The great e-bike experiment: the data

Want something with a little more zip?

Check out this e-bike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIhfwjWuj-I&t=0s&index=8&list=FLr4q9jPvoePi97AMR-GzL0g

Skip to 9:29 for the bike in action.

And he is working on a more powerful version(!).

After 15 years of cycling, including the summer daily commute 13km to work and back, I got an ebike and love the thing. The author is indeed not taking measurements of hard-to-measure things like fun - which gives the gumption to use it instead of the car. An ebike means even days with a cold wind against you are not so daunting and so you ride instead of drive. It means you ride even if you have 15kg of books and laptop in your pack that day.

But my favorite thing about it is that I have a carrier onto which I’ve bungee’d a large rectangular bucket that can carry, say, a gallon of milk and 5 kg of cans, or a 25 lb sack of flour. Between the bucket, the panniers, my large pack - I haven’t decided whether to add a basket yet - I can carry serious freight. And one can only grin when you take all THAT up a hill into the wind at 30 kph.

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Love the data! Super nerdy and persuasive!

You make a fine point about parking. We often compare (as this author does) ebikes to bikes. But we can also compare (as this author sometimes does) ebikes to cars, or buses, or walking. The ebike may not always beat a bicycle, but it might be a lot better than a car, as other commenters noted.

When we started looking at buying a house, one of the houses we liked was close to my regular bike commute route, but at the top of a mile long hill. One of the first things I did was verify if I could make it up said hill at the end of a work day. It wouldn’t have been a deal breaker (that honor went to the flipper who outbid us), but it might have changed my commute.

We ended up buying in a different neighborhood, and now I walk to work.

Dangerous, overpowered and IMHO this is not what e-bikes are about: I can’t tell from the video, but I doubt he was doing much pedaling on that contraption and I think these are types of projects that e-bike users a bad rep. For this kind of speed/power/usage he should have invested in an electric motorcycle that is actually engineered to handle the massive torque/acceleration that electric motors can provide. There are actually 5Kw motors available, but when you have your front lifting up at speed with a lot of battery weight working against it, I think it’s time to reconsider your design. The only things he said in the video that make sense to me are steel being better than aluminum for the frame due to its superior stress properties (that is all I use for my builds) and the fact that you need high quality disc brakes for e-bikes, but what about all other critical components in a bike? Spokes, tires, chain, gear cassette, etc. He should start thinking about upgrading these as well and perhaps invest in a set of quality alloy wheels, maybe steel ones, so that he can keep its front wheel on the road at speed, in essence he should be building a quality electric-powered motorcycle with pedals because that’s what that thing is :grinning: Sorry, this is not an e-bike, not a safe & useful one, anyway - just my 2 1/2 shekels…

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Sounds legit w/o even looking at the video. Yeah, please do direct your energy to electric motorcycles.

Still waiting for those to take off:

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