Why do they make the personal electric vehicle laws based on max wattage?

I think unless we are caught or in a severe no eskating country, we are okay since 90% of the time our boards probably break the law but we won’t be caught unless causing problems on the road, or it gets confinscated. Otherwise I don’t understand why the laws governments have made are based off of max wattage and speed (speed is a good one but wattage???). Isn’t this number only good for determining the amount of heat the motor can take before it overheats, etc., if so why would they use such a useless number for determining what is illegal… don’t get me wrong they do also set a max speed and production boards will probably surpass that number in some countries, making it illegal anyway, but why use wattage…

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Yeah the law in Finland states 1kW max. Funny how my dual 3.5kW exceeds that limitation quite a bit. :roll_eyes:

Whoops.

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Because most ebike are measured in watts?

In most European countries E bikes only are legal because they don’t have an accelerator"pedal", they give u assistance when pedaling up to 25km/h, so wattage is not considered. Vehicles that move on their own are only allowed up to 5km/h. Any self propelled vehicle under 4kw above 5km/h is considered a moped (50cc motorcycle) in Italy, this needing insurance, Registration, license plate and a driver’s license (thus no diy allowed). I don’t understand why either, but lately they were talking about regulation for scooters and hoverboards etc. and the minister responsible for the law didn’t even know that they fell under this vehicle category so…yeah nothing’s gonna happen for us any time soon, not in a good way.

I may be off base here.

Wattage is basically horsepower, right? Do Europeans use horsepower? I thought that was maybe another American unit… Regardless… Wattage is a measure of power output.

I think it makes sense for regulators to regulate the overall power output of vehicles by regulating wattage. It would be insane to have a vehicle that can do 25kmh but have 170KW of power. That’s like a Supercar geared to only peel out like crazy, up to it’s max RPMs at 20mph. Conversely, saying 10W, but max speed of :100: kmh… As if 10W could even get you to that speed. I guess this is besides the point too.

They are just regulating speed and overall power output.

I see lol wattage = HP which is why that metric is used, ebikes here are maxed at 1 hp here in that regard, I guess it makes sense but it really doesn’t at the same time. I think all of us are criminals unless you have a very weak board.

Hard for them to enforce such laws anyway, and the police typically have more important things to do anyway.

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