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Pi-Pop – the e-bike without a battery

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Rebecca Bland's picture

Rebecca Bland

Rebecca has been writing about e-bikes for four years, after a typically ill-timed career change pre-pandemic. She's been riding bikes since she can remember, and fell back in love with them after realising it was faster, cheaper, and more fun than getting the bus to work. Nowadays she enjoys all kinds of bikes, from road to eMTB and is training her border collie pup to become a trail dog. 

3 comments

1 year 1 month ago

"It weighs 21.7 kg" - so whatever weight advantage the battery offers is way more than offset by the fact that it's bolted to a total clunker.

1 year 1 month ago

Maybe it would be useful for regenerative braking however, where the supercapacitor can take on board energy at a faster rate than a battery. 

1 year 1 month ago

"Also, of particular interest to e-bikers, they can store and release energy far more quickly than a battery can."

Why do you think this point is of particular interest to cyclists? Energy delivery per unit time (ie power) is not a limiting factor of batteries in ebikes - the batteries already meet the power requirements. Anyone who has witnesses the sudden, total release of energy from a capacitor would not think it is a very useful property for most applications, rather a safety hazard to be mitigated.