This is a part one of a two part guest post by highly visible e-cyclist and regular reader Greg Nikoloff
This post is about my experiences with my Pedego brand (http://pedego.co.nz) electric bike (e-bike), which I purchased from Bute Bikes (who also trade as Electricbikes.co.nz) in February 2013. This post was prompted by Patrick sending me an email asking for me to do a post on “that electric bike of yours”, so here goes. This is part 1. Part 2 which has details of my commute and some thoughts on the future will follow.
The Bike:
Some of you have probably seen it, the bright Orange “Beach Cruiser”- style electric bike at events like the Cyclovia event, Meet the Bruntlett’s event, the opening of the Grafton Gully Cycleway and various times around the CBD. I and the “Orange Smoothy” were at the recent pilot Bike Rave on Friday night recently past, so you’ve may have seen it then, or even just along the roads along Remuera way or out and about in parts of the CBD at times before or since.
Some of you that have seen it, may not have noticed it was an electric one. Indeed an AT Train Manager on one of the EMUs I took it on recently asked me if that silver thing on the back was my lunchbox. When I said “No, that’s the battery pack”, he expressed amazement that it was an e-bike and wanted to know more about it. Which is a common situation – people see it as an attractive bike first, an e-bike second, that’s if they even notice. And when they find out it’s both, the questions about it always arise.
A small history lesson:
I’ve owned this bike for just on 2 years now, and have clocked up over 2400 kilometres of “riding”. I put riding in quotes, as the electronic odometer which records distances covered, ticks over whether you are pedalling at the time or not, so I estimate the actual “pedalled” distance is about 90% of that number. Its only 90% because sometimes I just decide to cruise on electric battery alone to enjoy the scenery in peace, as I motor along almost silently, sometimes I just cruise down the many hills I come across without power or pedalling. The odometer still ticks over in both those cases.
I’d wanted an e-bike for years, back when I was a kid at school in fact, before such things could have become practical – due to the lack of lightweight battery tech and no high-performance brushless DC electric motors with solid state electronic control systems as we have now.
In those days the closest you probably could have come to would be some steam-punk like creation using big “coil springs” in the rear wheel hub to somehow to capture braking/stopping energy, for storage for a quicker start. An idea I think based on the fact that there was a lawn mower that had a similar “clock-work” wind-up mechanism for starting it, instead of the usual “pull on the rope” style starter. In those days, it was either that or bolting on an internal combustion engine – my brother tried that with a 2 stroke lawn mower engine mounted between the frame near the pedals on a regular man’s bike – it worked ok but was noisy, and without a doubt dangerous and illegal (neither of us had motorcycle or car licenses then).
Why the Pedego?
Despite looking on and off for years, I never found one that ticked all the boxes, or pushed all the buttons for me. And that I could also afford to buy. I’d tried some other e-bikes a few years before and they were pretty underwhelming and gutless. But after some research and a test ride, it seemed the Pedego did met most my requirements. I was also wondering how I’d cope in Auckland traffic, not having ridden in traffic for years. A very valid concern, so that’s why I got the biggest and brightest bike I could – hence why its orange! The big tyres I got added as an after-factory option, allow me to go off road (or across rough ground like a local park), that normal bikes (and me) might struggle with and the bigger seat means my back or backside doesn’t get too sore when I do so.
As this is an upright style bike, you don’t have to hunch over the handle-bars, instead you can ride looking at the scenery and keeping an eye out for dangers. Plus being upright, it makes you “higher” off the ground than the motorist in the cars you ride beside.
While the Pedego model is a top-spec e-bike chock full of name-brand componentry, it is not the cheapest, nor the most expensive e-bike out there. The cost of my model was $2,690 for the base model, plus upgrades to a 50% higher capacity battery (15 Watt/Hr v 10 Watt/hr Std) and the bigger “Fat Bastard” oops Schwalbe “Fat Frank” tyres, a bigger seat, and some other upgrade features. The total cost with those add-ons was $3,300 inc. GST from the previously mentioned Bute Bikes in Browns Bay. All prices in early 2013 dollars. This being a Transport blog post, I’ve indexed my CAPEX spending to the actual year of spend i.e. 2013.
