E-Bikes or Electric Bicycles (Eco-Friendly) & Sizes & Budgets for Everyone

Sustainable transportation news gives electric vehicles like Tesla Model 3 all the publicity, but they are not eco-friendly. A new e-bike the most sustainable transportation choice. My Prodeco Phantom X folding E-bike was stollen :( 

Unmatched Energy Efficiency Personal Mobility Solution: E-Bikes

Electric bicycles are the most energy efficient vehicle. With more than 400 MPG-e they are unmatched by any other motor or engine powered vehicle, except for fully loaded steel railroad passenger trains. Like cars, bicycles let people use all the local dirt, gravel, pavement roadways & paths that trains & bus services cannot accommodate in a time efficient manner. 

Tips for E-Bike Shopping

E-Bike Charging

All E-bikes come with a regular power cord charging brick slow trickle charger & many offer dual charging solutions as an upgrade, but if you can get one with EV charging options for public EV charging & use the Plug-Share app to find L2 charging stations, that will dramatically improve the useable range, especially given that the E-bike battery going to be smaller than most electric car batteris & able to charge significantly faster. 

Look for fast charging options, that enable you to recharge your e-bike from public EV charging stations in minutes, like L2 with J1772 or CCA with the addition of L3 DC fast charging, or even an L3 CHAdeMo port like many Nissan LEAF's, that way you can super charge in under 5 minutes if your battery capacity & chemistry type can soak up charge fast enough, on the go in under 10 minutes. 

If the E-bike can take J1772 L2 charging it will juice up charge in minutes instead of hours, even faster if it has CHAdeMO levels 3 input charging port. Search "Super High Powered Electric Bicycles" with many kW of motor performance. Some new high performance battery electric kick scooters have 8kw motors with a top speed of 80 MPH, 54 miles of range, dual motors front & rear, full suspension, disc brakes and cost $5,000 or more :) There are E-bikes with wild performance too :) 

E-Bike Batteries

Consider the kind of battery pack, if the battery pack is easily user replaceable without tools, if the battery pack can be locked to the E-bike frame, how many AH or amp-hours of battery capacity, its chemistry durability, fire resistance, water resistance, average life expectancy, cold & hot tolerance, puncture or damage safety, voltage, size, mass, and especially the ability to procure an OEM replacement battery.

Think about if you can easily swap batteries or carry the battery pack separately while leaving the bike secured so that you can charge the battery at your desk or at home without bringing the bike along every time. Look for user-replaceable or removable battery packs such that E-bikes sometimes come with sealed batteries that are not feasible to replace when they are faded or worn out, making the entire E-bike a big heavy E-waste headache a few years down the road. 

LFP or Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries that last 10x longer than Li-Ion NCA or NMC that tend to fade faster with shorter cycle & calendar life, but LFP has more mass or weighs more for the same capacity, so bikes with LFP packs tend to be heavier E-bikes than those with traditional lithium polymer NCA or NMC cells.

Get a battery with enough amp hours for the range you need & performance you need in terms of top cruising speed, which is also affected by the battery & motor voltage, where 60v better than 48v, and 80v better than 60v, as higher voltages can move more current over smaller wires & give better performance.

E-Bike Motors 

Look for a motor with 500watts or more, geared more if you live in hilly areas, or direct drive hub motors that go faster per watt in flatter locals. Induction motors are heavier but do not contain rare earth magnets & are rare on E-bikes, but IPM motors with rare earth magnets are common as they have better power per mass unit performance & better efficiency in more compact forms factors which is why nearly all drones use inside out brushless DC IPM motors where the fan attached to the spinning magnet rotor & the windings are stationary in the center connected to the drone frame arms. Some E-bikes use the most advanced axial IPM motors that have the highest power to weight ratio like the RAXIAL motor from Koenigsegg. 

You want at least 1000 watts of motor power on an E-bike, and 1500 watts even better. E-bike can be two-wheel drive with a motor in the front & rear wheel. For higher power & higher torque, high wattage motors need larger AH capacity batteries with higher voltage, or many kWh of battery, which become heavier as the packs have more energy storage & power output. Liquid cooled lithium-ion tends to last longer than air cooled, but liquid cooled E-Bike batteries are very rare & most packs are sealed passively air cooled units, while some high performance sport or racing E-bike batteries feature forced air cooling. 

