Louis Rossmann

Louis has been recieving emails showing a general dislike towards electric mobility, primarily due to the restrictions on how freely people can work on and operate these machines.

In this video he makes the point that electric mobility isn't the problem - companies are choosing to make these machines restrictive.

The primary example cited is VanMoof, an e-bike company that has folded, leaving most users unable to unlock their bicycle or transfer ownership. Unlocking the bicycle usually requires an app & key stored on VanMoof servers. A rival company "Cowboy" released an app that extracts the bike key from VanMoof servers, so owners can continue using their bike until it breaks down.

He makes the comparison to his own ebike built using off-the-shelf parts, choosing products that gave the most autonomy to the buyer. He designed his bicycle to be able to keep up with New York traffic speeds, something that many prebuilt ones cannot do due to either an underpowered motor or speed limiter.

Some criticisms are raised towards prebuilt e-bikes that use speed limiters and proprietary technologies - personally I see no problems with restrictions as long as they can be bypassed with sufficient technical skill, however that can become a slippery slope where artificial limits get normalised, possibly reaching a point where bypassing them is no longer feasible (such as unlocking the bootloader on a modern Android device).

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