Even at the European street legal limit of 250W it makes acceleration trivial.
Some pedicab folks in Austin used to use them.
Hill climbing video YouTube https://share.google/iLrHXvjAKMO4esAux
Design info https://share.google/iLrHXvjAKMO4esAux
Mine sits between the pedals. That means I can just go down in gear and the motor helps with going up the hill.
That is a flaw in your ebike. Weird and dangerous.
This is somewhat overstated. Bafang middrive conversions fit on most frames with a BSA bottom bracket.
Pro of derailleur’s e-bikes: their price.
[waited long time to do that] - a former bike mechanist
edit: the problem with faster wear isn’t the risk to break but the decease in efficiency which will affect your motor health (heating) and batterie capacity. If you’re on a budget there’s a compromise: find your favorite gear and replace the derailleur and cassette with a single speed front and back sprockets (and chain). Beware that might not be adapted to hilly roads as GP environment.
This gets repeated a lot, but isn't true. Cheaply made single-speed and 6/7/8 chains aren't any more robust than nice modern 10 and 11-speed chains. Shimano CUES (11-speed) works fine for ebikes.
Belts are fine, but less efficient than well-maintained chains. And they require special frames with some way of breaking the rear triangle.
As for the chain you might be right, but a well maintained chain over time needs more work that many wants to invests. It’s an option for the hobbiest and sportmans but not for most of daily commuters which want something that just work, days after days and years after years.
Also, e bike users tends to user the higher speed way more than others so that sprocket wear off faster than others, accelerating wear even more. I’ve replaced many cassettes with all the speeds almost brand new and the faster one totally destroyed.
I covered 1 speed in my earlier comment (“single-speed”) too. There are some nice graphs at https://zerofrictioncycling.com.au/chaintesting/ (although that testing doesn’t cover single-speed chains).
> As for the chain you might be right, but a well maintained chain over time needs more work that many wants to invests.
Right! Totally reasonable to prefer not to maintain a chain.
But generally it's not the motor itself that's weak, it's just got a weak power supply (and potentially weak battery BMS. Some controllers tie phase amp output to battery amp input by some 2 to 2.5x multiplication ratio.)
Going from a generic KT 22A controller to a 35A KT will give over +50% torque. Up till the motor hits magnetic saturation, torque scales linearly with the amps. The thinnest kind of direct drive (27mm magnets) can hit 80-90nm too. Most of those are 30mm nowadays and can push 100nm tho.
On the geared hub motor side, the G062 (most 750w bikes use clones of it) can push 90nm before there's a risk of stripping nylon gears. Smaller ones like the G310 may strip gears earlier. These generally need less amps to produce torque than direct drive, so they work better with poor electrical systems.
Worth mentioning that wheel size matters for torque on hub motors. Larger wheels need more torque to climb (thrust). And also motor wattage doesn't mean much for torque (phase amps from the controller and gearing affect that even on bikes sold with the same wattage rating).
I also find the throttle gatekeeping or wattage gatekeeping a bit silly. Going 25kmh by throttle or peddling has no difference in how dangerous a cyclist is on the road. They should cap top speed and acceleration on throttles, but banning them outright unless someone is doing a minimum cycling motion on the pedals is a wrong regulatory approach and limits accessibility.
Throttles above 6kmh (walk assist) are banned across the whole of Europe. Judging by how heavily the Netherlands pushed for the EU-wide throttle ban, and putting my tin foil hat on, I can assume this was done as regulatory capture to ban Chinese ebikes from local stores, as they come with throttles and aren't usually capped at 25kmh on pedal assist. Netherlands produced ebikes are all pedal assist only, mid-drive, and have very poor batteries and electrical stuff for the (over 2x) price they're sold for. And now they have less competition. EU also has a 45% tariff on "e-bike part" imports...
I would also like a regulatory framework to register and insure a faster e-bike (as imo they should not cap wattage and cripple the hill climbing torque, only speed/acceleration) for adults. Right now you can only register one that has a license in EU. If you build your own, it can never be legal, even if you have a motorcycle license and want to insure it. This class of e-bike is impossible to drive legally right now.
L1-b class registration can technically do this, but it needs the bike to be registered in Europe. No e-bike has this. No manufacturers sell class L1-b e-bikes registered in the EU. Only some electric motorcycles afaik.