Electric Elk Blog

Riot Fest was two weekends ago. I didn't even want to see anyone this year but it has become a time for friends to come in from out of town and other social fun, I wouldn't miss it for the world.  This year, my little brother and three of his friends were staying at my place (in Logan Square), in from Cincinnati. They brought me some Rhinegeist beer, Skyline Chill, and other Cincinnati delicacies, which was very kind.  But the only actual 'charge' for staying was they had to let me take them to Riot Fest in the PX50. They had to be the guinea pigs for my little experiment. I think Cincinatti has even less bike culture than Chicago, and they were skeptical.  But their skepticism was quelled once they all mounted up in the back of the Pickup Trike. The 500W motor in essence just shrugged at the (over)load. I believe the rated payload of the trike is 661 pounds (300 kilograms), but as I've stated in other posts, one should be skeptical of "specs" on product c...

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...