A license isn't needed for an electric bicycle. The law states that it is classified as an electric bicycle if it is only pedal assist and only up to 24kph (15mph). The issue arises when either there are no pedals, or it can be operated without using pedals, like these suitcases. Electric only operation moves the classification to a scooter, thus license needed.
In China some able-bodied people have started riding electric wheelchairs to get around licensing and usage laws restricting scooters. Some of the wheelchairs are pretty quick now, basically the same drivetrain in a different package.
There was a new carve out created last year that allows driving electric scooters without a license, provided they meet some requirements (speed limiter, a speed indicator light, etc).
They managed to get a new category created just for Luup scooters. I've seen some on social media passive-aggressively wondering what kind of sorcery was at play for that.
In Japan, a bicycle with no functional pedals is called: a broken bicycle.
A bike with a motor which propels itself is called: a motor bike.
Japan has had bicycles with electric assist motors for 10+ years. They are popular with moms who need to carry kids but where a car is too cumbersome.
Japan has also had motor bikes for a century. They are popular with lower class workers who want to skip traffic jams and commute cheaper.
Japan is not confused by the shape of a motor bike. Making it look like luggage does not make it luggage (with a motor) but rather a luggage shaped motor bike. Japan appears to handle this Nominative determinism issue quite well.
Looks like it was relaxed in 2008 to up to 200% of input at up to 10kph/6mph then taper to zero at 24kph/15mph, yeah it is kind of restrictive.
I think equal power part is not too complicated to implement, with a load-bearing "just" you just sync synchronous motor driver to the rotor phase and limit current upstream. I believe a prototype also has to be brought to some office to get certified. Frankly it's all par for the course for a Japanese regulation; engineering cost is considered free and everything is supposed to be approved by someone official-ish.
What really happens is people like my friend make their own ebike that is super powerful but looks like a normal bicycle, and while it is against the rules nobody ever questions it because it looks like a bicycle.
Such a bad regulations. Rideable luggage actually seems reasonably innovative.
It sucks how the government often gets in the way of meaningful improvements. Feels like we are really headed for dark ages.
Japan has a very public problem of self powered vehicles running into people/stuff.
With an aging population, drivers who mistakingly hit the accel when they meant to brake, thus running full missile mode into shops and sidewalks make the news almost every day("Prius missile")
The last things people want is additional vehicles plowing forward at the push of a button, this time indoors and/or on the sidewalk from the start.
> drivers who mistakingly hit the accel when they meant to brake, thus running full missile mode into shops and sidewalks make the news almost every day
"Almost every day"? Hmmm... I do not think so. Wouldn't the same happen in other countries with lots of Prius and old people, like the US?
While I'm at it, here's the most famous Prius case in Japan, where a 87-year-old geriatric senior bureaucrat ran over and killed a mother and her child, but was treated with kid gloves until the husband whipped up enough public outrage to force the police to do something about it:
It’s really very many when you consider that a vanishingly tiny fraction of those deaths happen yearly in Japan thanks to it having alternatives to driving. Apparently 42k in 2022 in the USA [1] vs 2.6k in Japan [2] while the US population is less than 3 times larger.
Proportionally scaling that out I can’t think of many policies where Americans would dismiss 30k+ excess civilian deaths as “not much” and the cost of doing business, only a measly ten Sept 11 attacks. It’s pretty amazing how cheaply the USA values human life if a car is involved.
This is a great post, but I want to dispel this never-ending myth on HN that Japan does not have a lot of cars and drivers. To be clear: All highly advanced non-micro-state nations are driving nations! Read that twice, please. (Yes, we all know that Japan is insanely urbanised with at least three megacities.) Just 15km outside major cities in Japan will be lots and lots of driving. More than 30km, basically every house has a car.
That said, I don't know why the number of deadly accidents is so much lower in Japan, compared to the US. Is it speed? Is it driver training? There are so many K-cars driving next to huge dump trucks that could squish them like a fly!