E-Bikes are Heavy

Don't expect low mass, most E-bikes are 35kg or 70lbs or more, especially high-quality E-bikes with powerful brushless motors & big enough batteries for excellent range & performance. 

The lightest E-bikes on the market are around 25 lbs. or 12kg. These smaller lighter folding E-bikes with smaller wheels are better for carrying up-stairs or storing in your car's trunk or the utility space in the back of your vehicle.

If you are going to carry the e-bike on your vehicle with a bike rack, consider the mass of the E-bike requiring a robust bike rack & strong mounting system. Full sized E-bikes of 50kg or 120lbs are not safe for an individual to lift without help from someone else, as doing so, especially if twisting required, could cause a back injury. This important to consider if your going to be lifting the bike onto a roof rack or tailgate rack, it needs to be light enough to be bractically liftable. Just as someone else not going to lift a motorcycle onto a rack solo, heavy E-bikes are beyond safe lifting mass limits. 

E-Bike Performance

There are high performance E-bikes that are more like motorcycles in terms of performance, power & top speed. I consider these a legal loophole because they do not have a license plate, do not have vehicle tabs or registration, and rides of such are not required to have liability insurance like they would in all three cases for a typical motorscooter with an engine larger than 49cc or motorcycle. 

I would shy away from any e-bike or kick scooter with less than 800 watts of motor power. Many E-bike's come with a safety key, or lockout that limit the maximum speed to 15 MPH, but if they slow key removed or the unit unlocked for its full performance with the related smartphone app over Bluetooth or wifi or NFC to the data interface of the E-bike, that some high power E-bikes can hit 80 MPH and cruse at 70 for many dozens of miles. If you get a high power E-bike, make sure it has larger diameter front brake rotors & quality hydraulic brake calipers with ABS & high quality tires with good traction performance like a good quality motorcycle tire. 

Look for at least 48 volt batteries, 60v or higher even better, and at least 12 amp hours of battery capacity. Higher voltages & higher amp hours will give much better performance and range per charge. To get 120vac outlet like performance, battery electric E-bikes, tools & other devices & equipment needs 60vdc, which is similar to one half of the sinusoidal 120vac wave of grid powered AC corded stuff. Extension cord electric tools top out at 1700 watts, about 2.5 HP. So look for the motor wattage of battery electric bicycles to match that if you want similar to corded performance. E-bikes leverage the same battery & brushless motor + VFD controller technology electronics & power switching as modern power tools & electric kick scooters. 

Bus Too Slow Nearby

To use the metro- bus service nearby takes many transfers & many hours to get one way from where I live to where I work. The Link Light Rail system also years behind schedule & billions over budget, paid for by my vehicle registration RTA or regional transportation authority increased TAB fee's or fines as I think of them. 

EV's Expensive and also Resource & Energy Intensive

At ~$50,000 the Tesla Model 3 heavy, carbon intensive, & eats tires faster than most other cars making tons of microplastic emissions from the tire tread wearing away quickly like that. Important to note given that the Model 3 the world's bestselling electric car and often promoted as an eco-friendly vehicle. The high performance tires on high trim levels of Model 3 can wear out after only 1500 miles & the big wheel diameters 21 inches require thin sidewall tires that are weaker that tires with thicker sidewalls. Michelin addressing this thin tire weak sidewall issue with new tires optimized for larger wheels, but they can cost $500-800 per tire or more. 

EV's vs Gas like Nicotine Vape Pens vs Smoking Tobacco Leaf Products

Electric cars are not eco-friendly, they are like the difference between smoking tobacco & e-juice, both are bad but the electric version slightly less bad for health, the way EV' batteries can be recycled but are toxic to make given the environmental impacts of mining the needed minerals & elements to make the BEV battery packs, rare earths in the motor magnets & all the copper wiring for the EV motor controller power system & infotainment & ADAS features common on many new passenger automobiles now such that the average car has more than 130 chips or integrated circuits. 


Reused & Recycled EV Batteries

It is true that EV batteries can be reused in stationary solar PV storage systems when the EV destroyed in an accident minor enough to maintain the battery pack integrity. EV batteries are also high valuable for recycling to get cobalt, nickel, copper, stainless steel, titanium, aluminum, magnesium, gold, platinum, palladium, silver, and possibly other metals, high performance ceramics, and high-density high-performance polymer insulators. 

