There is an E bike repair shop here in my town. But for these drop shipped bikes, my understanding is that the problem is parts availability and electronics. They tend to use some non-standard mechanical components and proprietary electronic controllers and batteries.
Weird. I 100% believe you. I just thought selling parts was often more profitable than selling the original item. My understanding is car manufacturers make a substantial amount of their profit selling parts. I’d think this would be similar.
Maybe those people didn’t get the memo.
Yeah, but with drop shippers, you have to track down the original source in China which may or may not be owned by the shipper and may or may not still even be making that specific bike. And you may have to go upstream from even that to find the factory that made the various components.
It’s not really a consumer-facing business as much as a bare bones manufacturing pipeline. Most specifically for the Amazon brands that seem to pop up and disappear weekly.
Here’s why I’m considering an e-bike: I live in an area where there’s lots of good cycling around, but the first mile or two have serious hills. If I’m cycling for fun, it’s worth getting through the hills to get to the good cycling beyond them. If I’m just running to the store 2.5 miles away, then it’s mostly hills, so on a bicycle, it’s all work and no fun. So I drive.
The local shopping center with the grocery, pharmacy, bank, and post office is 2.5 miles in one direction. The hardware store is 2.5 miles the other way. The library’s 3 miles away in another direction. And any of those trips require dealing with at least one major hill. If I got an e-bike, it would replace a lot of short car trips.
Mountain bikes have seriously low gearing for those serious hills.
Indeed. Even a professional cyclist is not going to sustain 1000 W for minutes at a time. A really low mountain-bike gear could be 1:1 or even less.
You should check your local regulations, but we have to assume that any two-wheeled vehicle which is heavy/beefy enough legally requires at least a light motorcycle/moped license and a registered number plate. I don’t think they are going to consider a 10 kW bike a permit-exempt e-bike if you get busted.
A mountain bike would be ill-suited for most of my cycling. I stick to paved roads almost entirely, and choosing a different bike for the first two miles and the last mile of a 20-mile ride rather than the 17 miles in the middle is a big nope. I’m not going to buy a mountain bike.
Just how is a mountain bike unsuited for pavement? Other than switching out knobbies for road tires.
I’m pretty sure the amount of work to get to the top of the hill is the same though.
Sure, each pedal rotation will be relatively easy but now you need to make 1,000 revolutions instead of 100 all while moving at a snail’s pace.
I have a mountain bike, but it is set up for sport— there is no way to carry groceries or anything else, unless you stuff it in a backpack. If you just want something to go back and forth to the store then a utility (e-)bike may well fit better than a mountain bike.
A mountain bike works fine on pavement. Just change to a higher gear. (Maybe maybe conceivably someone has a mountain bike without a fine enough selection of comfortable gear ratios?)
Flip side of this is there’s nothing stopping someone from putting a really large cog on the rear of a road bike and getting the same gearing range. My bike has a 12 speed cassette and the lowest gear is so low that I’ve never used it other than other than for the comedy purposes of looking like an eggbeater while barely creeping along.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln.
By the time I’d weaseled one rear tire out from the chain and all, and weaseled the other one in place and made sure everything was lined up proper, I’d have been to the store and be on my way back if I were driving. So that’s what I’d wind up doing.
That’s exactly what I want the e-bike for. I really don’t have anything else in mind for it. Just those short local errands that are too much of a PITA on a bike, but all those stops and starts are what wears down a car. And besides, I’d rather not shut myself up in a car to get to the store if it’s a nice day, which around here is more often than not.
You aren’t required to change out tires for every ride. Wide road tires work fine all the time. If you do ride off road, there are inverted tread tires that work fine on pavement, dirt roads and moderate trails.
I have a mountain with road tires and a road bike. The road bike is much easier for long rides - better gearing, more aerodynamic, lighter weight, thinner wheels. MTBs with road tires are great for some people and some situations, but it’s silly to suggest you’ll get the same ride as a road bike.
I don’t have an e-bike but I get the appeal and if I end up with a commute in the future, I’ll probably get one. There are times I want exercise, and there are other times that a gentle peddle without sweating is much preferred.
Everyone knows what kind of energy is needed to ride a bike. If they have decided that some assistance will get them on the bike more often, it’s not productive to try to convince them that a regular bike is best for them.
