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Permalink Reply by sten on July 15, 2017 at 6:21am

I went to an e-bike expo at Lincolwood town center a couple weeks ago and test rode lots of e-bikes. I was skeptical but they can be *really* fun to ride. The good ones are like riding with a strong tailwind all the time ( the bad ones are like having someone randomly shoving you from behind, the bad ones are really bad and scary). I won't be getting one any time soon but they are really compelling and I expect we'll need to be having lots of discussions about where these things belong.

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Permalink Reply by V W on July 16, 2017 at 1:24am

How is it not a normal E bike? It's not uncommon for a normal ebike to have some of all of those features in that checklist.

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Permalink Reply by dav on July 16, 2017 at 2:00am

I guess that one of the first things that comes to mind is the very low gear ratio for a single speed bike.  In a normal (IMO) eBike there are gears. It's a bike first with electric assist.  The machine in this thread is gonna be a hard pedal in almost any situation. To me, that says this is not intended to be a bicycle first.

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Permalink Reply by V W on July 16, 2017 at 2:56am

I rode a folding electric bike where it had a throttle just like this, and where it had a low gear ratio and no gears and was hard to pedal normally, just like this. None of which is a good thing (and in my experience most E bikes arent easy to pedal with the assist off or no throttle, there are just varying shades of "bad to worst" when it comes to how impractical they are to move around when you're out of juice, and the folder in my example was toward the "worst" end of the spectrum). But again this is not out of the ordinary to me, and even if it was these aren't exactly good distinctions.

So I'm struggling to see the allure of this thing or why it's all that unique.

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Permalink Reply by ad on July 17, 2017 at 3:00am

It looks like a rat ride cafe racer motorcycle/moped (especially with the fat tires), rather than something a grandpa would ride on the local trail in Boca Raton.  Besides that, function-wise, probably little to no difference from many ebikes out there. 

They're tapping into a look and style that people deem cool enough to through down $2 to $3K. Pure marketing based on aesthetics, but that's true of a lot of things in the bicycle world. 

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Permalink Reply by ad on July 17, 2017 at 5:18am

Well, but that's the hook, right?  If it's an ebike moped, which you can (for now) ride on bike paths and bike lanes.  You can also lock it to bike racks.  Enforcement is obviously an issue at times in Chicago (and probably NYC to a degree) with full mopeds in bike lanes, but you can't ride in bike lanes legally with a true moped, and this presents a work around to that issue.   

So, they're selling the moped style in something that goes slightly slower, but with the advantage of slicing through traffic by being able to use the bike lanes.  I'm not buying one, but to be honest I can see why they seem to be selling well to a certain sect of people. 

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Permalink Reply by TonyP on July 18, 2017 at 2:51am

It looks like a mini bike that someone forgot to put a lawnmower engine on.

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