Gasoline ICE Well to Wheel Emissions

If you consider the oil refining industry emissions for gasoline used for the life of a conventional car vs charging energy to recharge a similar capacity battery electric vehicle, then the EV has much lower net total emissions, so even if the EV has higher carbon emissions to make, they cause less pollution during their operating life & the majority of an EV can be feasibly & profitably scrap recycled. 

Privately owned passenger vehicles are energy or emissions intensive to make & have enormous lifetime emissions from the energy used to move the vehicle as gasoline, diesel or battery charging, especially noteworthy given that coal power plants are a common way of producing electricity worldwide. I mention coal power plants because they are the most toxic form of carbon combustion, popular because coal fuel cheap & widely available. Think a train-car full of coal for under $100, petrochemical fuels are 5x more expensive. 

EV Energy Economy Compared

Even with class leading energy efficiency, a typical Model 3 rarely gets more than 4 mi (6.4km) per kWh, similar to 120mpg-e or a gasoline engine automobile with similar size, capacities, and features that achieves over 100 MPG or miles per gallon US, similar to 2.35L/100km, obviously not a sustainable transportation choice to give everyone given that there are nearly 9 billion people in the world. 

Comparing a class leading efficiency EV like the 120MPG-e Tesla Model 3 with a modern highly efficient trains which get 800 miles per gallon per person, when they are fully loaded with passengers like a fully loaded Airbus A320 or Boeing 787, which achieve around 300 miles per gallon per person respectively, and as example aircraft happen to also be about 2x as fuel efficient as a typical passenger airliner. A conventional bicycle powered by human muscle metabolism food energy gets around 200 MPG-bio-e. 

Hyperloop tunnel vacuum pressure train pod systems cost 25x more than steel rail roads that have much greater energy efficiency, but even if they do consume a bit more energy per unit of distance traveled, the rail system also easier to build by comparison to a Hyperloop of similar capacities or throughput of people and cargo carrying mass capacity. There is no practical way to cost optimize boring massive amounts of tunnels underground to install enough hyperloop to move billions of people or trillions of units of mass cargo or shipments. Hyperloop a premium technology that is very costly & resource intensive, like many other emerging technologies not leveraging mass manufacturing scales of economy discount benefits. 

Autonomous VTOL drones like EHANG184 are $400,000 like the GRAVITY turbo-jet flight suit that gobbles 1 gallon of kerosene per minute by producing 1000 HP of thrust so people in the hobby scale poly-turbo jet engine GRAVITY suit can fly around like Ironman for a few minutes before the fuel bags run low, with the helmet HUD feeding the pilot such relevant engine & fuel data so they can safely land before running out of fuel. They measure energy consumption in gallons per minute on the Gravity suit, since it makes over 1000 horsepower & very loud as a result of all the fast high pressure exhaust gases generated by the suits turbojets. 

A bicycle the most energy efficient human scale personal transportation assistance technology broadly commercialized, widely available worldwide, available at price points from quasi-free to as much as anyone willing to pay. E-bikes easily get 350-800 MPG-e, way better energy economy than electric cars like the Chevy Bolt or Nissan LEAF. 

Putting Engines in Bicycles

Motorcycles & scooters are similar to a bicycle with an engine or motor, and the first motorcycle made by Honda the worlds largest motorcycle manufacturer was actually made by 12 men in a small shack near Tokyo, with and inspired by Soichiro Honda the founder of Honda Motor Co, who was adapting small 500cc generator motors from WWII Philips radio gen-sets to bicycle frames, producing motorized bicycles, the technological precursor to many future models of motorcycles made by Honda in Japan & then elsewhere around the world. With more than 110 million sold worldwide, the Honda Super-Cub the best selling vehicle of all time. Typical motorcycles get 35-100 MPG, much higher fuel economy than sedans or automobiles, SUV's, trucks, hatchback or cars. 

E-bike Make Bike Riding Easier & Less Sweaty

E-bikes are trending and popular because they make it easier to go further distances, easier to climb hills, easier to travel at higher speeds & tend to offer scooter like performance without having to have insurance, a license plate, annual registration taxes and other costs associated with motorcycles & motor scooters, even electric scooters & electric motorcycles. An electric bicycle also has unmatched energy economy or is the most energy efficient motorized personal transportation vehicle. Think an average E-bike gets 400+ MPG-e. 

