Thanks Crazy Lenny, you rock
I tried to make the video relate to the average person in a similar situation. The average person living 20 miles outside the city, and commuting daily into the city, likely has a family, living in the suburbs, with a larger vehicle to hold the family. They also aren't likely to have the option of selling their vehicle to use a bike exclusively, like people in the city and single folks. This is why i didn't factor in the cost of ownership of the vehicle (maintenance, registration, depreciation, ect), since they would still retain most of that except depreciation due to miles, which would depend on the vehicle, so I didn't bother. I didn't want to over-complicate it.
I also have a scooter, and scooters get free parking downtown Austin, and better gas mileage, drastically reducing costs vs a car, which I addressed in the last graphic of the video. However, while I was originally going to use the scooter for comparison, by far more are driving a car (in Austin w/ long commute), you don't get exercise with the scooter, it still costs more for daily use, and you're still stuck in the same crappy traffic. So, I don't think it would relate to their current situation nearly as well.
I only listed the direct costs of choosing to drive the Yukon XL that day/commute vs the direct costs of choosing to ride the ebike that day/commute. The daily costs are:
$2.12 toll roads ($1.06 was used, since it's just my ride home)
$24 parking ($12 was used, to fairly split it in half)
$8.18 fuel ($4.09 was used, again, 1-way commute) This was based on my MPG showing in my dashboard for that commute X that day's gas prices. Rush hour stop & go is horrible gas mileage.
I didn't want to confuse anyone by showing the total cost of that day, but the video only showing a 20 mile commute, instead of the full 42, round-trip.
More on the comparison: I very rarely drive and I only drove this day because I wanted to video it for this comparison. I think the haze is because of the dirty windshield, which I thought was clean lol. I considered driving again to retake it, but I just couldn't bring myself to hahah. For the bike video, I always have the GoPro running, and I have faster commutes I could have used, as well as ones where there was more traffic due to wrecks, which would have looked crazy dramatic with constant passing of backed up cars. I used this one because it was close to the same period, same traffic level, and not a crazy tail wind, or head wind, just an average day.
I did ride hard on this commute as you can see from my power and heart rate. 279 ave watts over nearly an hour commute is very hard to average when there's a lot of short stop & go and a few slow-down sections. I would often take my R5 road bike out for 2hr+ on a solo ride (50-60 miles) and average 22-23mph and over 300 watts, yet that same bike on a 20 mile city commute I could never average 300W or even 19mph, no matter how hard I tried. I'm only saying to put things in perspective of how hard I went here, to show you can still get a crazy good workout, if you choose to. The days I average only ~180W, it only adds about 5 minutes to the commute, but it will drop the battery more. The reason is, 180W average means I'm easily riding over 200W, when pedaling, and that's enough input to max the motor assist out, so we're still talking 700W+ (motor & me). When I go harder, like in the video, I actually max the motor out less, because I'm more often pushing the speed limiter, making the motor stay more backed off. However, the extra effort doesn't cut the time much, it just trades battery power for my power, giving me a more intense workout and a fraction of a MPH higher.
On average, I use 422.1 watt hours, out of the 814 watt hours available on each 1-way, 21 mile commute. That puts me at around 48% battery remaining, each commute, while on max assist. It gives me an average potential range of 40.5 miles on a battery. The wind & cold definitely makes a difference, the extremes have left me with the battery at anywhere from the low 20% range to high 60% range.
Also, on the calories, as I said in the YouTube comments, I'm only going off what the Wahoo ELEMNT said. Since there's no official standard that carries from person to person with consideration of all conditions, its all relative. These devices can only predict the calories by applying their algorithm to your data. How accurate 998 calories on the bike and 96 in the car is I don't know. I have no data that tells me it's any more innaccurate than any other calorie tracker someone else is wearing. Since I also used the heart rate monitor and tracker in the car, I would more focus on the indication of the bike burning 10X more calories than driving. The days I back off and let the motor do a higher proportion of the work, it shows in my calories being a few hundred less. The 1k mark is about as high as it ever gets on a commute.
