VanMoof S3 Lecky Bicycle

The Verge reports: [edited]

Electric bikes, like cars, come in tiers of quality and prestige. Dependable commuter bikes start at around €1,000. At $1,500, they start to look nice, with batteries and motors integrated into the overall aesthetic. Above €2,000 you start seeing sleek designs, advanced electronics, and a preponderance of high-end or original components. On that scale, VanMoof’s premium prices have made it the Tesla of e-bikes.

VanMoof is now taking preorders for its newest pedal-assisted electric bikes: the S3 and X3. They’re follow-ups to the full-sized S2 and compact X2 theft-defying e-bikes released in 2018 and two of the highest-rated e-bikes we’ve ever tested.

Despite a similar appearance, VanMoof says the S3 and X3 are “an upgrade to the S2 and X2 in every way,” yet they cost €400 to €1,400 less than VanMoof’s previous generations of electrics. Priced at €1,998, VanMoof is aggressively setting a new entry point for premium e-bikes that can cost well over €3,000.

Good Stuff
Smooth automatic shifting
Near-silent operation
Improved value for money
Built-in anti-theft with extended recovery service

Bad Stuff
Battery can’t be removed for charging
Some features can feel gimmicky
Kick Lock finicky to engage
More complexity, more problems?

The S3 is designed for riders ranging in size from 170 to 210 cm (5 feet, 7 inches to 6 feet, 11 inches), while the compact X3 fits riders from 155 to 200 cm (5 feet, 1 inch to 6 feet, 7 inches). Both are available in “light” (white with a bluish tint) or “dark” (dark gray) models.

The S3 and X3 feature a number of improvements:

— New four-speed electronic gear shifter
— More powerful and immediate Turbo Boost
— Smaller, nearly silent 250W/500W front-hub motor
— Front and rear hydraulic disc brake

The S3 is the most sophisticated ride I’ve ever experienced on an e-bike. Shifting is incredibly smooth the vast majority of the time, without requiring a pause between downstrokes. Occasionally, maybe one of out every 50 shifts, I felt my feet chase the new gear for about a third of a revolution, or I heard a mechanical 'clink' as the gears advanced. Otherwise, it was silent and glorious, allowing me to pedal along with constant pressure as the gears shifted beneath me, always returning to first when I stopped.

The bike’s smaller, more refined front-hub motor, like the gears, is quiet. I had to strain to hear it above the wind, making it one of the quietest motors around. And the bike is so balanced that I often found myself sitting upright, hands off the grips, riding with 'no hands' on long, lonely stretches of asphalt during my range test.

Every e-bike should have VanMoof’s Turbo Boost feature. The button, accessible from the right grip, is now even more powerful and torquey, giving a near-instantaneous boost without feeling jerky. Push it when you want to make a fast start, climb a hill, or overtake someone quickly.
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When Christ Conquered Caesar

Unherd has published an excellent piece by Tom Holland on the radical message of Easter. If you have time, read the whole article, but excerpts follow...

The women who came to tend the tomb in the garden had no doubt that their Lord was dead. Rejected as he had been by his own people, legally condemned as an enemy of Rome, brought to a squalid and ignominious end, his defeat had seemed total. What victory could there possibly be in the wake of such a death?

Yet then something miraculous happened. Spreading from east to west across the Mediterranean, travelling along the great network of roads and shipping lanes that constituted the arteries of the Roman Empire, news began to spread that this man whose mortal remains supposedly lay entombed in the grave had been seen alive.

‘Christians’, these deviants were called, after their founder, ‘Christus’, a criminal who had been crucified in Judaea some decades before, under a previous Caesar. Nero, ever fond of a spectacle, had some of the condemned, dressed in animal skin and torn to pieces by dogs. Others, lashed to crosses, had been smeared in pitch and used as torches to illumine the night. Nero, riding in his chariot, had mingled with the gawping crowds. Suetonius would include his persecution of the Christians in the list — a very short one — of the positives of his reign.

[Nero's followers believed he would rise from the dead, and yet] despite the various imposters who appeared, his fate was to be commemorated, not as a saviour, but as a monster.

Among those put to death was a man who in time would come to be viewed [by some] as the very keeper of the doors of heaven. In 1601, in a church that had originally been built on the site of the tomb where Nero’s two nurses and his first great love had buried him, a painting was installed that paid homage, not to the notorious Caesar, but to the outcast origins of the city’s Christian order.

Peter, the story went, had demanded to be crucified upside down... Caravaggio, choosing as his theme the very moment when the heavy cross was levered upwards, portrayed the first pope as he had authentically been — as a peasant. No ancient artist would have thought to honour a Caesar by representing him as Caravaggio portrayed Peter: tortured, humiliated, stripped almost bare. And yet, in the city of Nero, it was a man broken to such a fate who was honoured as the keeper of 'the keys of the kingdom of heaven'.

That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. Nero, charging the Christians with arson and hatred of humanity, seems not to have undertaken any detailed interrogation of their beliefs — but doubtless, had he done so, he would have been revolted and bewildered.

Radically though Nero had sought to demonstrate to the world that the divine might be interfused with the human, the Christians he had tortured to death believed in something infinitely more radical. There was but the one God, and His Son, by becoming mortal and dying the death of a slave, had redeemed all of humanity. Not as an emperor but as a victim. The message was novel beyond the wildest dreams even of a Nero; and was destined to endure long after all his works, and the works of the Caesars, had crumbled into dust.

This Sunday, when billons of people around the globe celebrate the triumph over death of a man laid in a tomb in a garden, the triumph they celebrate will not be that of an emperor. “For God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:27)
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