Transporation Energy Commentary & Extension

Cars, trucks & SUV's are the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the USA. With more than 396 million gallons of gasoline & diesel per day, the US also the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels. America pioneered the 6kw lifestyle with single family homes with 2 car garages, microwave ovens, washing machines for dishes & clothing, think energy intensive & material intensive lifestyles that would require 9 Earth's worth of materials & carbon energy resources to enable all humans to live like that, especially important to consider as human population increases to 10 billion people at the same time. The ongoing Heat Wave in southwest Asia causing AC & Mini-Split Heat-Pump sales to skyrocket, and grid power loading from all these new loads causing brown-outs & blackouts, while the urban heat island effect makes big cities hold on to solar daytime heat energy all night long like a giant concrete thermal battery that causes heat-stoke & other hot weather problems to exacerbate in developed cities & metro areas with lots of paved roads & tall buildings. When you add in coal power, gasoline, diesel & jet fuel combustion emissions of greenhouse gases at the gigascale, the global warming problem part of climate change caused by human activity. 

Americans Waste Energy Needlessly

Large SUV's are super popular in the USA so any gains in engine efficiency for higher power output or better thermal efficiency are lost to larger less aerodynamic boxy 9 passenger vehicle bodies & their similar related increased mass that wastes energy by bending the tires more by applying more weight to the rolling resistance, causing the larger more expensive SUV tires to emit even more microplastics while the SUV of larger sizes tends to have the lowest fuel economy among other vehicles available in the same markets. This gets us to a short point about the difference between needs & wants. 

An average human being around 5 ft 5 inch tall with a mass of about 150 pounds. An energy efficient bicycle can easily accommodate allowing such a person to travel 5x faster than walking, covering 12x more distance with the same amount of metabolic calorie intake food fuel input. No one likes being cold & wet at the same time, so for many people in many locations, riding a bicycle during the winter not a good idea or safe. This is why cars are so popular in cold climates. 

You can calculate a human bicycle fuel economy by taking the food calories, GVRW, metabolic efficiency, a human body gets about 140 MPG-bio-thermal equivalent, by converting food calories into thought & brain controlled muscle movements for locomotion of the human body skeletal frame network so people can get in and out of their automobile, onto of & off of their bicycle or E-bike, to walk & talk & do all the other things we call activities that make up the majority of human activity on Earth, especially multiplied by machines, the mobile versions of which are predominantly 98%  energized by fossil fuels like gasoline & diesel that when burned released smog forming climate changing toxic to human lung & brain cell emissions known as HC, NOX, SOX, PM & acid rain + CO2 & CO & BC or black carbon or super fine soot. 

Even gasoline engines release soot, GDI engines release even more soot & even soot coke up their intake valve seats since gasoline vapor not washing the intake valve seat like it does in port injection engines; just not as much soot as diesel engines which blech out huge amounts of particulates and are often fitted with an exhaust filter DPF & urea injection DEF fluid emission control system so complex that a modern turbo diesel vehicles emissions control system costs more than the engine & transmission, part the reason that VW chose to abandon diesel engines & transmissions to focus on many new electric vehicles. 

You can get a new e-bike for $200-$5000 with 10-250 miles of battery range, that can easily cruise at 15-40 mph / in folding sizes with small tires that you can take onto your boat or into your RV or in and out of the trunk of even a small passenger sedan.

A typical full size e-bike weights 2x more than an average conventional bicycle of the same size, many E-bikes are 50-85 lbs and hard for a normal person to carry up stairs into their not-ground floor dwelling, important given that many people live in multi-story multifamily apartment buildings or condominium complexes, and this will continue to become the dominate form of home because we don't have enough forests to cut down to make wood intensive single family homes for everyone, the way that many Americans live today. 

The cost of a vehicle or good tells you about its carbon intensity, or emissions released to produce & ship the good to you, your lifetime use of it & its end of life EOL outcomes. All objects made by people have a lifetime and everything eventually wears out or nothing lasts forever. 

Everyone & everything has a story. I like to think and write about transportation energy because people need to go places. Even if people stay home & work from home, the food & other things they consume have to be moved around by other people & machines that are going places, consuming energy from batteries or fossil fuels along the way. 