Yes, you can buy a cheaper e-bike but many look to me that they are designed in China for lighter weight Asian riders and won’t cope well with NZ-sized riders (or crappy Auckland roads). Some of these come with Lead Acid or other “low-tech” batteries, and the many I’ve seen look pretty flimsy to me. And then there is the after-sales service aspect. I knew from my reading that Electric Bikes as a distributor had been around for years. In fact I’d heard an interview with them on National Radio a few years ago but they were based in Tauranga back then – but that meant I couldn’t easily test-drive one. Now they’re Auckland based, and Bute Bikes have their own NZ-designed models, similar to the Pedego in functionality, but which work out about $500-$1,000 cheaper for similar features. The style and features (and the lack of colours!) didn’t appeal as much to me as the Pedego did.
Pedego is “America’s number one e-bike brand” by sales so they say – not that means much to me or you, I’m sure. After all the Ford F150 truck, being America’s most popular vehicle by sales, is not very relevant for NZ. So some e-bike for rich yanks may not be what it seems, or is it?
Ok, cut to the chase – what’s it like?
My first go on the Pedego was on a grey windy Saturday, with wet roads, not ideal for the first time cycling in years. Bute Bikes set me up on a demo model, adjusted seat and handle-bar height. They showed me the 2 throttle control modes, and turned me loose on a cruiser model like the one I figured I wanted. They encouraged me to take a spin on it around the damp streets of Browns Bay. Within minutes I was hooked on the experience. I hadn’t ridden a bike for many years so I wasn’t sure how I would cope with an ordinary bike let alone an e-bike. Anyway, a 10-minute spin showed this was nothing but an extra-ordinary bike, which produced a very big and ever-widening grin. After a 30-minute hoon around the local park and surrounds and it was back to Bute Bikes complete with huge grin to discuss the cost and factory upgrade options. Two years on, here we still are – same bike, 2,400 km on the clock, one puncture (last December: cost me $20 for a new tube at the local bike shop and they fitted it while I waited), and not much more in maintenance.
When riding its like a heavyish (25kg or so) bike that rides well. But when you turn on the power and crank power up to max, it’s like having a massive hand at your back pushing you along – remember when you first learned to ride a bike and a parent or older sibling helped you get up to speed and pushed you along as you pedalled to help on the hills? Well imagine that, except that push never goes away, it’s there all day, every day, as and when you want it – that’s the e-bike experience in a nutshell. An e-bike simply lollops along, and takes you with it.
The motor in mine is the maximum legal power allowed on an e-bike by NZ law – 300 watts. That doesn’t sound like much (the European limit is 250W and some other brands keep the 250W same maximum power limit in NZ models). When you’re on an e-bike and you dial up 100% power, you can definitely feel it, and it’s like having legs that are 20 years younger at once. You can almost become a “Steve Austin: 6 Million dollar Man” wannabe. Beat that, you MAMIL!
The e-bike goes about 38-40km/hr top speed (exactly how fast much depends on the battery charge) as the electronic controller under the battery limits the top speed to 40km/hr, Beyond that speed you are on your own again – no more e-bike; it’s just a regular “me-bike”.
They say “power corrupts”, and having that sort of power on tap definitely corrupts changes your riding style. For instance when you have to pull up at the lights suddenly while still in top gear (7th for me), normally it’s a real bugger to get that sorted before the lights go green – you either hobble off at 5 km/hr or you have to get the back wheel off the ground to peddle it around in to a lower gear. With the e-bike, just leave it in 7th, and open up the throttle when the lights go green, pedal away, and you’re usually at 30+ km/hr by the time you leave the other side of the intersection!
Another point, you don’t need to run red lights or sneak across with the pedestrians to keep on schedule. You can afford to be legal, wait with/at the front of the cars, then safely zoom away when the light goes green – and catch up those cyclists who rode through the red lights ahead of you – and you’ll do that in a few hundred metres or so, without breaking a sweat. So you can get the virtuous glow of exercise and of being a more law abiding cyclist at the same time, as well leaving the motorists behind in your dust at the lights.
