@gerrymcgovern I can get almost any part required to economically fix faults on thirty year old bicycles. A few inexpensive parts make them ride as well as they did when new, resulting in lots of happy customers as a result.
Parts for three year old e-bikes on the other hand are almost always unavailable. Customers ask me quite often and I do my best to find compatible parts, but I usually cannot. On the rare occasions when parts like batteries, motors or controller electronics actually are available my customers *always* find them too expensive and don't buy them. Those bikes usually end up in landfill at a very young age.
I find it very sad, but that's how it is.
E-bikes are great for companies which sell new bikes, but pretty rotten for people like me who want to help people to keep the bikes that they already have in working order for as long as possible.
https://www.dutchbikebits.com
@hembrow@todon.eu @gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green This is one of the things I like about the Falco hub motor system (not a recommendation, unfortunately - the console units are unfit for purpose, and for a conventional bicycle mid-drive motors are usually a better choice).
They made a feature out of the battery interface being "put the rated voltage on these two wires, and here's the weatherproof connector you need to do it" - you could buy their battery pack, but you didn't have to use it. At a time where their main competitor used an expensive proprietary battery, it was a major selling point.
I don't have much hope for e-bike standardisation, given how much pointless incompatibility there is between mechanical bike components (cable pull ratios and such).
Do you know of a description of the current state of bifurcation in pushbike components (Sheldon Brown's articles, which helped me understand parts of the variety in the past, are sadly dated by now).