Given the scale of human activity, vehicle emissions & climate change, transportation energy so important that even the world's oil company executives are talking publicly about the urgent global need to decarbonize energy & specifically to decarbonize transportation. 

For the oil companies' petrochemical downstream products are far more profitable to make than gasoline & diesel & kerosene & JET-A fuels widely available worldwide made in oil refineries from crude oil or petroleum pumped up from near the surface of Earth's mantle or crust. The fuels market currently much larger than the petrochemical market, so even though they make more money per unit on petrochemicals, they make more money overall on transportation fuel sales. But making that much gasoline & diesel to satisfy global demand requires a lot of toxic emissions slog & complex chemical engineering at oil refineries with expensive hard to make & maintain equipment that can explode if a leak of flammable gas or liquid reaches the hot exhaust of a vehicle or other ignition source. The explosion at the Texas City refinery killed many people, causing billions in damages to the equipment & a huge toxic emissions debacle. Many oils spills are similarly eco-toxic, like Exon Valdez or Deep-Water Horizon spills. 

Oil refineries consume enormous amounts of electricity in the electrically precision heated distillation columns. Most oil refineries also flare off less profitable gaseous hydrocarbons & waste products that are dirty burning & make a foul smog that smells terrible & ruins local air quality near the refinery. This is bad for the environment near the refinery & for the health of the people working there. 

Oil a finite polluting chemical energy source better utilized as chemical feedstock to make much higher value products. Oil companies can make 400X more revenue (profits) for 4000+ more years by turning the remaining crude oil into petrochemicals as we progressively move to lower or no carbon ways of energizing transportation, with Bio-gasoline, GTL, DME, biodiesel, green hydrogen, nuclear thermal fuel production & other emerging biofuels. 

Even plastic to oil harvesting can make engine lubrication oils from plastic pollution harvested from waterways, like the plastics in Earths oceans from the inconsiderate dumping of plastics into the oceans, similar to thoughtless space trash creation & other waste & toxic emissions from self-centered greed obsessed inconsiderate development. Plastics can also be made into synthetic gasoline & synthetic diesel. Syn-fuels will also be a trending fuel type in the future. Bio-fuels & Syn-fuels will largely replace petrochemical unleaded gasoline & diesel currently sold as E10 with 10% ethanol by volume at millions of regular gas stations in America for example. 

We can & will be sending less waste to trash & more to recycling, so glass, paper, metal, plastics & even used furniture can enjoy a new life as something else or for someone else's benefit. Ikea even demo-testing a furniture buy-back program (in one city in Sweeden) where a dedicated warehouse area & refurbishment team cleans up the traded in furniture, later to be sold to customers at steeply discounted prices. 

Many municipalities collect household combustible waste to burn in co-gen district heating system plants that also make grid power electricity & with advanced emissions controls that remove particles & soot & fumes from the exhaust stack emissions which have also been harvested for metals & other valuable elements, while the visible emissions are mostly water vapor & CO2. 

Many innovative entrepreneurs are making new products from world wide waste. Making furniture & house goods from recycled skateboards & single use chopsticks collected from Asian restaurants. 

Many waste streams can be turned into new products where someone's waste becomes the input for someone else's value-added manufacturing processes. In this way cleaning up worldwide waste by innovating waste handling means more people will be working together creating value added shared wealth & prosperity while reducing pollution & improving tax revenue for governments. 

Its really a win-win for nature & people when we apply more intelligence to how we deal with the things in our lives, like how we choose to make energy or what we do with broken goods or disused items around the house.

There are emerging answers to all problems & its never been a more exciting time to be alive~ Many people are trying to minimize waste, minimize pollution, minimize harm on the environment, trying to be clean, low impact, highly efficient, eco-friendly, nice to animals & nature, so all life on earth can thrive without causing harm to ecosystems. 

This is what people like about renewable energy or renewables like Solar, Wind & Hydro or Geothermal, its also why electric vehicles of all kinds like the Nissan LEAF or Chevy Bolt or Tesla S3XY or many electric bicycler models are so popular. I think the Toyota Prius an enthusiast vehicle & that electric bicycles are similar. 