Going up hills is where the e-bike really comes into its own. Yes, the obvious one is you don’t have to peddle as hard. Generally you still have to peddle – the e-bike can easily do smaller hills on its own. Really big ones, not so much – I’m sure it could make it up Carlton Gore Road on its own at about 6-8km/hr if you didn’t peddle. I know some of the back streets I cycle near the Orakei boardwalk are pretty steep in places and I’ve gone up those on battery alone just to see how it manages it, and they are over a 10% grade.
The second point, which is just as relevant is this – when you do pedal, it’s much faster to get up the hill. Which means your time spent straining at the pedals is very much reduced; you’ll still need to get some huff and puff up though. But I never have to get up on the pedals to get up a hill – I can ride seated all the time if I choose. So e-bikes make it easy to become a “gentleman/woman rider”.
The best way to visualise this, is that it simply “flattens the hills”. What it won’t do well is push you up a hill very fast if you don’t pedal. But this simply means that you can pedal your e-bike, as if it’s flat everywhere. i.e. it turns Auckland into Amsterdam. And you know what – when you cycle up the hills faster than the cars in the next lane because they’re grinding up the hill in slow crawl traffic and you, in the bus lane next door are not – that’s priceless! You can’t buy that sort of pleasure and satisfaction as cheaply, or anywhere else I know of.
And lastly, the dreaded head wind – that can be pretty tiring to ride into especially on an upright. I know from my dreaded easterly winds when I lived in Christchurch that winds are a real drag. On an e-bikes it still is, except that you are doing it at 30km/hr instead of 15km/hr or less. You get a bit more wind-buffeted but then you spend a lot less time in it. So in theory, for half the overall effort – you get there, quicker, and feeling more refreshed.
When you go downhill, the bike doesn’t recharge. The guys at Bute Bikes have some good discussion on this on the FAQs area of their website, but basically the mechanical and electrical complications you get as a result of doing so don’t actually extend the range much, so they say it’s better to buy a bigger battery and go that way and have a bike you can peddle normally. So it’s eminently do-able and worthwhile for regenerative braking on a $15m EMU – not so much on a $3K e-bike.
I know from 2 years regular use and charging that the battery is starting to lose its “freshness” – you can tell as the bike goes faster when it’s just off the charger in the morning, as compared to the go-home trip at the end of the day. Even so it still goes like a rocket. As for electricity cost, I haven’t really calculated that, but I know it will charge up in about 3-4 hours on the charger provided – which is little more than a large sized laptop charger with 48 volt output. So maybe 5 cents per charge is probably the actual cost. I think I pay more money on my power bill for running my 32 inch LCD TV a few hours each day than charging my e-bike.
The battery will probably need to be refurbished/replaced in the next 2 or so years, but it’s designed for that, with the battery being removable and is built from standard cells inside. So I don’t expect to have to scrap the e-bike ‘cos the battery is worn out. The capacity (in watt/hours) of the battery controls the distance you can get. My rules of thumb for my set up is up to 40km/hr speed for about 30-40km distance – your mileage will vary.
Having said that, I have cycled into town, up and down Grafton Gully a couple of times, gone to the new Waterfront Promenade and headed back home on it along Tamaki Drive, into a stiff easterly breeze, all at top speed/full throttle, I’ll have done the thick end of 30km and the battery will be nearly tapped out by the time I get home, with top speed dropping to about 32-35 km/hr on the way back. So yes mileage does vary. I took the bike last year on the Hauraki rail trail from Waihi to Kopu (via Paeroa) and the battery was full at the start and about 1/3 charged at the end, even after pedalling along the boring flat from Paeroa to Kopu at a good clip. And while doing the Hauraki Rail trail I saw a couple of (suggested collective noun for a group of e-bikes –“a fleet”), near new Pedegos going the other way (up the hill).
So that’s part 1 of my experiences with my e-bike. Part 2 will look more closely at my daily commute in detail to get a feel for how it works in practise.