My old titanium cross bike has a triple on front and mnt bike cassette and derailleur on the rear for climbing hills (I live in the land of hills and grades). It also has 32mm road tires on it for great performance on asphalt and smoother riding on the chip seal that is everywhere around here. It can also do gravel thought I’m itching to get a dedicated gravel bike with something a bit more (32mm is all my titanium can take). My wife isn’t excited about the idea of another bicycle even though she
Wider tires are back in in professional cycle racing. 23mm are out.
YEP! I now have an e-bike and use it for my daily work commute. Makes it easier in the winter when my knees don’t like the cold without a warm up period, and makes it way less sweaty in the summer. Also, I use it to run errands like the grocery store. But “acoustic” bikes for pretty much everything else.
Why? (really asking)
Less friction and lighter weight was where it was all at I thought. As long as they are on pavement (which I think they are) then why a bigger tire?
I gotta find a link, it’s hard to explain. What’s really in vogue right now is lower pressure, which as I understand it requires a little wider tire for compliance and not getting crushed against the rim causing flats.
So the better question is ‘why lower pressure?’ And that seems to be because at the sharp end of the racing world where single digit percent improvements count, they’ve found that to a point, lower pressure reduces rolling resistance.
It was gospel that high pressure = low rolling resistance for a long time, and rolling rests of a tire on a polished steel drum prove that out. What is understood now is that the difference between a metal drum and the irregular pavement surfaces actually matter. And in the real world, a certain amount of compliance reduces resistance. The tire conforms to the road surface instead of bouncing back off it.
Everything discussed until now is accurate, but impedance loss is a crucial aspect that needs to be considered when it comes to road cycling in the real world. Imagine a perfectly hard tire. Once it hits a little 5mm pebble stone on the road, it won’t deform, but the whole bike and rider system has to be lifted up accordingly by those 5 mms (left picture). This is a considerable energy loss! As a cyclist, you experience the vibrations throughout your body where all that energy is lost, similar to the tire example before.
On the right side, an optimized tire is depicted. When it encounters a pebble, it slightly deforms, causing the entire system to lift only by 1 mm. This results in less vibration on the body and, therefore, less energy loss and, as such, faster movement.
I hadn’t thought of it like impedances, a term I’d only associated with electrical characteristics, but that’s very illuminating. A major component of electrical design is matching impedances, a bit tricky to visualize, and bike tires meeting gravel vs asphalt vs velotrack surface is a neat way to think about matching a given source to a load. A minor adjustment in coupling between the two has an impact on power transfer efficency.
I was thinking about this last night while on an escooter ride. I’ve got a Segway G30LP that tops out at 19 but I keep it in a wimpy mode that tops out at 15 mph. I agree that it is as fast as comfortable for casual transportation. Sure, i could handle faster at times but I’m overall happy with the compromise. I was able to average about 12 mph for a nearly 4 mile ride to Walgreens and back in weekday evening suburban traffic, some stoplights & signs, etc.
I’ve seen the hacked firmware to increase my max to 28 mph which I think is nuts and not only because the brake [singular] is for shit. The current G3 Segway does this out of the box and people have been raving about them but I’m not looking to upgrade. I’d want a full face helmet, gloves, probably wrist guards and loads of lighting.
Yes, what @Pork_Rind said. Bigger tires with less pressure seem to have lower resistance. For non-professionals, they are more comfortable to ride on.
(not directly e-bike related)
My lowest gear is 30 in front, 32 in rear – I can usually make it up hills around here (driftless region of WI/MN/IA/IL almost all the major climbs are ~600ft – the Mississippi and other valleys are at ~600ft and the bluff tops are at ~1200ft), most roads top out at 10%. There is one climb that hits 18%* – I’ve only made up that once without stopping. – I wouldn’t mind a lower gear. My bike is set up for loaded touring and theoretically could haul groceries but don’t. I did commute to work (4.6 miles one way mostly flat) fairly often.
Brian
* so called hipbreaker hill. One probably apocryphal story is someone was climbing so slow they tipped over and broke their hip. I’ve also heard they were going down and didn’t make turn and crashed and broke thier hip