Ubco electric 'mopeds' to join the urban electric transport crowd
Friday, 12 April 2019
Ubco's electric utility is accelerating towards a city street near you.
The Kiwi company began as a maker of electric utility bikes for farmers, but its aim is to produce a sleek, modern version for city commuters and businesses in the enormous global market.
New niches in personal city non-car urban transport are rapidly changing the way people get around cities, with pay-per-ride bikes, electric scooters, and personally owned electric motor powered devices from scooters to bikes to skateboards now common sights both on pavements and roads.
The upfront cost may be high at just under $8000 for a new Ubco dual electric drive utility bike, but even fully-loaded, the cost of electricity it needs to drive it is less than 1 cent.
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But though Timothy Allan, chief executive of Ubco, says there is a rugged charm in their robust construction, he has just inked a deal he hopes will result in a high-style urban version for sale in the world's cities.
'We've agreed an urban partnership with a really interesting brand, which will involve the development of a 100 per cent urban version,' he says.
Work was also under way on developing a pay-per-ride scheme for Auckland, though pedestrians do not need to fear yet more competition for space, as the Ubco bikes are purely road vehicles.
There will also be an urban Ubco clothes brand.
Allan has ridden the bikes in the American cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland, as well as in Shanghai, China and Melbourne, Australia, and Auckland.
He is not above taking an Uber, or using public transport, but says he prefers to get about on the bike.
Allan is a specialist in product development who bought a stake in Ubco, after seeing one of the bikes at a fieldays event several years ago and recognised it it as a technology with broad market appeal.
Ubco is nearing the end of a $2.5 million capital-raising through the Snowball Effect equity-raising platform.
As well as being used by farmers, the bikes are being used in tourism ventures and pizza delivery.
New Zealand Post is running a pilot to test them for use by posties, and there are even some people buzzing around Auckland on them for their own personal use.
Allan likens this to the popular children's toy Lego, which comes in all sorts of themes.
'You have got spaceman lego, police lego, fireman lego. You can expand it any way you like, and that's how it has panned out,' Allan says.
Some people use them for both business, and pleasure, doing a bit of off-roading, or beach riding at the weekends.
The vehicles are driven by motors on both the front and back wheel, giving them stability and traction, and though the maximum speed is limited to 50kph, they accelerate rapidly.
The speed limitation is designed to ensure they remain classed as mopeds, and not motorbikes, which means they can be ridden legally by anyone who has an ordinary car drivers licence.
They have to be registered, and have a licence plate, but Allan says they are easy to learn to ride.
The rise of non-car electric vehicles, which are often far cheaper than owning, maintaining and running a car, is posing challenges for transport laws that evolved in an era of mass car ownership, and relatively few bicycles.
Lime scooters were launched into a legal grey area, and though e-bikes' motors should cut out when they reach a speed of 25kph, there are 'undampened' e-bikes in the hands of the public.
Their use is also resulting in personal injuries as inexperienced and incautious riders have accidents, though some early users of Lime scooters were injured as a result of a software 'glitch' that caused some scooters to brake suddenly, throwing the rider.
There have been concerns that moped riders lack training, making them risky sharers of the road, and it has resulted in some calls for moped riding tests.
A report in 2016 by the Abley transport consultancy for ACC found there were no requirements for a car licence holder to complete any moped handling or skills training to ride a moped on the road, and a car learner licence holder is permitted to learn to ride a moped without a supervisor.
New Zealand also did not impose minimum age requirement for a pillion passenger. In Queensland and South Australia it is eight years old.
Certification as to the roadworthiness of mopeds and scooters was also not required in New Zealand.
Abley studied crash data, and found more than half of accidents were caused by the rider losing control.
The New Zealand Transport Authority crash data covering the data from from 2010 to 2014 showed total of 1593 reported crashes with mopeds, including six fatalities, and 258 serious injuries.
The proportion of moped related crashes which resulted in death or serious injury, was similar to the percentage of bicycle-related crashes- 17 in every 100 crashes.
WHAT'S IT LIKE TO TEST DRIVE AN UBCO?
I had a ride on one of Ubco's utility bikes in the quiet streets of Auckland's waterfront Wynyard Quarter.
I'm an experienced bike rider, having used pedal-power as my main form of locomotion for most of my working life, with a brief period of heavy dependency on cars when my children were young, and I lived in Titirangi.
But I have never ridden a motorbike or moped. I wanted a motorbike when I was a very young man, but my mother was a nurse in the emergency department of the local hospital, and she was so horrified at the idea, she gave me her beat up old car, and got herself another one.
The Ubco bike was fairly easy to get the hang of.
The bike's setting can be controlled using an App, and when I tried it out, it was set for 'learner'.
The Ubco utility bike was far heavier than a bicycle, but the acceleration is easily controlled, and when you want to increase speed, you can do it slowly, or surprisingly fast.
It was easy to steer, but obviously a lot heavier to handle than my bike, though as there's an electric motor driving both the front, and the back wheel, it felt very stable in the turn.
There are no hills in Wynyard Quarter, so I did not get the chance to feel it's power going uphill, and I suspect there are some urban streets they would tackle, if not that speedily.
They are being used in some scenic trekking tourism operations, and on farms, so there's no doubt about their ability to tackle bumpy terrain.
Looks wise, one colleague described them as a motorised aluminium clothes horse, which seemed a little unfair to me, but they are to get a make-over to make them more aesthetically-pleasing to urbanites.
I saw my first one zip past the office last week, and I see electric mopeds and utility bikes as likely to become a more a common feature in our cities.
The temptation for their riders will be to use cycle paths. Already ordinary pedal cyclists moan a bit about e-bikes and e-scooters in the bike lanes, so there's likely to be a bit of resentment there.
Despite the ease of riding one of the Ubco bikes, I would say it takes a lot more than being able to control a two-wheeled vehicle to be a safe rider in Auckland.
You need to develop safe riding skills, which involve not only being law-abiding and cautious, but also developing the ability to read the road, especially the intentions of car, van and bus drivers.
Just as there's plenty of dumb cycle riders (no helmets, earphones in, no lights, weaving in and out of traffic, running red lights, etc), there's (it seems to me) to be an at least equal proportion of car drivers who are not very competent, and prone to mis-judgments.