Hey Steve,
Indeed that was me!! Yes I did see what a wisper does, you have a sharp brain dude. Anyway, I will keep checking out various ebikes along holloway/archway road(only seen one ,yours, in the last two days), I will also visit that camden bike shop when I get the time.
I wish my Milan2 can go fast on manual, but the gears keep going 'loose' at certain speeds, i guess that is the cut off.
Is your wipsper easy to pedal? At the moment, every man and his dog is cycling faster than me and can't keep up with them however hard i cycled. I cycle faster on my manual MTB though
Regards
Motion
Motion,
Well the rules say something like the bike can only
assist up to 15mpg, and different bikes behave in different ways when you get up to that magic 15mph. Some have lots of power at 15mph and none at 15.1mph (not exact numbers but you get the picture), others start dropping off the power at say 14mph so that by the time you get to 15mph there is no assistance provided.
In practice the 2nd situation is often achieved by having the max throttle set so that if "no load" was applied the wheel would spin at 15mph, so as you approach 15mph you get less and less power. You will see reference to "de-restricting" bikes and some bikes (like mine) let you do that for off-road
use by pressing a button, this gives me the full power, which provides assist up to 17-18mph.
Above the max assist speed you are essentially pedalling the bike without power.
Anyway that's probably not what you're asking!!
I suspect you are asking what the bike is like to pedal without power, which is the case when your battery runs out or you go faster than "15"mph. In which case for most bikes (including the Wisper) the answer is it's pretty hard. So you can get the bikes up to 20mph or even 30mph, but it requires more effort than a "normal" bike would (or a nice hill).
There are a number of notable exceptions to this though, of which the best known are bikes powered by the Tongxin motor (for example the Cytronex bikes). This motor uses rollers instead of internal gears, and is known to have a much lower rolling resistance than other motors such as the Suzhou Bafang than the Wisper uses. However it trades that for not being as suitable for scootering along on throttle only and in particular standing starts. If you are an otherwise fit/healthy cyclist who just wants to take a bit of the effort out, then these types can make an excellent choice.
In terms of difficulty pedalling without pedalling you can group bikes into 3 catagories (in order of decreasing pedalling difficulty):
* Motors without a freewheel. Hard to pedal because you have to turn the motor. (I suspect but don't know that your Milan2 might be in this class)
* Motors with internal gears and a freewheel. You still have to turn the gears even if the freewheel means you don't have to turn the motor. (the Wisper, Mistral etc fall into this category)
* Tongxin based bikes. Just like motors with internal gears and freewheel, only the gears are rollers and have much less friction.
Are there any others with low friction like this?
I haven't included "drive thru the chain" based bikes such as the excellent Panasonic powered Khalkoff bikes in the above discussion. I'll leave that to others with more knowledge than me!
If your commute is 13miles each way I'd heartily recommend the Wisper bikes if you can stretch to them, aftersales support can only be described as astoundingly good. Otherwise the Synergie Mistral has many fans too.
Cheers
Steve
