Even in an age of working from home, riding an electric bike (motorcycle) to the office makes more sense than ever.

…biking to work wasn’t just not unpleasant—it was downright enjoyable. It made me feel happier and healthier; I arrived to work a little more buoyant for having spent the morning in fresh air rather than traffic. Study after study shows that people with longer car commutes are more likely to experience poor health outcomes and lower personal well-being—and that cyclists are the happiest commuters.

This article is just saying what bicycle riders have known for many decades. The question is when will the people confined in false comfort of solitary cages figure out that happiness comes inherently from being outside.

In May, I asked Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, to explain the state’s rationale for a newly passed incentive that offers residents $450 to get an e-bike. He dutifully ticked through the environmental benefits and potential cost savings for low-income people. Then he surprised me: The legislation, he added, was also about “putting more joy into the world.”

It’s hard to overstate how true this is. People on bikes riding next to each other have a literal opposite mood to the “road rage” felt in cars that share spaces.

Tesla is perhaps not known well enough for shutting down high speed rail in CA with a “hyper loop” pipe dream that never delivered anything.

They threw fiction into PR cycles using scam and propaganda methods because they couldn’t handle any competition with their poorly made cars (which are increasingly killing hundreds in “veered” head on collisions due to quality failures).

At the end of the day, Tesla became little more than corporate welfare with a fraudulent CEO taking handouts while far more sensible public transportation was delayed or cancelled.

Now, he is at it again, setting up another transfer of public funds to his pockets with a total fiction about semis.

The automaker has requested $100 million from the United States government to build nine charging stations for the Semis, according to CleanTechnica and Bloomberg. The stations will be strategically positioned between Northern California and the southern border of Texas.

Build a high speed train instead. Problem solved.

This is little more than Tesla trying to trick the US government to fund a private shipping corridor between two private factories so Tesla can move its assets to Texas.

It’s a dumb political stunt and total waste of money, which is why Tesla wants to troll someone into paying for it.

Why Texas? More like Apartheid, it has less protection of working people from exploitation by racist billionaires.

According to CarNewsChina, Tesla only registered a measly 10 (ten) “revamped” Model 3 cars in all of China during the first week in October.

Tesla was the biggest loser, with an almost 90% drop in sales… For Tesla, the first week of October wasn’t good. Their sales were down 86% week-on-week, and they sold only about 1,000 vehicles in China. That isn’t enough even for the top 10 EV makers, so you don’t see them in the first leaderboard chart. All 1000 registered vehicles were Model Y, with Model 3 registering only about 10 units.

Compare Tesla falling off a cliff with BYD Motors rocketing ahead on 51,400 new EV registered in that same period.

Not a misprint.

More than 50,000 new BYD electric cars were being registered as Tesla strained and struggled to find 1,000 people who haven’t yet heard of BYD.

Tesla made a huge splash announcement recently that it “updated” the Model Y in China by changing the dashboard trim and fixing a misprint in their published range, increasing a whopping 9 whole kilometers from 545 to 554. Seriously, they just switched the numbers around. Tesla also claimed a high performance “boost” to 5.9 seconds for its 0-100km/h acceleration time.

Yawn. Is it 2013 yet?

In related news, crushing the ongoing fraud of Tesla, BYD says it is ready to begin shipping their U9 supercar, a 1,084 horsepower EV rated at 0-100km/h in 2 seconds… designed with balance so refined it can run on three of four wheels.

Despite the Tesla CEO going “prostrate” for sales in China, his low-quality rushed cars are inevitably getting pushed aside.

…Musk seems to go out of his way to prostrate himself before Chinese authorities. At the end of 2021, Tesla opened a showroom in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang—the province where the Chinese government has, by many accounts, carried out mass detentions and abuses of the Uyghur community. Only days earlier, Biden had signed a law that bars products from the region from entering the U.S., to counter the use of Uyghurs as forced laborers. The office of Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who has been active in this cause, charged that companies such as Tesla “are helping the Chinese Communist Party cover up genocide and slave labor.”

What a guy.

A white South African guy raised by anti-Semitic white nationalists under Apartheid is now known for covering up genocide and excusing slave labor to sell his cars? The same guy who throws down a WikiPedia article in 2023 to help justify slavery as “standard practice”?

Hey, you know what else was made rare last century? Horses and carriages. Somehow the guy wanting everyone to immediately buy into future driverless science fiction and forget the present, wants to also argue that the abolition of slavery two centuries ago is oh so very recent.

