Oh, I know the answer to this. Take the pedals off.
If it doesn’t have pedals, it can’t legally be a bicycle.
It can’t legally be a moped either - that’s why they have the useless pedals in the first place.
Unless they are still living in the 1990’s, and have the requirement of a combustion engine in there, period.
The I guess you just need to tape a diesel generator on it and call it a hybrid.
As I understand it the requirement is that it must pass a battery of emissions checks. They refuse to submit electric models to said emissions tests, and citing the logic that a battery powered vehicle would naturally sail past any tailpipe test because it self-evidently creates zero emissions is apparently not sufficient.
I went through this with a planned Surron purchase a couple of years ago and after getting stuck in this Kafkaesque loop with multiple idiots from multiple branches of our DMV including two supervisors, I gave up.
Note that I know how this works (or so I thought), because I already own a plated converted dirt bike, which was not a street legal vehicle when I bought it and is now, because I already went through all of the above with that. My inside knowledge of the bureaucracy gained from doing that apparently didn’t help.
Oh, I know the answer to this. Take the pedals off.
If it doesn’t have pedals, it can’t legally be a bicycle.
It can’t legally be a moped either - that’s why they have the useless pedals in the first place.
Unless they are still living in the 1990’s, and have the requirement of a combustion engine in there, period.
The I guess you just need to tape a diesel generator on it and call it a hybrid.
As I understand it the requirement is that it must pass a battery of emissions checks. They refuse to submit electric models to said emissions tests, and citing the logic that a battery powered vehicle would naturally sail past any tailpipe test because it self-evidently creates zero emissions is apparently not sufficient.
I went through this with a planned Surron purchase a couple of years ago and after getting stuck in this Kafkaesque loop with multiple idiots from multiple branches of our DMV including two supervisors, I gave up.
Note that I know how this works (or so I thought), because I already own a plated converted dirt bike, which was not a street legal vehicle when I bought it and is now, because I already went through all of the above with that. My inside knowledge of the bureaucracy gained from doing that apparently didn’t help.