I saw this bike made by an independent bike shop for himself.
It’s an electric longtail and can carry a 300kg europallet, plus the toolbox on the front, plus an extra person or material on the bike rack!
Here is the link to the shop website: https://www.cycles-penet.fr/
At what point does it become prudent to actually add brakes to the trailer like a truck would have? 300kgs (plus trailer, rider, etc) is a lot of weight for two bike wheels to stop.
I wonder what that would look like from a bike builders perspective.
I believe I see a disc brake on the trailer wheel.
Good eyes! I wonder how theyre actuated?
Would be really cool if it was hydraulic like the automatic braking car trailers.
As the driver brakes, the trailer pushes on the coupler which has a hydraulic cylinder that compresses and brakes the trailer automatically. So cool.If there’s any play between the bike and the trailer, they’ll kinda do this spring thing boioingboioing because of the pedalling not being 100% consistent power, now if this would also trigger breaking it’d feel very terrible
That’s true, i didn’t think of that.
Those “surge brakes” suck. They suck on a car, and they will be even worse on a bike. There is a reason most trailers have electric brakes and require the towing car to tell it how much brake force to use - it works much better. (air brakes might be even more common for trailers, but that only applies to large semis - I don’t know enough about air brakes to comment but they need to be acknowledged) The only advantage of surge brakes is you don’t have to ask if the towing vehicle had the right controls to support them, which is why rental trailers mostly have them. However for every other purpose electric brakes are better.
That’s a lot of words to not even say why.
Sorry, I got lost in my reply. Electric brakes done well are not noticed. Surge brakes you can feel the trailer push against the truck before they kick in, and oscillate - it isn’t much but you feel it. Surge brakes mean you cannot back up - the trailer brakes turn on when you are in reverse.
Electric brakes also meant that when the brakes failed on my truck went out I was able to stop safely and limp to a place where I was able to get a repair done. This is kind of a niche, but still one I’m glad I had.
That oscillation must suck so hard on a bike. I can imagine that getting really dangerous fast.
I gotcha, fair points. I’ve never hauled one, they just seemed neat.
I’m in the electric brake camp, but I’ve met people that argue surge brakes are far better than electric.
Personally I like being able to control the electric brakes independently.
The one good part is if the trailer overbrakes it self releases as the pressure comes off the actuators. I towed a fully loaded trailer with those brakes across Canada ( through the mountains ) and you didn’t even know it was back there.
Must be a mechanical coupling of some sort.
In the standard configuration the bike can already carry 200kg on the rack and the bike has a mechanical brake disk system, not hydraulic.
So with better hydraulic brakes and a slower speed (electric bike motors are limited to 250W in France so I don’t think he will go very fast once fully loaded) the weight might not be too much.
How many Kombis could a Yuba Kombi carry if a Yuba Kombi could carry Kombis?
