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Bike Manufacturers Are Making Bikes Less Repairable

(www.ifixit.com)
207 points LorenDB | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 19:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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oulipo ◴[14 Oct 24 20:15 UTC] No.41841449[source]▶
Founder of Gouach, the repairable (and fireproof!) e-bike battery mentioned in the article, happy to answer any question!

- we salvaged 100s of discarded e-bike batteries

- we found that 90% of components were like new

- batteries were thrown away because of the spot-welding and the glue which prevents repairability

- we spent 2 years (and 5 patents) to design a robust, safe, and easy to assemble system that requires nothing but a screwdriver

Our batteries have been in use since 2 years in the streets of France, on micro-mobility e-bikes, in the harshest possible conditions (rain, snow, cold, heat, shocks), and we're very happy with their performances!

We're now opening it to the general public (for conversion kits, and to replace old batteries that are no longer manufactured)

We plan to open-source at least part of the embedded software, so people can write extensions (to let their battery "talk" with any e-bike system, and share it — using WASM embeddable code — to other people on the web!)

Let's fight planned obsolescence!

(and if you're looking for a new battery, there's 25% off on https://get.gouach.com)

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cibyr ◴[14 Oct 24 21:59 UTC] No.41842479[source]▶
Why does configuration require a closed-source app, with an account on your proprietary platform?
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oulipo ◴[15 Oct 24 07:23 UTC] No.41845824[source]▶
There is no required account :)

The app just allows to connect over Bluetooth to the battery if you want to set a wifi password to retrieve your data and set alerts!

It also lets you configure your battery for any type of e-bike system

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1. cibyr ◴[15 Oct 24 16:39 UTC] No.41850391[source]▶
"Required" is hiding the ball here. There's desirable functionality - that you're touting in your sales pitch! - that isn't accessible without your client software, and it sure looks like https://clients.gouach.com/ won't do anything without a login.

https://docs.gouach.com/connected-batteries/monitoring-inter... explicitly states "In order to access the connectivity features, you will need a Gouach client account."

None of this is the end of the world, and I'm glad the batteries will continue to work as batteries after you go out of business, but it does come off as hypocritical given your big talk about repairability.