right past, completely ignoring the “school zone” sign, and keeping on driving at 40 miles per hour [25 miles per hour over the posted limit, a measly $500 maximum fine].
The latest research says driverless cars are ten times worse than human drivers (Waymo/Cruise crashing every 60,000 miles, whereas human drivers average 600,000 miles).
The latest NHTSA data paints an even worse picture for Tesla, revealing a jump to 30 fatalities (12 more since January 2023). The average now seems to be one death reported by Tesla for every ten “Autopilot” crashes.
Wouter Basson, known as “Doctor Death”, led the Apartheid government clandestine chemical and biological warfare program to capture and assassinate people who had anti-apartheid thoughts: Project Coast. He did not apologize, did not show any remorse and after 13 years of fighting in court was found guilty of unethical conduct.
First, let’s just get out of the way that white South African children exposed to horribly racist Apartheid lies were raised to believe Black people should never be allowed to keep private thoughts.
Inside South Africa, riots, boycotts, and protests by black South Africans against white rule had occurred since the inception of independent white rule in 1910. Opposition intensified when the Nationalist Party, assuming power in 1948, effectively blocked all legal and non-violent means of political protest by non-whites. The African National Congress (ANC) and its offshoot, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), both of which envisioned a vastly different form of government based on majority rule, were outlawed in 1960 and many of its leaders imprisoned. The most famous prisoner was a leader of the ANC, Nelson Mandela, who had become a symbol of the anti-Apartheid struggle.
Indeed, it was Nelson Mandela’s private thoughts while in prison (as well as his sophisticated use of secret distributed encryption technology) that have been credited with winning the war against Apartheid.
Getting a link to someone’s thoughts used to be referred to as detention and torture, or as many Americans know from their own history of denying Blacks privacy since the 1770s, cynically referred to as rubber hose cryptanalysis.
Stephen Bantu Biko was an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s who founded the Black Consciousness Movement, empowering and mobilizing the urban black population to fight for human rights.
With the rise of better privacy technology, the brain remains a crucial aspect of safety. Things you know, such as a password, are thoughts that are supposedly beyond the reach of anyone or anything if you refuse to disclose them.
Remember, Nelson Mandela took on and defeated the entire South African government by keeping his thoughts secret yet shared extremely selectively.
[Musk’s grandfather was] leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. During World War II, the Canadian government banned the group, declaring it a risk to national security. Haldeman’s involvement with Technocracy continued, though, and he was arrested and convicted of three charges relating to it. Once he got to South Africa, he added Black Africans to his list of rhetorical targets.
An avowed white nationalist, aligned with Hitler, gives important context to Elon Musk’s childhood. The old man pushing to spread Apartheid with “technocracy” had a grandson who is the one now allegedly torturing captive animals to death in an ill-minded attempt to use technology for removing physical privacy of thoughts.
Public records reviewed by WIRED, and interviews conducted with a former Neuralink employee and a current researcher at the University of California, Davis primate center, paint a wholly different picture of Neuralink’s animal research. The documents include veterinary records, first made public last year, that contain gruesome portrayals of suffering reportedly endured by as many as a dozen of Neuralink’s primate subjects, all of whom needed to be euthanized.
Reading this stuff is truly awful, reminiscent of Nazi experiments, demonstrating again the inhumane and cruel lies that Elon Musk often runs with.
Additional veterinary reports show the condition of a female monkey called “Animal 15” during the months leading up to her death in March 2019. Days after her implant surgery, she began to press her head against the floor for no apparent reason; a symptom of pain or infection, the records say. Staff observed that though she was uncomfortable, picking and pulling at her implant until it bled, she would often lie at the foot of her cage and spend time holding hands with her roommate.
Animal 15 began to lose coordination, and staff observed that she would shake uncontrollably when she saw lab workers. Her condition deteriorated for months until the staff finally euthanized her. A necropsy report indicates that she had bleeding in her brain and that the Neuralink implants left parts of her cerebral cortex “focally tattered.”
Shown a copy of Musk’s remarks about Neuralink’s animal subjects being “close to death already,” a former Neuralink employee alleges to WIRED that the claim is “ridiculous,” if not a “straight fabrication.” “We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed,” they say. The ex-employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, says that up to a year’s worth of behavioral training was necessary for the program, a time frame that would exempt subjects already close to death.
Think of it this way. South Africa’s secret police didn’t bother to detain and torture any Black people “close to death already” and neither would Elon Musk or the fools who decide to work for his evil intentions.
He plays with fire, everyone else gets burned.
The labs sought healthy subjects for a specific reason that makes perfect sense, to try and keep captive subjects alive while forcing them to disclose all their secrets. This sounds like nothing new to veterans of the CIA, that capturing someone terminally ill to extract information isn’t worth a bother.
Musk propaganda is literally the exact inversion of truth, as if proving the South African methods of keeping Apartheid alive aren’t dead yet. Rockets blow up on launch as intended. Cars keep killing more and more people. Captive patients die as expected. Biko shot himself with a rifle in the back of the head while his hands were tied behind his back. Whatever is the absolute worst outcome is described in a way that, no matter how far from truth, all liability goes up in a puff of white smoke.
He selected healthy subjects for the purposes of trying to test with dangerous implants to measure the effects on their health. He obviously needs to prove his toys meant to destroy privacy aren’t a source of harm, or people will reject them for causing terminal illness (which they in fact are doing).
Common sense test: if you only choose terminally ill patients for a test of new technology, how would anyone ever suitably prove that technology wasn’t the cause of their immense suffering and early death?
Instead of the right thing — rising up to the hard work of proving no harm — he has started the usual gaslighting claims that any and all harm should be expected, even when very obviously and totally unexpected.
To assess whether the technology is causing harm or not, researchers typically follow established protocols, which is the antithesis to Elon Musk’s constant demands that nobody ever follow established protocols (because they would quickly expose his fraud).
In all, the company has killed about 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys, following experiments since 2018, according to records reviewed by Reuters and sources with direct knowledge of the company’s animal-testing operations. The sources characterized that figure as a rough estimate because the company does not keep precise records on the number of animals tested and killed.
They say their company doesn’t keep records on the number killed. If you don’t keep records, you are peddling ignorance and not science.
Musk told employees he wanted the monkeys at his San Francisco Bay Area operation to live in a “monkey Taj Mahal”
Presumably Musk thinks being a soulless monster is amusing when he says he wants his test subjects to live in a mausoleum. Does it make any more sense if he says he wants his monkeys to live in a casket six feet underground? Maybe he doesn’t know what the Taj Mahal is. Either way…
What the sources really mean, since there is literally no way to perform research in an unexplored field like this without keeping detailed records, is that they keep everything secret to avoid accountability (just like during Apartheid).
At one meeting, he suggested using data collected from the car’s cameras—one of which is inside the car and focused on the driver…. One of the women at the table pushed back. “We went back and forth with the privacy team about that,” she said. … Musk was not happy. … “I am the decision-maker at this company, not the privacy team,” he said. “I don’t even know who they are.”
“The decider” brags how nobody else matters and that he doesn’t know/care who experts are anyway. He’ll make the dumbest decision possible and classify it genius. You’re the enemy if you disagree. Of course he doesn’t care what truth is, he’s making it up like a tin-pot wannabe dictator in Africa (e.g. this apple didn’t fall far from its horribly racist family tree).
In other related news: police refused to charge Elon Musk for crime even though he posted video of himself in his Tesla clearly breaking the law. Historians may recognize this as similar to when the South African Apartheid state set up parallel and unequal information access and record-keeping regimes to create secrecy and lack of accountability only for… white supremacists.