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Deleted member 4366
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I don't think you need to spend a lot of money to get lightweight stuff. On my latest build, they motor and controller cost £125 . The battery with BMS was about £100. Throttle and PAS les than £10. They're retail mprices. A factory or OEM bike make would pay half of that. Total weight for the kit is less than 3kg. I can't see why you cant' have a 10kg folding bike with small wheels when you can get a cheap roadbike with big wheels at 10kg.An ordinary bike weighs about 14 kg, a battery weighs about 3.5kg, a motor another 4 kg , a controller and wiring another 1kg, so an overall weight penalty of 9kg for electrifying a bike. Typical well speced road worthy ebikes are up to 23kgs. It costs a lot of money to reduce weight, exotic materials, carbon fibre. It would be much more cost effective to cut out a latte every day and reduce the humans body weight by a kilo than to spend 1000£ on reducing the bike by a kilo, and one would feel better anyway.
Anyway the only time the cyclist on an electric bike need worry about the weight is when they are struggling to carry it up steps or through doors. Normally the power of the bike more than compensates for any additional weight....the cyclist will normally weight 3 to 4 times the bike
.. I was going to say don't sweat it... .
The Dahon Vybe C7A is only £399 retail price and weighs 11.5 kg. You could easily save a kg by changing the tyres, seat and pedals to light-weight ones, so you could have a 13.5 kg bike for less than £700.
I can't understand why nobody offers something like that with a 1kg clip-in 200wh battery. if you want to go a long way, you could carry a spare battery in your pocket.