Lastly, just before I go (for all you Star Trek TV series fans, this is the episodes “tinkly bit” – I’ll explain in part 2 more what a “tinkly bit” is if you don’t know).
Todays, tinkly bit, is a small graphic design note.
If you look at the Pedego logo, you can see it, like, the well-known FedEx logo, uses negative space to some effect – heres a close up of the Pedego (NZ) logo:
You can see the D and O of word PEDEGO use the negative space to show an electric plug and electric socket (albeit a US socket). Which neatly reminds you that this is an electric bike i.e. technically a “plug-in hybrid electric vehicle” (PHEV). Hybrid ‘cos it has two fuel sources electric powered and human powered.
While I’ve not read/heard the exact pronunciation of the Pedego brand name, I assume it is said as 3 words “PED” “E” “GO” , I suspect some would see/say it as “PED” “EGO”.
Part Two next Saturday.
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My wife and I have a Pedego each. We love them and they are awesome to ride but we’ve had quite a lot of things break unfortunately.
It’s not what I would ride (a pointy looking thing), but I’m really glad this exists. It’s good to have options. e-bikes should be huge, because they offer what people want and need; short-medium distance transport that is quickish, easy, cheap.
I imagine that the biggest barrier to uptake so far has been the upfront cost. Casual cyclists and those currently reluctant to cycle are the market, and these people might be shy about putting in a large up-front investment. I wonder if importers couldn’t offer lease or hire schemes – say $50 per month, or whatever was appropriate.
There are other Pedego’s than the model above available here in NZ, including commuter-style and “step-thru” models.
And Electric Bikes/Bute Bikes have their own “Smart Motion” designs which are cheaper than Pedego’s for similar levels of performance.
Agree cost is a barrier to many. But Electric Bikes will be able finance it using regular consumer finance. And there are cheaper models than that one.
Not sure the finance interest rate though.
Sorted.org.nz says if you financed it at say $3k over 3 years at 15% thats probably about $104 a month, with total interest of $744.
If you compared that monthly cost with say a monthly PT pass then you could save some of that PT pass money by e-cycling to work either all the way, or just some of way, for 6 months of the year.
So that would possibly mean the actual “additional” spending cost of thee-bike would be much less than the $104 per month, possibly down to the $50 a month figure you mention.
Don’t forget to allow for insurance costs (listed on your house contents insurance as a “specified item”), a decent lock and a good bike helmet if you don’t already have one.
I purchased a SmartMotion eUrban a few weeks ago, also from Bute Bikes. Earlier this year I started riding my ancient mountain bike from Three Kings to the nearest train stations (Remuera, Newmarket or Kingsland), but the electric bike gave me the extra oomph to ride the full 8kms into the CBD.
Unlike the Pedego, the SmartMotion looks the same as a normal commuter bike unless you look closely: the back hub is bigger than a normal bike, and the battery pack sits neatly under the rear carrier. It has a hand throttle to get moving, but otherwise pedallng is required. On max assist, the electric assist tapers off around 32 kph. It has 8 gears and you need to use them.
I was unsure about spending the money on the electric bike, but I love it – way more than I expected. The electric assist and the hand throttle give me the extra confidence to sit in a lane of traffic waiting for the lights to change, knowing I can take off as fast as they can – something I never did on my old bike. Journey time is a wee bit faster than the bus, and I’m getting some exercise at the same time. I’m quite disappointed when the weather is bad and it stays at home!
Do you save mainly money or time by commuting via the bike to a closer station?
I think the Smart Motion e-bikes are pretty good for their price.
And quality in your e-bike costs, but will last a lot longer as a result so its a longer term investment.
I guess if you get enough exercise you can go to the gym less often too (or not at all) right?
So how much is Gym membership you never use versus an e-bike “subscription” that you do?
It’s probably neither a money nor time saver – more quality of life.
The bike costs $2400. The bus costs $6 per day. So I guess after 400 days of riding, I’ve broken even.
But I really, REALLY hate the bus. It takes around 30 mins to travel 8km, the same time it takes my colleague to bus in from Silverdale. There are way too many bus stops, but AT aren’t reviewing the isthmus routes for a couple of years yet. I may be getting LRT one day – in around 22 years.