Waste is costly, especially energy emissions, often known as externalities in academic circles. Its really that pollution harms, hurts & kills people prematurely that makes it immoral or unethical. Waste also reduces profits in most business who try not to be wasteful like many governments & militaries who tend to waste fuel & goods since the weapons of war are often eco-toxic with harm caused at every level, yet war & rumors of world war 3 abound. 

Remember that all human organizations, governments, businesses, schools, just made up of people in legal frameworks. Those people are were we can make the big difference, upgrading everyone's thinking, moral, emotions, helping people to enjoy life more by wasting less & saving more money faster, with lower emissions safer for everyone. 

While I am a petro-crazy American car enthusiast, I release that my lifestyle not sustainable. If everyone tried to live like me the world would devolve into a dystopian toxic emissions debacle with run-away climate change, and I drive a used Nissan LEAF SV, my motorcycle gets 85 MPG with light hypermiling that I practice while riding it. My wife's motor scooter gets over 100 MPG when she rides it solo below 55 MPH. Her Prius III gets 48 MPG average. 

We only drive the antique Audi inherited from my mom after she died, one day per week to go to church on Sunday. I have taken its dashboard apart now 3x trying to fix the broken LCD information display, and despite carefully soldering down a new LCD, the display not working. The old MFD  LDC had so many lines out it was very hard to read, so I thought of DIY fixing it, since the replacement screen on $10, I got two, but taking the display out of the car & taking it apart took me more than 5 hours so far, and I probably going to pay an expert to repair it, but will give it one more super careful try later today after we get back from Church, God willing if the creek don't rise, if you know what I mean. We have traditional bicycles, not e-bikes, a battery electric kick scooter & Segway MP. 

Human body gets about 150 miles per gallon, while a human riding a bicycle gets over 250 miles per gallon because the bike enables gliding on flat surfaces & down hills at speeds way faster than walking, while it might be easier to walk up a steep hill that pedal a bicycle up the same grade or topographic altitude gradient, bicycle gearing enables different ratios so that torque can be modified for mountain biking as mountain bikes typically have 3 gears up front and 7 or 8 gears in the rear hub with an mechanical cable articulated chain guide able to select different gears via handlebar mounted controls that the rider easily able to actuate while riding. 

My current bicycle a $800 out the door Specialized Crossroads in dark flat grey color with bright green text accents (my favorite color) with a beautiful design, its made mostly of aluminum, with a mass of about 30lbs, it only has 7 gear ratio. Its also stuck in deep storage so I cant easily access it without moving a house worth of goods blocking my way, which really bothers me since I would love to ride it even in cool light raining conditions that are the tenor of the weather right now. I have even conjured th idea of acquiring a cheap bicycle to satiate my desire to ride a bicycle, as I have considered adding an electric battery front wheel upgrade to make my main bicycle into a DIY E-bike. Meg's antique Marin bicycle also not-easily accessible in the back of the storage unit. 

I like bicycle riding because it helps you get out & about while also providing exercise activity and way faster than walking, and since everything so spread out in America, even nearby, walking anywhere takes a long time. 

The closest businesses that we can walk are Areana sports, followed by Formula Brewing. To be walkable, a business must be within 15 minutes of average walking distance. People need about 7500 steps per day to stave off the effects of sedimentation or sitting around too much, like I do when typing these blog postings, though lately I have been mounting the laptop up on the kitchen counter on a box or similar as an improvised standing desk. Standing desks are trendy because sitting too much causes blood to pool up in the legs in way that increases risks of strokes, clotting & embolisms. Sitting too much toxic to the capillaries, vascular system of the heart, arteries, and veins, and toxic to the brain because of a loss of blood flow, causing neurological declines in retired people who sit around too much & do not get enough healthy movement or activity. 

This information right out of AARP magazine and backed by many credible sources and a ton of long term meta medical & physiology research that proves empirically that regular exercise has numerous benefits to the human body, to fitness, health & wellness, as staying physically active, mentally active, morally straight, ethical & fair by treating all other people & nature with dignity & respect, are all part of a healthy lifestyle when combined with a healthy diet with enough water to stay hydrated to protect the kidneys, enough healthy fats & fiber to promote good apocrine & endocrine function, enough high quality protein to provide amino acids, a balance nutrient mix of macro nutrients & micronutrients, think vitamins & supplements to account for the loss of the nutritional value of many common foods because most farm do not put down wood chips, humus, compost, moss, mushroom soil or other sustainable soil auto-watering water conservation applications that make the plants strong enough to have natural pest control resistance without the application of pesticides. 

