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Twitter post by @DirtyTesLa: Thankful to have Cybertruck to help me with the real work and big loads 🙏 (image of Cybertruck with several bags of soil in the trunk)
Reply by @KralikLj: Hell boy that would fit in a bicycle. Way more carbon free than that wankpanzer. (image of cargo bicycle with several bags of soil strapped to the front)
A liter of potting soil is roughly a kilo. Very few people will be able to move a bike with 200kilos on it unless the ground is perfectly even.
There are plenty of vehicles that are better for moving around that much mass than a Cybertruck is but a bike isn’t really one of them.
It’s a cargo bike: Low centre of gravity, adequate transmission for hauling heavy loads uphill, moving it isn’t the issue. You should be more worried about the actual load capacity: A good cargo bike, as in two wheels not four or a trailer configuration or something, usually maxes out at ~150kg load (including driver). Trikes about 250kg, quads or trikes with trailer at 500kg.
But then a kg of soil weighs more like 400g so we’re talking more like 80kg. Including driver you might be exceeding load capacity, but not by much (assuming obese people don’t ride bikes which I think is a fair assumption) it’s probably going to survive, especially if you’re careful around kerbstones and stuff. Those load limits are all calculated off some maximum drop distance, if you don’t drop your wheels then you can generally go much higher. The frame is very unlikely to break or bend, the axles would probably be the first to fail.
It looks like these bikes are 100% human powered. That’s the part I’m worried about.
I’m starting to get kind of old but I know how to ride a bike and I’m in pretty decent shape. In nice weather I ride for several miles at a time with my kids. I could move a heavily loaded bike for short distances but if I’m doing regular transportation with that for hours at a time I can forget about my knees.
I’m fat and out of shape. I know I wouldn’t be able to move that bike without some sort of motor assistance. You can 100% get a battery-powered engine to help, though.
I’ve never tried a battery assisted bike but I imagine that would make a huge difference.
The usual distances for these kinds of bikes are a couple of km max, once or twice a week. Big shopping trip if you’re living on the outskirts kind of deal, or smaller shopping trip and the kid rides in the cargo bucket. If you’re up for it sure you can also tour them, tent and sleeping bags don’t tend to weigh much and there’s ample of space.
Bikes for parcel deliveries etc. tend to be quads or trailer-trikes, also, electric. Noone is running a landscaping business with one of those bikes that still is, and probably always will be, a VW transporter with flatbed kind of deal.
That makes a lot more sense. A bunch of groceries or other bulky but not that heavy stuff seems ideal. I could occasionally do some short trips with a bunch of soil as long as my regular trips had much lower weights.
Are you sure about that weight? I can’t say I’ve used a lot of potting soil in my life, but the first google results for it that have weights listed for the bag are all more like quarter to a third of a kilo per litre. That puts the weight of the load at less than 70kg, which is much more reasonable
I’m not sure at all. It’s just the first number I found online. Since a liter of water is a kilo it seemed reasonable to accept a liter of soil being a similar mass.
But shoot. I just went downstairs and checked the bags of soil we recently bought. 44 liters and 16 kilos. That’s about 0.36 kilos per liter, so you’re correct.
That said, when I had 4 of those sitting in the back of a Subaru hatchback you can definitely feel the accelerator get mushy. It probably wouldn’t be terrible to carry that much weight for short distances occasionally. Regularly riding long distances on less than perfect roads with that much load sounds pretty painful.
Once you’ve got some speed it’s easy to stay stable