The electric component adds these extra features to a normal bike:
– I’m old and fat. I have five big hills between me and work. It helps me get up those hills, and I arrive at work without needing a shower.
– The additional acceleration gives the non-confident cyclist some extra ammunition in dealing with Auckland’s homicidal car drivers
– Range: I can go distances I wouldn’t have considered tackling on the old bike. But it’s also so fast, I’ll probably use it for short trips where I used to take the car.
If the electric bike is the catalyst for getting my ageing lardy ass off the sofa and into some exercise, then it’s a worthwhile investment. I’ve lost about 5kg so far. The fact it is the same or quicker than the bus is just a bonus.
Hey Steve, I hear ya, and agree 100% with all your comments.
And well done for making the effort to cycle, every additional cyclist on the roads helps make the roads safer for all.
At 400 “riding days” for payback (using the current non-integrated ticketing model for bus/rail pricing with no daily caps or cheap(er) “single zone” monthly passes) then thats 2 solid “working years” of commuting to pay it off. (theres about 230 working days a year if you take 4 weeks/20 days holiday each year).
Of course, 2 years doesn’t sound like a lot – but when half of that time is going to be spent cycling in the wet/winter/dark its not so encouraging so it might take twice that time (4 years).
Don’t forget the electricity cost as well- at maybe 10 cents a day, over 400 riding days thats $40 of “gas money” you’ll need 😉 – electrons are just *so expensive* these days!
I reckon there would a lot of motorists who’d give their right arm to only have to spend $40 on fuel for their car a month let alone over a number of years.
Still if you avoided the need to have a car at all, then the money you’d save in insurance, registration and maintenance etc would shorten the payback period even more. If only there was a Auckland wide car sharing scheme you could tap into when you needed one?
Even if you keep the car, putting less miles on it will obviously make it worth a bit more than otherwise at the end of the day, but probably no more than a dollar or two a day.
Speed is definitely the key factor with an e-bike, you can cover reasonable commute distances, easily and at about the same speed as a normal bus could achieve, so thats a big incentive over regular kind of cycling.
And then you don’t have to spend so much time (or money) doing aerobic exercises on top to keep fit/healthy. and of course, you control you own destiny when you ride – you can take different routes if traffic jams force you to or you can do things you’d not consider like going out somewhere for your lunch that you couldn’t easily drive to and park when you got there.
Once SkyPath opens you could hop over to Northcote Point to eat your lunch and get back in to work in way less time than you could drive.
The Bute Bikes folks told me of one e-bike customer who lived in Manurewa and who worked in town (at Ports of Auckland) who had a e-bike with 2 batteries and chargers – first one got him to work, over all those hills – where he put the (nearly flat) battery on the charger and then used the second (freshly charged) one to get home at the end of the day (charging that at home overnight). In theory he might have got away with one battery with double charging it. But still thats a long commute.
My commute profile is a bit different than yours, similar distance, but without your 5 hills (I really have 2 maybe 3 hills to climb).
Next weeks part 2 post will cover that in detail so you may see some similarities there.
If it’s being used in weekends, then that’s considerably more than 200 days per year. The point is that they pay for themselves reasonably cheaply, if they’re replacing a bus or car.
I would commute to work via bike+train+bike but my only issue is I would feel unfortable doing it on a packed train. Perhaps when 6-car EMU’s and 10 min frequencies are the norm on the western line then I would consider it. I just hope AT/transdev stop messing around with reduced capacity due to issue or w/e (e.g. running 3 car EMUs at peak once 6 cars EMUs at peak are the norm) and all these ridiculous “train faults” and “train crew matters”. They need staff oncall and ready to go if for some reason the rostered driver/TM unable to make it and their shouldnt be any train faults once the “teething issues” of the EMUs are out of the way.
Also cancelling services for “trespassers on the track” is ridiculous, I doubt they are actually standing on the track, if they are on the nearby land just get them removed instead of cancelling/delaying a bunch of trains until that happens.
