The additional complexity and manteinance needed by ebikes is the major factor that scares me, more than price.
I want to do as little manteinance to my bike as possible, to be able to do it on my own, and ebikes don’t look like something that would allow me to do so, at the moment
I’d suggest convert a bike into one and not buy purposely-made ebike if you want that. I turn my 20+ year old bike into an ebike recently and did 1000km++ with it, all the maintenance i ever did is on the bike itself, nothing on the electrical component yet. Added benefits is it will still have repairable part, so nothing is proprietary, even the ebike components. So if my motor broke tomorrow(please don’t), i can just order a generic brand motor and swap it in, so is the controller, screen, throttle, battery, everything.
I just use generic brand just to dip myself into ebike scene, and even then it works very well. The one i used is from L-Faster. I think it required more work with these diy conversion kit, but those branded or that can be done quickly (swytch, bafang, bosch) have the same proprietary issue.
The additional complexity and manteinance needed by ebikes is the major factor that scares me, more than price.
I want to do as little manteinance to my bike as possible, to be able to do it on my own, and ebikes don’t look like something that would allow me to do so, at the moment
I’d suggest convert a bike into one and not buy purposely-made ebike if you want that. I turn my 20+ year old bike into an ebike recently and did 1000km++ with it, all the maintenance i ever did is on the bike itself, nothing on the electrical component yet. Added benefits is it will still have repairable part, so nothing is proprietary, even the ebike components. So if my motor broke tomorrow(please don’t), i can just order a generic brand motor and swap it in, so is the controller, screen, throttle, battery, everything.
This is a good point. What conversion kit did you use?
I just use generic brand just to dip myself into ebike scene, and even then it works very well. The one i used is from L-Faster. I think it required more work with these diy conversion kit, but those branded or that can be done quickly (swytch, bafang, bosch) have the same proprietary issue.