Electric motors are cool. Using magnetic fields & electricity to create torque to spin pumps, fans, wheels, to move chains or shafts or belts, to make movement happen or to energize machines, appliances, vehicles, manufacturing and more.

Consider the typical ICE vehicles starter motor or alternator, as amazing examples of motors and generators. Even the magneto of early motors & many simple motors used in power equipment and generators with small carburetor engine platforms, to power the spark plug or ignition coil that generates the high volage current to create the hot arc in the spark plug used to ignite compressed mixtures of gasoline in air to generate hot expanding pressurized combustion exhaust gases to shove the piston down so it can translate linear motor through the wrist pin & con-rod to the crankshaft to output rotation torque power from the engine to gears, shafts, machinery, transmissions, wheels, or other devices, like those used in all the machine connections of agricultural combines or harvesters or in manufacturing on conveyor belts or crushers or mixers or similar. 

Electric motors tend to dominate applications that are stationary, while fossil fuel energized engines tend to dominate mobile application energy systems as prime movers. Batteries were not good enough to create a Tesla Model S until lithium ion invented & commercialized by Sony in 1991 became cost optimized through high volume manufacturing, first in Japan & then China, though the USA been making Li-ion batteries for classified defense applications since 1960, while some space satellites were developed with Li-Ion batteries in the early 90's when Li-Ion was over $2000/kWh, actually when Sony first made Li-Ion for the Walkman line, Li-Ion cost $3700/kWh, in part because they had to be made in small volume in an argon purged inert gas machines inside a class 3 cleanroom. Anything made in low volume in a cleanroom going to be costly or expensive. Think Aerospace gold plated titanium foam insulation. 

Tesla Battery Day 4680 Tab-less made Li-Ion NMC cost less than $57(then USD) / kWh, cheaper than every before, making it possible for Tesla to make the Model 2 and sell it for less than $25,000 base price while it will have a range of 250+ miles per charge, such that Tesla going to undercut all the other automakers by selling the best value EV Tesla Model 2, slightly smaller cost optimized version of the Model 3, with steel stamping & robot welding high volume low cost per unit mass manufacturing to leverage scalar reductions in cost per unit produced. 

Think Nissan Versa style cost optimization of the Nissan LEAF platform shared, so Nissan could adapt all that EV tech into a low cost vehicle to make an affordable electric car available as early as 2011 with the first 24kWh version, upgraded with a 30kWh air cooled battery in 2015, then 40kW battery in 2018 & optional 60-62kWh SL battery in 2019 onward. Now the liquid cooled 60-83 kWh Aryia trending on the emergent CMF platform. Sandy Monroe and associates estimates the Ariya useful life at more than 2 million miles ODO. Similar research shows that a Tesla Model 3 will last around 3 million miles before EOL or end of life. 

My daily driver a used 19 Nissan LEAF SV with a 40kWh battery that goes 156 miles at 35mph but drops to 120 miles with the heat & defrost turned on all the way at freeway speeds. I am averaging 3.9 miles per kilowatt hour or 3.9mi/kWh // good given the mostly heavy steel construction of the LEAF. I really appreciate all the sound dampening Nissan installed that makes the cabin of the LEAF ultra quiet while LEAF had the best crash protection among similar cost used EV's available, given that a BMW i3 REX was just behind the LEAF as a sub-$20k option. 

I went with the LEAF having stellar prior experiences in the 2015 LEAF S 30kWh & 2013 Nissan LEAF S with the 24 kWh battery. These aluminum battery modules contain large flat rectangular laminate lithium-ion batteries in 48 modules inside a big waterproof module bolted to the underside of the LEAF. This makes it possible to adapt the 40kWh battery to older first-generation LEAF's. 

This also makes harvesting a good pack from a wrecked LEAF easier & less costly than buying a new replacement battery from Nissan with the OEM battery faded & not providing enough range. I know of show on YouTube called Fully Charged where Robert the host worked with a shot to put an accident reclaimed 62 kWh battery pack from a wreck 2021 SL into his old 2011 Nissan LEAF S that originally could only go 75 miles with 24kWh, now able to go over 210 miles with the bigger capacity upcycled battery :)