I can't say it's definitely the cause, but some of the things that might play a role are that the driving test is much more strict/difficult, the minimum age to get a permit is 18, the highways are generally less dense, the speed limits are lower, and traffic enforcement is stricter.
No. This is your presumably tech-informed “any regulation that gets in the way of my passing intuition of what’s good is TERRIBLE!” Have you been in a city as dense as (parts of) Japan with completely unregulated use of vehicles like this? It gets quite bad quite quickly. I say this as someone that uses an electric scooter regularly. It’s quite easy for there to be a high enough concentration of idiots doing the wrong thing that it’s not worth it overall. Putting some rules around use is just the intuitive reaction to this, learned by countless jurisdictions worldwide.
"Does it need regulation?" and "Should it need more licensing than an electric bicycle?" are two entirely separate questions, and I agree that answering "yes" to the latter seems wrong.
Bicycles are known and understood by the people you're sharing spaces with; there are rules for where they're allowed and where they're not allowed and how they have to behave. The Japanese laws essentially allow ebikes that mimic bikes very closely to be used as bikes; otherwise you have to follow the rules for a scooter/moped (which is, after all, what you are).
I'll be riding my bike in a designated a bike lane (which is sometimes shared with pedestrians, dogs, etc.) with clearly marked speed limit signs of 15mph. That's plenty fast in general, but even more so in busy spots. And suddenly a near-silent e-bike will go flying past me (no "On your left," by the way) at speeds close to 30mph. Happens all of the time and is bafflingly reckless and arrogant.
The way folks ride class 3 e-bikes they really should be treated as mopeds: put them on the roads like other motorized vehicles and licensed and (hopefully) forced to obey the rules of the road. Just my opinion, but they seem to break the spirit of being in the bike lane. The touristy day-cruiser eBikes like Lime bikes are fine.
Legally, in many places they are mopeds. The problem is that there is no way to enforce the law because they look like e-bikes. It takes checking model numbers of bike or components. Throttle is relatively easy to notice.
I own a Brompton, which fits through the baggage X-ray and can be checked like a stroller at the gate. I've flown with it more than 12 times, and you had better believe I've ridden it in the terminal
I only do this during late arrivals when the airport is almost empty, travel at a reasonable speed, and otherwise conduct myself like a civilized human being. On a bike. In the airport. It's great actually.
Why not? If it can be folded into a carry-on, draw a line between bicycle and wheelchair. I doubt many would object to a carry that turns into an electric wheelchair.
This reminds me so much of the “no vehicles in the park” test.[1] We allow wheelchairs as a special case for people with mobility issues, not because we want bike lanes inside airports.
That's the point, isn't it, no one would ride a bicycle through a crowd, and if they did they'd ride very slowly and with extreme caution. But no such convention exists for animated suitcases.
A few weeks ago, Mezameshi 8 (morning news that my wife watches) was fixated on foreign tourists for days and days. Sure, tourists can be bothersome but they’ve been making mountains of molehills. The rideable electric suitcase was one of those issues. I actually laughed out loud as I watched it.
Edit: Also I now remember laughing as the panels started gasping at tourists jaywalking which I regularly see where I live.
Another area that I think needs big reform in Japan is legislation that allows for electric wheelchairs and similar devices for medical use (such as by elderly people or anyone with mobility problems) to be used anywhere.
There are many companies that either have such devices in Japan that they can't sell, or companies that want to sell there but can't, because there are laws against riding electric devices on the sidewalk, and it's too dangerous to ride those on the street.
There's the Honda Motocompacto.[1] It's more like a rideable electric briefcase. 15mph top speed, 12 mile range.
I saw someone using a Honda Motocompacto as intended yesterday. She rode it into the Redwood City train station, quickly folded it, and easily carried it onto the train.