Any cars that are being made that don’t have full autonomy will have negative value. It will be like owning a horse. You will only be owning it for sentimental reasons.

He said that in 2015. Since then his fraudulent “full autonomy” project is what has turned into negative value. More importantly, he revealed he has strong sentimental reasons for trying to bring back slavery.

This guy sounds like just the kind of 村中白痴 the Chinese are very wise to stop buying from. A 90% drop isn’t enough.

We often speak about disinformation like it’s a side show to news, something motivated in extremes and from adversaries outside of balanced mainstream reporting.

The NYT however gives us a good example of disinformation in the mainstream cycles (pun intended).

They’ve been caught by StreetsBlog pushing an agenda with false analysis.

To begin, the NYT blames victims.

Richtel never clarifies, though, how the mere presence of a battery and a motor on Champlain Kingman’s bike contributed to the crash, aside from the fact that he personally believes that e-bikes “tempt young riders, untrained in road safety, to think they are safe mingling with high-speed auto traffic.” (Hot take: maybe the bigger problem is the presence of high-speed auto traffic in neighborhoods where children live, rather than the fact that children feel happy and confident riding bicycles — especially ones like Champlain Kingman, who by all accounts did have strong roadway training.)

StreetsBlog is right. Simple logic says if speed is a killer, cars need to slow down to stop killing cyclists. Death was the fault of the driver, as the cyclist would have survived without the presence of the speeding car.

Then, the NYT tries to paint with a rediculously broad brush, arguing that all eBikes are bad if some of them are modified for any speed at all.

This is like saying the Nissan LEAF and Chevy Bolt (five deaths) are as dangerous as the manslaughtering Tesla (nearly 500 deaths).

Richtel’s series, which instead explores the idea that e-bikes may be inherently unsafe for young riders, regardless of how they’re designed, ridden, and regulated.

The NYT seems to lack any understanding of safety engineering let alone transit design, peddling (pun intended) feelings of baseless fear instead.

A bike modified for 30km/hr could be safer than 25km/hr because it travels at the same speed as cars. It’s a fact that the worst crashes are a function of speed difference, so if eBikes are to be made safer they either have to speed up or cars have to slow down.

You know what I’m talking about. A bike at 10mph around cars trying to go 40-50mph is recipe for disaster; just like a car going 120mph around cars going 50mph. If safety is the goal, the worry about an eBike going faster on its own without any context is like 1800s campaigns claiming people were getting dangerously sick from traveling faster than 20mph (because it was bumpy).

That’s not how anything works.

The Nissan LEAF is incredibly safe. The Tesla is a death trap. Both are EV. Both are capable of high speed, but are totally different. The same stands for the variety of eBikes (pun intended) and their engineering/quality practices.

The final point made by StreetsBlog is a killer one (pun intended) about misdirection. The eBikes when adopted widely could dramatically reduce deaths, while the NYT falsely alleges they should be feared for risk of deaths.

The frank truth is that, of all of the dangers the Times attributes to e-bikes — grisly crashes, lawless vehicle owners modifying their rides to be more deadly, lives abruptly stolen from children and teens — car drivers and the auto-centric systems that surround them are overwhelmingly more likely to be the culprit, as evidenced by the fact that nearly every crash mentioned across the four stories involves a driver. And unlike thousands of teen motorists every year, the teenagers who were brutally killed in these collisions didn’t kill anyone else in the process, nor did they contribute to the pollution, sprawl, and staggering public health crises that are part and parcel of mass car dependency.

In fact, studies show the more bikes the lower the fatalities, exactly the opposite of cars. This is a function of bikes having an interactive and social component. Cyclists around cyclists become exponentially safer.

StreetsBlog makes a crucial point that cyclists don’t kill other people. All the cyclists dying on eBikes? Mostly killed by cars. See the problem?

It’s like reading an article in the NYT that says kids can choke on easily modified carrots and broccoli so they should be smoking with their parents instead, which not only kills them but everyone around them.

Wat.

Oh, but the vegetables are organic and could have a bug! NYT says chew on some tobacco instead kids because think of the risk.

NO.

NYT go get 100 eBikes, ride them in an eBike environment protected from cars, and then come back… you spoke too soon (pun intended).

Bottom line is disinformation can come from anywhere. In this case it’s a NYT writer so wrapped up in toxic car culture that he’s become nonsensical, afraid of the very best thing that could end it.

disinformation • \dis-in-fer-MAY-shun\ • noun. : false information deliberately spread to influence public opinion or obscure the truth