Not to rant on offtopic but they also they seem to cancel services when one side of the track is damaged, flooded, faulty or etc instead of running the train around on the other track, which is stupid unless its only single tracked like the onehunga branch.
Apparently one such obstruction was a car, having lost a wheel, winding up stranded on a level crossing in Avondale.
Without knowing the actual reasons for these delays and cancellations, it’s probably a bit unfair to be critical of the procedures that kick in as a result of them. You can always lodge an OIA request to get answers, though.
This might be just what is needed to get people out using cycle lanes. Although a high initial outlay the maths pay off if you can weatherproof yourself.
Plenty of people use cycle lanes now, you don’t need a flash e-bike to use them. Just like you don’t need a $200K Mercedes convertible to drive in Auckland [although some might beg to differ].
But I can tell you that every cyclist takes up 1/8th or less of the road space of any car – so even when cycle lanes don’t exist, cyclists being present on the road still make a lot of room available for other road users than would otherwise be the case if they drove in a car too.
Just remember Ricardo, you are not “in traffic” – “you are [everyone else’s] traffic”.
The Dutch cycle in worse weather than we get here.
What makes wet weather commuting here on any bike so bad is not the rain – its the crazy antics of the car drivers who don’t see/look out for you no matter how many lights and other things you have on you and your bike.
You either fix that problem by making cyclists separate from cars at all time e.g. via a lot more separated cycleways and/or you ensure motorists are trained to share the roads better with all users.
No matter how hard you wish it, cyclists, cycleways and the need to share the road will not go away anytime soon.
Research has shown that precipitation really does stop people riding (I read the study on Copenhagenize some time ago). If you’re dressed up for it, rain isn’t such an issue. But if the new rider doesn’t have a Gore-Tex jacket and a good pair of waterproof gloves, their cycling might be cut short rather quickly.
My solution to this problem would be to allow riders to claim back both their bikes and accessories as tax deductable items, and to include a good cycling appropriate jacket and legwear etc. within that grant.
Lights should also be in the category of things that are absolutely essential but which are often an ‘extra’ and become problematic if not bought at time of purchase.
It really depends on distance – 10 minutes in light drizzle is nothing, but 30 seconds in a tropical downpour is not.
In most cases, something like this is what I want:
https://thenetherlandsbynumbers.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/300_1249340.jpg
I find Auckland’s climate very mild. If it’s raining in the morning I hop on the bus instead of ride. Weather is really not a problem -and probably very comparable or better than San Francisco, Vancouver, etc.
Compared with Vancouver, Auckland tends to be windy when it’s raining, and get more heavy downpours. Vancouver just drizzles a lot, but gets colder and has a really long winter. The numbers do drop when its foul – I dont know what the % is though.
‘The Dutch cycle in worse weather than we get here’
Average annual precipitation in the Netherlands = 832.5mm vs Auckland = 1212.4mm.
Source Wikipedia
They do, however, have colder winter temperatures.
I find the concept of electric bikes quite interesting, but I’m not sure I like the idea of buying a bike twice as heavy as a good quality conventional commuting bike, then relying on the electric motor to compensate for the additional weight. Why not just go for the lightweight bike in the first place? There’s something wonderfully elegant about the idea of a conventional bike, providing an efficient way of moving around using your own effort. Electric bikes just seem kind of clunky in comparison. Also they are considerably more expensive.
Everything you say can equally apply to cars too.
I routinely see people driving around in 2+ Tonne “cars”, which can take 7+ people which never do, which are way heavier and costlier than they ought to for the job they do.
And then they need a bigger motor to move all that steel and stuff around. Equally many folks quite happily drive around the streets in $200K cars.
Still that doesn’t stop either of these vehicles being popular with a lot of people?
As for cost, some cyclists will spend way more than the cost of the average e-bike on their normal cycles. Yes, many don’t, its horses for courses.
I know a few “MAMIL”s who routinely ride bikes that are the thick end of $10k – you could ask them is the $10K bike 5 times better than the $2K one? – cost is relative thing.
The main weight of most e-bikes is the battery and electric motor, the frame and wheels aren’t that much heavier than an average bike.
