• ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 months ago

    Good. The US can make e bikes. The problem is that the tariffs need to be solidified in place for a minimum of 10 years or manufacturers won’t invest in the infrastructure to make them. If the tariffs seem likely to go away soon, no one will bother doing it on a large scale. All the Chinese made batteries are garbage, anyhow. There’s only a handful of actual quality small lithium batteries and they’re samsung, panasonic, Westinghouse, and miel. The ones from china horribly lie about capacity and start failing way too soon. There’s a reason all the power tool batteries inside Dewalt and makita and such never use Chinese batts inside. Same for all the high end cordless vacuums. You open up a dyson battery pack, you’ll never find chinesium.

    • cyd@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The US can make them, they’ll just cost $10,000 and be several design generations behind the world market.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        Yeah…there’s actually a bunch of e bike companies that are US based that do all the design and spec work in the US and are built at various places overseas. EBC builds em in the US, using mostly overseas parts. As far as “design generations” go the US is one of the global leaders. Juiced and Rad Power have both been making e bikes for 15 years, bucko.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          The problem isn’t the bikes, the problem is the lithium.

          China controls a lot of the worlds lithium, and most of its refining.

          • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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            5 months ago

            They refine a lot, but hardly have most of the lithium. Most of the bigger mining operations are out of Chile or Austrailia. The largest known lithium deposit is in the USA around Oregon. They haven’t started mining that one, yet. 20 to 40 million metric tons of mineable lithium.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      5 months ago

      Chinese batteries are plenty good enough for e-bikes. For that matter, CATL makes some of the best batteries for electric cars.

      Iron and sodium based batteries are coming on the market, and those all e-bikes need.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          5 months ago

          It does come out. All the time. 5-8% per year, compounding.

          There’s a toxic positivity in how the news presents battery tech advances that leads people to think it’s never coming. I’m not talking about stuff that’s in a lab that may or may not be practical for mass production. I’m talking about stuff starting to come out of factories today.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        9 of the 10 largest lithium Mines aren’t in China. They’re mostly Australia and Chile. Also, the largest known lithium deposit in the world is near Oregon, USA.