Dug up this old image. It was a limited edition of 100 bikes. We built it in celebration of the Electric Bike World Tour when a Wisper was ridden through China, Japan, Australia, Vietnam, India etc. Happy days!
Ongoing reliability of Kalkhoff/Focus Impulse 2 motors
- Thread starter Tomtomato
- Start date
you should perhaps look at the stats from the point of view of usage and care given to the bikes. Cheap bikes tend to be used as cheap transport, left outside to be rained on and to rust and not much spent on it regarding maintenance. On the other hand, bikes costing over 2k are treated as pride and joy, with maintenance often handed to the professionals.
I have an Oxygen emate city befang hub drive bike with a throttle that I bought in June 2011 and hammered on off road tracks that it was not designed for carrying two fully loaded panniers for the first two years of its life and 6000 miles and it still works really well. I used it yesterday for a 20 mile return trip to work when the gear cable on my Haibike failed at the end of my 10 mile return trip from work on Friday. I must be up to about 10,000 miles now on the Oxygen. I affectionately now refer to it as my B bike.
You will get many more miles out of your chain, chain ring and sprockets on a rear hub powered bike as the hub motor removes rather than adding strain to the drive train.
But you cannot expect any mechanical devise to work trouble free, and you need to be prepared to do the maintenance required to keep it working properly and safely and fix it when it goes wrong.
Andrew at Oxygen sent me a free rear motor wheel right at the end of my two year warranty period that impressed me, and I have had to replace spokes in that replacement rear wheel and true it from time to time. I needed a new bottom bracket and quite a few brake pads as well as various other items etc etc, but I will be going to work on it later today and I might do a few off road tracks on the way there. Splendid.
You will get many more miles out of your chain, chain ring and sprockets on a rear hub powered bike as the hub motor removes rather than adding strain to the drive train.
But you cannot expect any mechanical devise to work trouble free, and you need to be prepared to do the maintenance required to keep it working properly and safely and fix it when it goes wrong.
Andrew at Oxygen sent me a free rear motor wheel right at the end of my two year warranty period that impressed me, and I have had to replace spokes in that replacement rear wheel and true it from time to time. I needed a new bottom bracket and quite a few brake pads as well as various other items etc etc, but I will be going to work on it later today and I might do a few off road tracks on the way there. Splendid.
.... That's a fair point, but needs to be tempered with the realities that an ebike contains 3 elements of roughly equivalent cost. The mechanical bike , the battery pack and the motor electronics. So 200£ mechanical bike and a 600£ ebike are mechanically equivalent, with the same wear, rust potential.
D
Deleted member 4366
Guest
That's sort of true, but paints a very wrong picture.
Look at all the Kalkhoffs that have had to have more than one motor replaced.
There's probably significantly more cheaper bikes and we only tend to hear from owners when things go wrong, so you'll see more reported problems.
The cheaper bikes are often bought mail-order or from a source not local to the user, so when things go wrong, the user has to ask in a place like this forum what to do, while as expensive bikes tend to be bought from a local dealer. When there's problems, they have to be taken back to the dealer, who fixes it, so we never hear about most of the problems.
People that have expensive bikes often don't like to talk about them. I know that there's been people on this forum boasting about how reliable their bike has been, though they had to get significant problems fixed by their dealer.
Every type of electric bike gets it's own problems. I don't think that there's any link between problems and cost.
If you buy from a local dealer, you get at least a year guarantee. If you buy from anywhere else, you need to be able to fix things yourself. That probably won't work with expensive bikes because only dealers have access to the test equipment and parts.
I've found that the mid-price bikes, Kalkhoff especially, have lots of minor problems (but this happens on ordinary bikes). On ordinary bikes it is usually the flipping derailleur or transmission becomes inefficient: just doesn't function as optimum after 2000 miles or so.
It is strange how people are still pleased with their ebikes after so many problems. Electrics (hearsay) has been reported more often than crunching sounds (undiagnosed on my Cyclamatic).
I am going to have to go on a trial run. Cyclamatic gear change was the easiest (extremely impressed). I am going to have to compare again.
I was just going to reply to that more than 10 years of reliability out of an e-bike comment above, looks like you beat me to it! Yes we also have a Giant LaFree Comfort Twist ST 5 speed model with Panasonic motor and Panasonic NiMH batteries and it's about 10 years old, done quite a lot of miles, and has been very reliable and no electrical problems at all. Batteries STILL give quite an adequate range, even after 10 years !