I can’t help but think Japan’s recent anti tourist mania is going to hurt them significantly. The country already has a reputation for xenophobia and discrimination, and the visibility of social media and news media attacks against tourists over trivial things like this is just going to keep young people from going there. And their economy needs them.
It does have a principled argument to make, in which locals would ask if it's fair for owners of this kind of luggage to continue without a license in a place where electric scooters and mopeds are common, and require a license to use.
As a recent tourist to Japan (and a fluent speaker/reader of Japanese, so I get both sides of the story), the "anti tourist mania" is ridiculously overhyped by the media. Yeah, there are a couple of overcrowded hotspots, but it's a country of over 100M people and the vast majority of them either couldn't care less or actively welcome the tourist revenue.
Does their existing xenophobia and well known exclusionary society stop tourism now? My experience is that only makes people more interested in going to Japan. Is like a cool kid's club.
Meh. 13kmh is not a lot and these are only suitable for really smooth floors. Don't see the point though because these things are so big they must be checked in which is the first thing you do at an airport so they can't be used after that.
I also wonder how much useful space is left in them after the slide-out steering mechanism, batteries and motors.
I'd be more worried about tons of lithium batteries made to the cheapest price going inside the cargo hold.
It looks like it is just the size for carry-on luggage, with a removable battery with a capacity no higher than the maximum allowed. They obviously thought about these things.
They weight about 10kg though. It means if the airline imposes a limit on the weight of a carry-on, you probably won't be ably to put anything inside of it. But because the battery is removable, you can still check it in and keep the battery with you.
> I also wonder how much useful space is left in them after the slide-out steering mechanism, batteries and motors.
looking at the image in TFA, that looks about the size of a carry on which is much smaller than I was imagining. to counter, there's a Visa commercial running as part of the Olympics with Simone Biles next to her suitcase which is as big as she is. It is disturbingly large. Like, it can't be real, can it? Or she is just that little. Either way, I'm remembering the wrong parts of their commercial, but I could see a suitcase of that size being something Transformer-ish into something you and your family could ride
Part of the problem here is that it seems like you can't actually pedal this thing, which is to me (and a lot of lawmakers in the US) sort of foundational to the concept "bicycle".
The other problem here is that with ever-increasing electric motor technology, old standards like engine displacement, or even power supply (gas vs electric) are not great indicators of the maximum speed of these things. As it stands, while 13 km/h is not that fast (its a reasonable jogging pace), it is very fast if the user is zoned out on their phone, which happens all too often in e.g. airports or tourist zones.
I see a lot of scooters around here with vestigial compliance pedals, mostly driven by gig delivery drivers. The form factor looks more like a moped. No one would ever use those pedals. Clearly they're there to skirt some kind of regulation. I'm not sure what the fix is, but "able to pedaled" is kind of a ridiculous compromise.
Vestigial pedals, LOL. Many deliveristas in NYC are seemingly competent riders. I noticed that an increasing number of them have bright red and blue blinking lights the exact color of police car emergency lights. That is distracting and bothers me more than a lot of their riding.
In 60s/70s France 14 year olds could ride motorised bicycles, so Vespa sold a Pedalo - a regular (but lower-powered I think) Vespa scooter with pedals as well as 2-stroke engine - you had to put the engine in neutral to pedal (I bet not many 14 year olds did this).
Whole terminology is pretty mixed up and messy. Moped is that, but then again speed limited scooters like Vespa without the pedals could also be moped. And so could speed and engine limited motorcycle of other style...
In general I understand moped as anything with limited speed/engine size.
So long as the pedals are hooked up to the drive train in such a way that they actually work, I don't actually have any complaint.
If the user can easily switch to backup-pedal power to traverse e.g. Millenium Park in Chicago, then I don't really see the problem. Certainly, failure to use that function is a problem, but I don't think its good for society if we allow police to stop actual bicyclists on suspicion of riding a pedal assist vehicle. These things are pretty obvious when in use: bikes don't coast, unassisted, uphill at the speeds these things frequently achieve.
