Hi all you healthy types.
Mama G is going to treat herself to an trekking e-bike, but we know the square root of bugger all about them, or really what to look for. She not a hardened treadder activist, so just for general daily use in the summer from the Aegeri’s to Zug, and round the Aegerisee or Zuggerzee etc, so mostly road and some track use. Any tips, pointers or places to look would be great.
She spooted this one in Decathlon, is that anygood:
BTWIN - I once bought a rock-bottom priced regular teenager bicycle of this brand. The brakes and many other parts were of very low quality and broke. It was the first bike that could not be passed down to another child.
I would not buy any ebike without disc brakes. The additional weight of an ebike makes stopping power even more important than it already is. In wet weather, that bike you linked will put your missus at risk vs a bike with disc brakes.
What about this one? https://www.decathlon.ch/de/p/e-bike…626?mc=8577923
A properly set up V-brake is very powerful, far more so than it would matter for a beginner cyclist, including the increased weight of an ebike. Discs have better modulation (well, hydraulic disc brakes...), but again, for this use case I doubt it will matter. Also OP wrote that it's going to be used in fair weather only during the summer. I would choose a V-brake for this scenario without a second of thought.
What I would also like to highlight is that suspension on these cheap bikes is necessarily of bad quality, more of a nuisance than anything else. By all means forget a "full suspension" frame (the one that has suspension in the rear), and think carefully about a suspension fork even. It is not an accident that dutch bikes have neither... (and these are also quite heavy, built out of steel, for the eternity.)
In general, Decathlon offer reasonable bikes for a very good price. These are NOT your crappy Tesco's / Walmart "bikes" (which are more of a joke)!
What I would do is walk into a Decathlon store and ask for advice from the people working there. I don't think that you necessarily must spend 2500 CHF+ for a beginner, rarely used ebike.
I have an Ortler Wave (paid 1'400 Fr) since 4 years, all good.
Please refrain from such general statements.
Try one (not the cheapest one), and come back later with feedback, not lazy generalizations.
It can happen, no dispute.
But besides Ortler, you can find e-bikes from Giant, Cannondale, Cube which are cheaper than 2'500 Fr. All very good brands.
CU has some valid advice: https://www.consumerreports.org/heal…/buying-guide/
A recent test of entry level ebikes: https://www.srf.ch/news/panorama/ele…rliche-modelle
Here one can perhaps find a 2nd hand bike: https://www.bls.ch/de/freizeit-und-f…on-rent-a-bike
or here: https://www.flyer-bikes.com/de-ch/occasionen
or here: https://www.occasionsvelo.ch/
Happy biking!
If you can do math, add together the cost of the shimano gears set and disk brakes, a Bosch or Yamaha motor, a well known brand battery and charger and then a solid aluminium frame. The battery alone comes to Fr 900.
So if you buy a bike for Fr 1'400 what are you getting in terms of quality?
For the price of a pretty bad to mediocre cable-operated disc brake you can get an excellent quality V-brake (say a Shimano XT pair), which is going to be trivial to setup and adjust, cheap and easy to replace pads... Good luck setting up your cheap disc brake without rubbing, for example.
I had been riding V-brakes on MTBs for a long time, in rain, mud, snow, you name it. I would take them any day over a cable operated disc brake setup... or even cheaper hydro brakes.
But all this is a moot point, since we are talking about a beginner good weather cyclist who will maybe use 10% of their brakes' capabilities, ever... No, V-brakes don't just stop working in the rain, and if anything, disc brakes are much worse affected by oil spilling on them than V-brakes.
You may also want to read this review on ebikes. It is from 2017 and they mention the same figures for a quality bike so I don’t think my post was a generalisation.
I got these:
* Bosch motor
* Bosch Power Pack battery
* Shimano gears set
* Tektro disk brakes
The new model has:
* Shimano motor
* Shimano battery
* Shimano gears
* Shimano disk brakes
All these for 1'419 Fr.
If I had a penny for every time I got these advises...
"Buy expensive clothes for skiing, otherwise you'll freeze/sweat"
"You need the latest expensive tennis clothes, otherwise..."
"Buy expensive..."
"Buy, buy, buy"
I guess these "experts" are deliberately forgetting that most of us don't spend the whole day in the saddle, that we don't ride 1000 km/week, that sometimes we just want to have some fun and not always have the latest, the shiniest, the most expensive stuff one can buy.
The only thing stopping me was the price tag for the bike rack + installation.
So, if you don't mind me piling onto your thread, would anyone also give advice for recommended racks for an e-bike?
Thanks!