In my city, travel habits and condition, I find I wish for more torque and lower speed. Every place I want to go has significant hills that the motor can't handle, and easing climbing hills is the main reason I want an ebike. My ebike's minimum speed for the motor is 15kph, which is ok by myself, but my family likes to go slower, so I have to go fully manual with them. When I look at ebike ads it feels like nobody else cares about these two areas of performance. When I talk to local ebike shops they are unprepared to talk about torque and minimum speed.
I fitted a Bafeng mid-drive motor to my city bike and it's fabulous for hills. Because the power goes through the existing drivechain you can get high torque simply by switching to first gear. No minimum speed, power kicks in after half a turn of the pedals. Coupled with hub gears you can change at rest it's a marvel.
Even at the European street legal limit of 250W it makes acceleration trivial.
I'm a total sucker for ebikes and built my first ebike around 2006, powered by 40lbs of lead acid motorcycle batteries.
I recently outfitted a trailer with a large battery made for an efoil (my other obsession) where the non-battery components went bad, the company went out of business, and "Hey, this would make a bitchin' ebike battery.
It does feel like this is such an untapped market. Think commuters, credit cart tourers, tourism around a spread out city. Something that is safer than a motorcycle and faster than a bike.
In Germany at least the routes are a lot prettier because they go through forests and villages. It's what got me to cycle more and ride my motorcycle less.
high quality heavy 18650s weigh about 2 oz. 190 of them would weigh about 24 lbs. Throw in another 6-10 lbs for bms, wiring, casing and errata and it's not that bad.
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