NY state has three classes since 2020: pedal-assist only, pedals with independent hand throttle up to 20 MPH, pedals with independent hand throttle up to 25 MPH (NYC only, slower than standard class 3).
Whether a "treadmill bicycle" counts seems on the level as asking "if the impossible burger is a burger" or "if a hotdog is a sandwich" in terms of failure to gain any clarity by asking.
On the literal sense every dictionary definition of "bicycle" is going to include some variation of "pedal driven". In the practical sense whatever functions enough like a bicycle is going to count, typically alluded to by being called a ${thing} bicycle, but "it moves on wheels and you go on it" isn't going to clear that bar on its own in this "electric suitcase".
In all 3 cases, the forward motion is ultimately provided by human power. So, even if you (for some reason) decided to motorize an elliptical bicycle or treadmill bicycle, the straightforward requirement is that its still mostly functional without power provided to the motor. I feel like an electric-assist handcycle should already exist, but its ultimately the same question. "Does it still work nearly as well after the battery is discharged?" I'm not super fit, but I can definitely hit 30 km/h on my road bike, so pedal assist to get me to 30 km/h is not beyond the reasonable limits of the average user.
You can certainly put a motorcycle into neutral and sort of scoot it around, but to make it usable in that configuration, you'd have to mess with the overall geometry to the point that its not comfortable to ride as a motorcycle.
The first two are probably more literal than you're interpreting them at first glance. E.g. imagine taking a bike and putting a literal treadmill in it to replace the pedals/seat. It's a (niche) thing separate from a treadmill and definitely moves. In the end I think you're right but your conclusion "it's just a variation of a bike" really applies to all 3, hence "${thing} bicycle" instead of something like "electric suitcase".
I think that part is wrong. You don't need a license to ride an e-bike in Japan.
However, what would be an e-bike in some other country would be classified as a moped in Japan, requiring a driver's license. In particular, the amount of assistance an e-bike can provide is limited, some power has to come from the rider to be classified as an e-bike. So it is possible that because of some quirks of the Japanese regulations, an electric suitcase would be classified as a moped, therefore requiring a license.
I think the classification is pretty standard. A bicycle has pedals. A motorcycle/moped does not. Legal definitions start drifting by region about things like can you ride an e-bike without using the pedals or maximum speeds. So I doubt anywhere would consider these bicycles. What is more interesting to me is if it fits into the same category as mobility scooter, wheelchair or golf buggy. Over here in my state, mobility scooters are only legal in public if you are injured, have difficulty walking or other disability. Electric scooters were entirely illegal until recently, unless they were under powered enough to be classified as a toy (which was so low they where incapable of transporting a teenager or adult)
Because many electric "bicycles" are throttle controlled and are essentially electric motorcyles and they should be regulated as such. The "pedal assist" ones aren't so bad, but some of the more powerful ones with unrestricted motors can go 40+ mph.
Even the pedal assist ones can be a hazard by giving a rider false confidence or letting him ride faster than his capabilities. It takes a pretty experienced bike rider to sustain 25+ mph, but with electric assist, a lot more people can go that fast or faster for long periods without having developed the skills to do so safely.
Unsure where you are, but in most of the US ebikes that can go over 28mph are not ebikes. They are electric motorcycles, and must be registered as such.
You're not mad at ebikes, you're mad at people with unregistered vehicles, and potentially drivers driving motorcycles without motorcycle licenses.
>You're not mad at ebikes, you're mad at people with unregistered vehicles, and potentially drivers driving motorcycles without motorcycle licenses.
Yeah, but the problem is that they all look the same, many legal bikes even come with easily removed speed limiters.
I'm ok with throwing the baby out with the bathwater -- regulate them all if it's impossible to tell which one is which until they get into an accident.
IMO this can be solved with education and enforcement in equal measure.
This is not the first example of there being an easily-abused commons of some sort, where we all benefit from using something within reason but a few bad actors can make things radically worse for everyone.