Even with Lithium Ion technology batteries and small compact DC motors the weight they add is surprising for the size they are. So yes you pay a penalty in $ and weight for having the electric part.
I know my HP laptop I use at work weighs quite a lot less with no Lithium Ion battery in it.
Still its no good without it when away from a power supply, so that’s the “penalty” you pay for functionality and portability.
But if using that “unnecessary” weight of an e-bike allows for you to get where you’re going quicker or more consistently than any other mode or if it means you actually ride a bike at all (as opposed to say simply driving or using a bus) then its not all bad.
Trade-offs abound in life. This is no different.
Purists will continue cycling as they want. But not everyone wants to arrive at work thinking they’ll need a shower – that’s if your workplace provides facilities like that, and many still don’t.
And perception is a big part of the barrier to (re)uptake of cycling. Anything that changes the perception that “cycling is too hard” is good for all in the long term.
Plenty of people spend way more $ than the cost of any e-bike on smoking fags – even a 10 a day habit is more $ in one year than an e-bike would cost.
And I know which of these two will be better for the users health in the short, medium and longer term. Even if you don’t like either smoking or e-bikes – I’m sure you agree e-bikes do have their place.
Smoking – maybe not.
The electric motor doesn’t just compensate for the extra weight, you get way more power than that. You won’t have to shower after riding the ebike less than 5kms (maybe more) because the effort up hills is way less. I would say the real beauty of the ebike is on the hills or into a head wind. On the flat, there isn’t that much benefit speed wise.
I do agree though that the weight is an issue, though it really only bothers me carrying it up and down the stairs on the Bayswater ferry. On the Kea or the trains, it is just roll on – roll off, so weight is irrelevant really.
I don’t ride an ebike for any reason other than it is more fun. I am more than fit and confident enough to ride a regular bike and did for 30 years. However, I know I would cycle less (I do 90% of my kms on the ebike now) just because of the sweaty factor. I do other (much more physical) stuff for fitness.
I really think almost anyone in Auckland would benefit from one. Some people need to get out of their heads that cycling is a sport and choose the best bike to get around on – dressed for the destination not the journey.
Interesting, informative and entertaining post, thanks Greg..
today my daughter needed me to drop something to her urgently a couple of km away at Mt Eden. I took the eibike of course as I was tired and didn’t want to change clothes or get sweaty. No quicker, more fun way to do that trip.
I can bike up Howe st still sitting on the seat with a box of Corona on the carrier . Try that on a Pinarello 🙂
My wife regularly uses it for trips in her work clothes. I can’t keep up with her on the hills. Hire one on Waiheke for a day and you’ll be sold.
Thank-you for the great post! I have been looking at getting back to cycling after a 15 year absence and this may just be the answer.
Thought of you yesterday Greg down on the wharves:
I was working most of Sunday or I’d have been there for sure.
I saw a similar black Pedego with olive drab saddlebags yesterday, parked outside (where else) Farro Fresh in Grey Lynn.
I’m seriously getting quite jealous of these things and the only real thing stopping me is the lack of a secure park for one – I’d have to leave it chained in the open under a rain cover which I’m guessing is a recipe for quickly destroying multi-thousand dollar electric bicycle technology…
We are both in our mid-60’s, based in Sth. Akld. After seeing these bikes while walking the Waihi Gorge tracks plus seeing them for hire in Thames over the summer, ( while away in our Mobile Home ), we decided to investigate further. Eventually deciding on Flying Cat bikes ( his & hers, step-thru, 26″ & 24″ ), plus a special bike rack for 2 e-bikes ( Tableau Towbars, Napier ).
It has opened up a whole new world for us, yes, we still have to pedal on hills but we could never have imagined at our age to be travelling 40+ K’s ( 20% battery still remaining ), plus returning from our travels with energy to spare. These are a ‘must have’, as far as we’re concerned, and should be promoted much more as an alternative transport option for N.Z. ers, young & old alike.
Comments :- “One day I will . .” , ” I’m just waiting for . .”, “Maybe after I retire . .” Yeah right !
Once you get a taste of the possibilities, you’ll find the uses are endless, just so liberating. Go for it.