Folding bike, 20", full suspension and integrated battery.

[Deleted member 4366]

your reasoning is of course sound but you can't reason with tastes. There is something compelling about having the motor pulling on the chain - making you feel you ride a bike, not a motobike. The power isn't huge but flexible and appropriate.

I think it's the other way round. Before I had my Nuvinci, I used to ride the GNG just like a motorbike, because you use the throttle and gear-change in exactly the same way. It was a waste of time pedalling because the motor span the crank too fast to keep up.

I've tried every type of crank-drive. Now I've decided that I don't like them. I can see only disadvantages over a high torque hub-motor. As far as I'm concerned they should have become extinct the moment Ezee stuck a 250w label on their motors, except for serious off-road stuff, where you need the wheels to be as light as possible for the suspension to work properly.

 

[trex]

...
As far as I'm concerned they should have become extinct the moment Ezee stuck a 250w label on their motors
...

that I may agree with in time but for now, the CD can give you a lot of speed without pedalling so fast that you could give yourself a heart attack. Woosh will give me an 18A BBS01 in a couple of weeks to play with and I will try to fit it with a Nexus 7 laced to a 700C wheel.

 

[Deleted member 4366]

It'll go even faster if you chuck it off a cliff or the top floor of the multi-storey car park. I'll show you how to do it if you want. No tools are required.

I'll bring mine too, and we'll see whos goes the fastest.

 

[Geebee]

d8veh, not everyone has the same view or tastes, you have made yours clear, others have their opinion neither is correct for everyone else.
I suspect hubs and crank drives will co exist for sometime.

 

[Jimod]

Why is it on almost every thread, no matter what bike is being discussed, it comes round to Woosh?

As to the bike in the OP, you couldn't pay me to take it.

 

[mountainsport]

Why is it on almost every thread, no matter what bike is being discussed, it comes round to Woosh?

As to the bike in the OP, you couldn't pay me to take it.

Please Jim please you are cracking me up I hadn't noticed until I read what you had said. No offence to Woosh bikes.

MS.

 

[Deleted member 4366]

d8veh, not everyone has the same view or tastes, you have made yours clear, others have their opinion neither is correct for everyone else.
I suspect hubs and crank drives will co exist for sometime.

Don't be so sensitive. I'm only expressing my opinion, which I'm entitled to do. You can have your own opinion if you want. Feel free to express it.

 

[flecc]

I suspect hubs and crank drives will co exist for sometime.

Fashion trends play a big part. From 1999 as e-biking first started to become more popular, crank drives from Yamaha, Giant and Panasonic headed the market, hub motors occupying the low price segment.

The Yamaha was discontinued having been beaten by the Giant-Panasonic in the market, but then Giant discontinued the latter in 2006 due to inability to make a profit so crank drives virtually disappeared. Coincident with that eZee introduced more hub motor power in 2005/6 and it looked like a hub motor future.

However, the new Panasonic crank unit in 2007 was quickly adopted by some twenty brands and both Daum (later Kalkhoff-Impulse) and Bosch jumped on the bandwagon. Now a number of Chinese crank drive units have been added and they do seem to be the dominant type in today's market.

It may take a while for such as the powerful BPM/CST and eZee hub motors to achieve more widespread recognition of their abilities in the mainstream market, but until then the hub motors seem to be mainly the budget options once more.

 

[trex]

for many years, 250W geared hub motors are those with 120mm diameter. Their larger cousins, the BPMs, have 180mm diameter and are usually marked as 350W.
It's clear that the 120mm 250W motors do not have the climbing power of the 180mm 350W BPMs.
When someone makes a comparison between hub and crank, they should compare a 120mm hub with a 15A crank and a BPM with 18A 350W crank.
it may be worth mentioning that the only large manufacturer in the EU having made e-bikes with BPM motors is BH and I could not find any substantial German or Dutch or French manufacturers making e-bikes with these BPM motors.

 

[Deleted member 4366]

Bosch has ruled for the last two years. Now, they have a lot of competition from Shimano and the Chinese. The theory has always suggested that crank motors would be more efficient, but in practice, it seems to be the other way round. The Panasonic hub-motor trounced the Bosch in a steep mountain climb test.

I would be very surprised if Bosch don't present their new hub-motor in the near future. When they do, there'll be a massive swing back to hub-motors.

You don't have to have a large hub-motor for high torque and efficiency. The Panasonic has shown that; however, it's much easier to get high torque and robustness from a larger motor.

5 years ago, the failure rate from Bafang motors was unacceptable, so it got hub-motors a bad reputation. It's almost unheard of for them to fail now. The quality and attention to detail in the design have been improving continuously. Step-changes will follow as the Chinese start adopting zero-defect and 6 sigma quality strategies like the Japanese did in the '80s.

Hub-motors can meet all the requirements for a legal ebike. They can produce enough torque to get heavy-weights up steep hills, they're efficient, simple and cheap. If I were an ebike designer, why would I want to choose anything else for a non FS bike?

 

[flecc]

I agree with all that d8veh, but have one proviso. The waterproofing of components and interconnections in the hub systems needs to be good enough. This is one area where the integrated crank systems, and particularly Panasonic's, have excelled, while many hub motor system installations have been a regular source of trouble.

 

[halfer]

I've tried a Bafang hub and Bosch crank drives - the latter on more expensive bikes admittedly - and found the Bosch motors much more reliable. It's good to hear that Bafang have improved in the last couple of years, and last time I tried a hub drive (an Emotion Neo Cross) it was a very nice ride indeed.

I like that wheels can be swapped easily with the CD - it is not a trivial job to fit rims of ones own choosing to a hub drive, since it requires the whole thing to be laced in, and then professionally trued.

I wonder if hub drives might be cheaper on components, though. I just had a LBS report to me that the Ave had chewed through a cassette and stretched the chain, and it can't have been a year since the same shop fitted the previous set. That was near-enough daily use though, and some non e-bikers will replace these more frequently anyway.