About a month ago I started jumping on a bike to get to and from work. I haven’t been on a bike in more than a decade. I had affectionately referred to my donated Raleigh Triumph mountain bike as “ditch bike” as I’m certain my uncle found it in a trash pickup day on the side of the road. The rides downtown were great! But Sackville - It’s a hilly place, and the ride back is all up hill. I realized quickly on the rides back home that I’m very out of shape. So after a few weeks of doing that, I decided to grab a couple electric bikes for my wife and I.
I did a bunch of research, and decided on a roughly $1000 per bike budget. The primary use case is daily transit - To and from the office, downtown for a few groceries, going out, etc - never really much further than a few kilometres from home. Most importantly though, I still wanted a bike that looked and felt like a bike, but flattened out the Sackville hills.
There’s surprisingly not a lot of tangible information online regarding how various motors perform on hills. There’s discourse all over the internet telling you that you need super powerful 1000w motor and a giant 48v battery if you want to do anything beyond a slight incline.
I decided to take a gamble on a 350w 36v battery model with the brand HeyBike - I grabbed a combo pack of two of their CityScape bikes, for roughly $1800 shipped to door. These stood out vs others in a similar price range with features like headlight/tail light, a throttle, and disc brakes. The design is also super clean - so props to that!
Assembly was very easy - I had both bikes together and running in about half an hour, and I immediately took one of them on a romp around the neighborhood. Pretty much all of my concerns related to hills were null and void after about 15 minutes biking around, up and down hills, around the block. Taking them out that night for roughly 25 kilometres of cycling around town really cemented that too - We tested all the hills around town that gave us trouble with regular bikes and had no issues.
My only comments would be that customer service email was a bit slow… I can see this as being an issue in the future potentially, but for now I’ll put it on sending them emails during their anniversary sale.
This has been a really pleasant experience overall. The ride to and from work now is about 5 minutes door-to-door, and I arrive on both sides sweat-free and not out of breath, but still feeling like I moved my body. I’m actively looking for reasons to get out for a ride too!