Radio comes to mind. It's very easy for anyone to prevent their neighbors from using their wifi, by trying to boost their own signal strength beyond legal limits.
But people don't, despite the equally easily removed power limiters. Because the FCC will come down hard on them.
Let's add more enforcement. Speed cameras everywhere, for cars and bicycles.
I would support legislation requiring license plates on electric bicycles, if it came alongside legislation that would make cyclists radically safer from cars, such as ubiquitous speed cameras.
Over here, if the engine works without pedaling or when traveling over 25km/h, it is a motorcycle, and can't even use bike lanes. But I've heard of that being enforced and the food delivery industry seems to have become dependent on them.
Why? Is there supposed to be any problem in riding suitcases besides the very fact this formally breaks a law? Shouldn't they better just update the law to add an exception?
> Shouldn't they better just update the law to add an exception?
No, the point is in crowded places like airports you don't want people zipping around on electric scooters, suitcases or otherwise, running into people - esp elderly.
Enforcement is not worth the benefit of allowing luggage scooters.
You've got to have "police" everywhere who need to be trained to identify when someone is going too fast. Who does enforcement? Actual police? You need a lot more police than normal. Airport staff? They're not enforcers. They keep the carts in the right location and bathrooms tidy. But, let's say you can have enforcers. So enforcer says slow down, kid says okayyyyyyy and then goes fast again right out of eye sight. But speed limits on the luggage! No way, so add an on/off button to comply because no one wants to buy only a slow luggage, but you've still got that person who "won't airplane mode".
Repeat offenders? Now you've just confiscated their luggage. That's gonna be good.
In this scenario, electric luggage == actual scooter. You don't ride actual scooters through an airport, but I've seen so many electric luggage scooters.
I admit they're cool af and everytime I see someone on one I'm jelly. They're their own advertising. But they're at an airpot and it's crowded for the speed. I'm already stressed enough - I don't need your kid running into me at speed.
No one wants you zipping around them on a suitcase in general, I dont think a speed limit helps (also enforcement). A complete ban makes sense for the same reason you can't ride your bicycle or scooter in the airport.
It seems like the average walking speed (3mph, 5km/h) would be a more reasonable limit, since all the luggage is already "zipping" around at that speed.
I'd rather set it to running speed. Occasionally you would run through an airport but you probably can't do that comfortably all the way from one terminal to another one. Riding a personal portable electronic vehicle would just let you do the same all the way without to much sweating.
A key difference though: someone walking can stop in place and potentially work around a collision in a very limited time. I'm imagining someone flexing in to avoid a small kid they didn't see coming for instance.
That's pretty manageable when we're walking, but basically impossible when riding a vehicle (at best we stop within the machine's braking distance, including our reaction time until pushing the right button).
Then when a collision occurs, it will be the luggage's hard surface hitting first, compounded with the weight of the rider on it. Compared to person vs person collision, that probably hurts a lot more. Same way it's worse to get hit by a cart than by bumping into someone.
I see. Why not just limit the speed to that of a fast walking / slow running human and/or fine those who would ride carelessly enough to bump so people would have to remember deciding to ride means taking responsibility? Maybe also ban using smartphone while riding.
I imagine there is also a real concern that a lot of these things are using Lithium batteries from no-name companies that cannot be tracked down and held responsible if there is an explosion.
Those rules are about delineation between scooters and bicycles. The easiest way to think about it is this:
Bicycles have performance limitations for safety and licensing reasons, pedal assist with a speed limit has proven a convenient performance measure for a bicycle in a bunch of countries.
Scooters have no such performance restrictions and as such require licensing, age limits, insurance and all that jazz.
So TL;DR it's just a convenient demarcation between two classes of vehicle performance, that doesn't also limit human only powered bicycles or full scooters.
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https://www.keishicho.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/kotsu/jikoboshi/elec...