Regards,
Alistair G.
I wouldn't bank on that....my 2016 Integrale EVO has clicking, clacking, clunking issues despite having been back once to 50cycles for so called rectification. Still in warranty until November so will be speaking to them again soon.
Sent from my SM-A300FU using Tapatalk
I went in and nearly bought a Beat Bike Toba. Alas, I found it sluggish compared do the Cyclamatic (when it worked). It seemed quite light though and would not be such a handicap if the battery ran out. I will have to try it on a hill. http://www.50cycles.com/electric-bikes/beat-bikes/toba_crossbar.html
On reflection, its performance as an ordinary bike was quite good. The Cyclamatic was impossible as an ordinary bike.
On reflection, its performance as an ordinary bike was quite good. The Cyclamatic was impossible as an ordinary bike.
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add me on this one too. Kalkhoff Endeavor Premium S11 (Speed). less than 100 km into use (perhaps the 2nd or 3rd time I used it), the engine started cracking at low speed. I had the engine replaced, to no avail. The bike has now been sent back to the reseller. Awaiting financial settlement. Another issue I found with the bike (it is not a defect but a design mishap), is that whenever the power is on, anyone can steal the bike (as long as they break the lock). There is no engine lock or password mechanism. This is why I am likely to switch to Stromer...
Looks to me as if the OP has left the building, possibly a forced ejection given his profile now comes up as 'Guest'.
Few ebikes have immobilizers, although you can remove the display on Bosch and Yamaha crank drive bikes, so a thief would have to ride away unpowered.
Which presumably a thief could also do with a Stromer.
The Bosch displays are not coded, so a thief could get the bike going if he bought, sorry, stole a display from another bike.
No doubt you've researched the Stromer, but I'd recommend a test ride.
One passed me which had a surprisingly noisy motor.
D
Deleted member 4366
Guest
When did you buy the bike? When was the motor replaced? Are you saying that it clacked with the new motor immediately (after zero km).
This answered one of my queries. Bosch is not really in the frame on these believable figures. At least the 28 miles which is not enough (nearly). Not sure that the Impulse does the 50 mileage w/o confirmation after my test ride.
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.. I'm not in the pay of Bosch honestly .. but we must be realistic. The information provided on the post you are referring to did not give enough clues. The Bosch website does give a calculator so that one can estimate their range. You have to input weight, cycling habits , nature of terrain and wind conditions and it will estimate realistic ranges.
The variables are weight of person and bike . ... This is irrelevant except that everything you brake, that kinetic energy is lost. The energy required to bring a 100kg up to 25 kmhr is 2.45 kJ
Climbing hills .. unless the downside balances exactly the upside , there will be losses . If the person had to climb a nett 100 m that will also involves work of 98kj.
J
Going against wind. A person's wind resistance will depend on their stance.. lieing flat like on a recumbent gives the best effect, sitting up as on a Dutch bike the worst. Straight on the frontal area is about 0.5m2 , but on a recumbent could be the area of their shoes . Clothes , anaroks or Lycra or nude will all have an affect. .(especially the latter!) Assuming still air and a person travelling through it at 5 kmhr. Then they are experiencing a 5 kmhr wind. And a specific drag. To overcome this they must supply power . The power required increases as the cube of the wind speed. E.g at 10km it is 8 times morepower is required than at 5 , at 20km it is 64 times and at 25 km it is 125 times that at 5km. Say it took only 1 watt of power to propel against still air at up to 5km it then becomes 125watts to travel at 25km.
An average person can deliver about 100watts leg power for a sustained period.100 J per second
The best of the Bosch systems can store 500watt hrs , and the minimal assistance level eco mode is 100% . The max is 250% So it should allow the person to travel on flat ground in still air at the legal max 25km for maybe 5 hours .
The total energy stored in the battery is about 1.8MJ.
But the air is not still , there are hills on the road , and a cyclist stops and starts , so each of these will cut into this potential distance.
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If you are looking for range the Bosch 500 battery is poor unless you run it on eco assist or at the most tour.Riese and Muller have a bike in their range that has two Bosch 500 batteries in the frame but it has a very high price tag.
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