Source: Radio New Zealand
AA said increasingly powerful e-bikes and e-scooters were hitting the market and causing a headache for police. RNZ / Dom Thomas
The AA wants stronger rules for high-powered electric bikes and scooters.
Its principal policy adviser Terry Collins told Checkpoint the current rules were unfit for purpose.
“These rules that exist today have very little clarity for the riders, for the councils, for police, and really it just kind of undermines both the compliance and the public confidence in the system,” he said.
“An example is the rules say an e-bike is less than 300 watts in power, but it doesn’t have a speed limit because the assumption is 300 watts will keep it around 30 kilometres per hour if you peddle furiously on it.”
“[But] if you go on the internet, you can look at these things at 9 kilowatts, which is 30 times the legal limit, they are for sale.”
He said increasingly powerful e-bikes and e-scooters were hitting the market and causing a headache for police.
“What we’ve seen is the battery technology is allowing us to have much bigger, more powerful motors for these bicycles, so they’re bigger, heavier, more powerful and they go way quicker than what the old ones used to do,” Collins said.
“I’ve seen e-scooters that claim to do 120 kilometres per hour. As we get better at building these batteries for electric vehicles they’re going to go for longer distances and they’re going to go faster, so we really need to get a solution sorted out now, because if we don’t more accidents are going to happen.”
Collins suggested high-powered e-bikes should be classified as a different type of vehicle so rules could be better enforced.
“I think if we set up what would be known as a class of vehicle that may not have to go through all those rigourous requirements of certification and warrants of fitness, but because they’re classed as a vehicle then the riders of them are subject to other land transport rules around use of a vehicle, around speed rules, use of alcohol, turn signals, that would be the expectation of the riders of these devices,” he said.
“How do you visually inspect that a bike is only 300 watts in power? You can’t. A lot of them look very similar to each other, yet they have a completely different power ratio and speeds they can attain. I say by trying to moderate the behaviours of the driver, as opposed to setting standards around the technology, we’ll probably have a better outcome.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand