Electric Elk Blog

I am excited the first prototype of 2022 has arrived (though it was the second one ordered). It has been more fun than I imagined and multiple people have been stopping me on the street to learn more so I thought I’d make a little blog post on my initial thoughts on this awesome piece of equipment. I ordered Big Capacity 2022 Electric Cargo Bike with Pedal Assist Fast Mobile 3 Wheel Trike Customized Tricycle on Ali Baba for around $5300 (with shipping) in the beginning of December. With various shipping hang ups due to COVID and other issues it took around 6 months to arrive (another trike I ordered in October is lost in transit). But it did arrive and I’ve had about a week to take it out on various errands.   So a few days ago this crate showed up in my garage. It was very easy* to put together. It came with some plastic hub caps- one of which was broken, but I think the spoke looks better aesthetically anyway. Also the master cylinder for the hydraulic brakes had a leak around th...

In this post we’ll introduce our first new hire, Merlin. Merlin is a Jr. Mechanic, that also may work the sales booth with us this summer (more details on that coming in a future post). Merlin, the new Jr. Mechanic We sat down with Merlin, and asked him a few questions to get to know him better and translated his results and included pictures.  What sort of professional goals are you hoping to achieve at a Jr. Mechanic? First, I’m really looking forward to mastering some basic motor skills. Once I have those down, I’m looking forward to getting some hands-on experience with simple machines like levers, chain driven pulleys, and wheels.  Finally, I’m looking forward to getting a lot of critical training in basic circuitry and programming.   What made you want to get involved with Electric Elk?  What is this, an interview? I kid- pun intended. Electric Elk is an industry leader in e-bike safety, and I think that’s fairly important if bikes/ebikes/and scooters are going...

   Intro So you’ve seen some e-bikes going down the road and they look like so much fun. OR you’ve been reading about how much better for the environment ebikes/trikes are and you want to jump on this band wagon. OR any one of a million other reasons, but the point is- you have fallen in love with electric bikes and you want to build your own. There’s a lot of reasons to build your own instead of buying an ebike off of Amazon. My big two reasons were I absolutely loathe the fat tires aesthetically, and in the case of my ebike, I wanted full suspension ( speed bumps at 30 mph one a fixed frame- you feel it in your spine). So while building my third ebike (actually a trike this time), I took some pictures an am writing a blog post. Also- at Electric Elk we strongly believe in safety, and I’ll also be putting a full electrical kit on it, but that will be a future post. This post will be about hooking up the motor, battery, and other components on a new model we will be calling th...

Sorry for the lapse between posts, we’ve been a bit busy on boarding a new Jr. Mechanic, whom we’ll introduce in an upcoming employee spotlight. A couple of weeks ago, I was checking out the Mercedes AMG site for ideas on re-skinning the Electric Elk website and noticed that all of their cars list g/km of carbon footprint.  First of all- well done, this is an awesome step in the right direction for auto manufacturers, and second it got me thinking.  And when I get to thinking, I get to Googling, and then I found this little gem of an article . The article attempts to estimate g/km for bikes and e-bikes AND take into consideration production costs AND unlike AMG, includes carbon footprint for power generation (excess food for calories in the case of biking, and power to charge batteries in the case of ebikes).   The methodology is far from perfect, and since the AMG site disregards carbon footprint from power consumption (and production) you end up with a bit of an a...

So you know when you open a new tab in a web browser and it recommends articles for you to read? It’s like Firefox knows you’re about to embark on some task or side task, and exploits the opportunity to distract you. Well, that happened to me the other day, and I read this great (but admittedly a bit dated) article from the Atlantic on The Absurd Primacy of the Car in American Life and it really resonated with me. So in case you are either paywall blocked from The Atlantic or simply don’t have the time to read the full article here is a bit sized recap. Edward Humes, point blank calls cars “insane” and points to the three major reasons cars are insane, they: Destroy the environment Waste human lives Waste money (above and beyond fuel prices, and killing people) Environment For those who already don’t like cars- this starts to feel like beating a dead horse, so I will be curt in my recap- please read the original article. But there were a couple of salient points. While everyone is com...

Hi! Welcome to our blog. Thanks for dropping by. This post is just a quick one to introduce who we are and what we’re all about. You can get the quick hits on our About Us Page but this will delve into what we’re all about in a more free-form-style. Mission From the About Us page you can read our mission statement, and a brief company history. Let me blow both of those out a bit more first: Our Mission is to get cars off the road. Full stop. Not necessarily all of the cars, but a lot of them- especially for short little in town trips. I grew up in rural America- you have a truck for getting around on the farm and to do farm stuff (not a $70,000 new one to make you look cool), I get it- we’re not coming for your truck. Cars have a place- unfortunately- they have grown way larger than their place. It’s the 5000 pound H2 that you fire up and run cold for 1.2 miles to go pick up a Mountain Dew from your local bodega, that is the truck I’m coming for.   I’ve got a full post floating a...