I love riding bicycles. Traditional, man-powered bicycles. I ride for exercise and often am panting when I roll into my driveway, at the end of a long ride. Due to distracted drivers, I do not ride on streets, except for the short distance to get to our neighborhood’s greenbelt. The newly expanded Fort Worth Trinity Trails paved bike system now passes within two blocks from my home and is easily accessible from the end of the paved greenbelt sidewalk. My plan is to stay healthy by riding (off city streets) into my old(er) age.
Because of this, I have always been uninterested in electric bicycles. That changed suddenly, recently. Here’s why:
A couple friends of ours, Kerry and Kristi, have four Rad Power bicycles. Two for the couple and two for their adult daughters (for when the visit mom & dad). The daughters have kids of their own, so when they visit, they are too busy with kids to go bike riding so our friends decided to sell two of their bikes (RadCity 3).
My wife let me know about the bikes a few days after the ad was posted to our neighborhood’s website. She opened my mind to an idea I had not considered. For years, I have wanted her to ride the trails with me, but she just could not keep up. I didn’t want to go slow enough for her to stay with me, because that would keep me from getting the exercise I wanted. So, I just ride alone or with a buddy of mine who rides for exercise as well. My wife said that if she could use the pedal assist of an eBike to keep up with me, she could, over time, reduce the assist level to the point that she could keep up with me on a non-powered bicycle. Finally, a way for us to ride together! I decided to visit our friends and possibly buy the bikes.
By the time I got to their house, they had already sold one of the bikes. I took the remaining bike on a test drive and was surprised at the acceleration and how cool the pedal assist system were. The bike only had 32 miles on it! I decided to buy it for my wife to ride, before another buyer happened along. She loved it! We took a short five mile ride on the Trinity Trails and she kept up with my manual bike, no problem.
The bad thing was, I’d been exposed to eBikes. Now, I wanted one.
Kerry and Kristi love their Rad Power bikes, so I started shopping for another one and fell in love with their fat tire bike, the “RadRover.” Unfortunately, even the discounted sale price was more than I wanted to pay, so I kept searching Craigs List, eBay and Facebook Marketplace, looking for a bike. Scalpers had been buying up Rad Power bikes on sale and selling them at a much higher price, so the preowned market was less than exciting.
One thing I discovered was that, in order to prevent theft, Rad Power won’t sell replacement parts to you, unless you are the registered owner. Our friends had no issue with notifying Rad Power that we had bought their bike. It’s a pretty easy process. I found so many brands that I felt lost. Many were Chinese products and I have a concern about battery fires from cheap Chinese products. A couple years ago, a friend had asked me to donate to a man whose entire family was killed when an electric skateboard caught fire while recharging. The man was a truck driver and the fire happened when he was out, on the road.
I decided to focus on the batteries used in eBikes I was evaluating. Due to their reputation, I was only interested in bikes that had Samsung or LG batteries. LG batteries were used in the Chevy Volts we’ve been driving for ten plus years. While searching for a bike, I stumbled across a company called Doheny Bikes. They were founded in California but have a store in the Houston area. Their fat tire bike, aptly named “Doheny Fat Tire Cruiser,” had the batteries I wanted (LG). The motor was a 750W motor (but I can’t seem to find out if it’s a brushless motor), a top speed of 28 miles per hour (doesn’t sound fast, but on a bike, holy crap!) and also had a range of up to 40 miles and a 48 volt electrical system, which were on my wish list. Unfortunately, its brakes are mechanical and not hydraulic, which was my uneducated preference. I found many eBikes that use mechanical brakes and the reviews of those bikes said braking was powerful, so I decided it wasn’t that big a deal and I bought the Fat Tire Cruiser. Their sale had reduced the price to $500 below the price of the RadRover 6’s sale price and I am chea…uh…frugal.
My electric vehicle journey continues into the two-wheeled world! Stay tuned for blog posts and/or YouTube videos about our eBike experiences. We want to share them with other people (like us) who know almost nothing about eBikes and help them understand them (and maybe get one…).
