Cheapest bike on Amazon

[saneagle]

Not perfect, but what do you expect for £600. I love bikes like this. Not so much as they come, but because every part is easily and cheaply upgradeable to make it into the bike you want. I thought the guy was a little unreasonable when he was scaring people with stories about ebike fires and linking that to his misunderstanding about how the battery work.

One thing I don't understand with these cheap bikes is why the persist with these crappy controllers that run on for two seconds and have delays between start of pedalling and the power coming, when they could fit a controller that doesn't do that for the same price.

 

[Az.]

There is nothing to like about this bike. Fork is a disaster, controller is crap (as you have noticed yourself), brakes are mediocre at best. Battery is small and probably of poor quality.

You can buy a good new hybrid bike with rigid fork and hydraulic disc brakes for £100. Add kit worth £350 and you will get much better e-bike.

 

[AntonyC]

@saneagle You hit the nail on the head there! Which controller brands / sellers / listings have been OK and don't have these delays?

 

[AndyBike]

The thing is it wont last. 6 months down the line, every metal bit, inc the fork stanchions will be as rusty as a deep sea fishing trawler.

I suppose initially it will suit some people who arent really day to day cyclists, and they'll get on fine with it, but as it starts to prematurely wear, the excitement will go out and the owner could be left feeling very disappointed with the large outlay they've made, and TBH someone paying such a low price isn't really the type who can afford to spend hundreds of pounds on a bike that leaves them unhappy and saps their interest in continuing cycling.

Overall this type is thing is bad for the sport.

 

[Az.]

someone paying such a low price

It is not a low price at all. £600 is a lot of money for a poor bike. One Can get a much better bike for same amount or cheaper than that.

 

[matthewslack]

Anyone UK based could have had a 500Wh Shimano E6100 motor reasonable spec road ebike brand new slightly shop soiled last week in Wiggle's sale for under £600.

Still worth keeping an eye on them and chain reaction in case more good stuff to come.

 

[Peter.Bridge]

It was almost he had made up mind that the bike was crap, devised an unfair series of tests, which the bike sailed through but concluded it was crap anyway.

 

[guerney]

Three years ago, before converting the bike I already had, I looked at many inexpensive bikes like that and concluded (rightly or wrongly) I'd have to change pretty much everything but the frame. However, of the few people on this forum who have reported buying similarly priced Ancheer and Soodoo bikes over the past three years, none have returned with major problems.

 

[Woosh]

Not perfect, but what do you expect for £600. I love bikes like this. Not so much as they come, but because every part is easily and cheaply upgradeable to make it into the bike you want

by the time you have spent time and £££ to upgrade the bike, it won't be 'cheap' anymore unless you buy used parts and not counting the time you spent.
IMHO, it's better to buy the best you can budget for.

 

[guerney]

I can't find similarly priced 250W rear hub motored ebikes with KT controllers, batteries made using good brand named cells, decent suspension forks, hydraulic disc brakes etc. Surely there's a market for that? I would have bought one. At the time, my budget was £909.

 

[saneagle]

The thing is it wont last. 6 months down the line, every metal bit, inc the fork stanchions will be as rusty as a deep sea fishing trawler.

I suppose initially it will suit some people who arent really day to day cyclists, and they'll get on fine with it, but as it starts to prematurely wear, the excitement will go out and the owner could be left feeling very disappointed with the large outlay they've made, and TBH someone paying such a low price isn't really the type who can afford to spend hundreds of pounds on a bike that leaves them unhappy and saps their interest in continuing cycling.

Overall this type is thing is bad for the sport.

That's not true. My first electric bike was a similar sort of thing. I used it for thousands of miles, then sold it to a friend, who used it in all weathers as his only transport for at least three years after. All the parts are the standard parts you get on cheap Chinese bikes. The cheap forks didn't go rusty and no components failed. If I'm honest, it had one fault in that time. The seat-post broke due to a design flaw after a couple of months. It was immediately fixed under warranty and prevented from further occurrence by a small design change - probably better service than any expensive bike. See how quickly you can get a replacement frame for a Haibike, Specialized or Cube.

 

[Woosh]

I can't find similarly priced 250W rear hub motored ebikes with KT controllers, batteries made using good brand named cells, decent suspension forks, hydraulic disc brakes etc. Surely there's a market for that? I would have bought one. At the time, my budget was £909.

KT controllers and Lishui cost the same. If you are the supplier, selling KT means you rely on the customer to configure correctly which many simply can't, selling Lishui means the customer doesn't have to do anything. Lishui controllers work with the majority of geared hub motors automatically without specific settings. Which way would you go?

 

[Woosh]

The cheapest bike I can buy is about £30.

 

[guerney]

The cheapest bike I can buy is about £30.

Potentially a good profit margin... surely enough to pay an employee to configure each bike assembled with a KT controller individually? I'm not in the market for another bike BTW (at least, I don't think so at the moment [if I was, I'd probably get a second BBS01B for a conversion {because the first one has worked out so well, and because it'd be handy to have spares}]).

 

[Woosh]

Why would I do that? KT controllers give tinkerrers the control. If you want to control your costs, the last thing you would want is to give tinkerrers a free reign. They may take the product out of their best settings by mistake.

 

[guerney]

Why would I do that? KT controllers give tinkerrers the control. If you want to control your costs, the last thing you would want is to give tinkerrers a free reign. They may take the product out of their best settings by mistake.

For many, even £600 isn't small change... people scour the internet for reviews like the one above, but if they knew a bike or kit was highly configurable to suit the rider, wouldn't that take presale nervousness out of the equation? My BBS01B was set up so badly, I almost sent it back to Amazon for a refund - programming cable to the rescue...

As for worries about tinkerers of speed and amp limits: You could make a small computer system to monitor and record amps drawn from the battery, inclines, speeds, possibly speed limit modification, suspiciously speedy ascents, which must be read by an app on the user's phone via bluetooth and sent back to you, for you to consider before you decide to honour a warranty claim? And charge extra. As you know, small and sufficiently powerful computers with bluetooth don't cost much these days.

 

[Paul1962]

The thing is it wont last. 6 months down the line, every metal bit, inc the fork stanchions will be as rusty as a deep sea fishing trawler.

That is always a question of how well it is looked after.
Even a bicycle in the higher price regions will be scrap at a certain stage if you don't look after it and maintain it here and there.
On the otherend, if you buy cheap stuff but you are taking care of it it can last an eternity.

Besides this the question is always: What do you want to do with this vehicle?
Crossing the alps? Then an electric bicycle in the 600ish region is the wrong choice.

 

[saneagle]

Why would I do that? KT controllers give tinkerrers the control. If you want to control your costs, the last thing you would want is to give tinkerrers a free reign. They may take the product out of their best settings by mistake.

The parameters can be locked just like any other controller, that's no excuse and no issue.

 

[guerney]

If the parameters are locked, requiring an unlocking code via the display, I doubt many owners would going to all this trouble cracking it:

 

[saneagle]

What do you want to do with this vehicle?
Crossing the alps? Then an electric bicycle in the 600ish region is the wrong choice.

Good point, well presented.

Just to emphasise the point, it also works the other way. If you want a bike to ride to work, there's no point in buying a Haibike Allmtn or Sduro. You can use that Amazon bike to go over the Alps and you can use the Haibike for work, but there are a lot of better options.