Another new TQ motor: hpr40

[Stefan Mikes]

Very helpful, thanks. Any idea of how the Mahle X-20 drive compares (not sure what value you use for cadence on a hub drive...)

The issue with the hub-drive motor is we don't know the reference angular speed. As @mschwett was explaining, the X20 motor has a good torque when it spins fast, that is, on the flat. The steeper the climb is and the slower you ride, the slower the hub-drive motor spins, losing its torque. That's why geared hub-drive motors are poor climbers.

 

[apctjb]

The issue with the hub-drive motor is we don't know the reference angular speed. As @mschwett was explaining, the X20 motor has a good torque when it spins fast, that is, on the flat. The steeper the climb is and the slower you ride, the slower the hub-drive motor spins, losing its torque. That's why geared hub-drive motors are poor climbers.

Like choosing a cadence for mid drive could one choose a average speed for doing the calculation (say 10kmh)?

 

[Stefan Mikes]

That’s probably why we rarely see the actual test parameters and data.

I understand Specialized motors very well, especially as Specialized gives the peak power for each motor together with the marketing torque value. It is clear that Specialized uses 60 rpm as the reference (Yamaha does the same). Therefore, the listed torque values for SL motors are fair enough. When it comes to full power motors, Specialized marketing says 50, 70 and 90 Nm. However, these figures are 68, 75 and 90 Nm.

Fancy you are choosing between three differently priced e-bike models. You look at the 50, 70, and 90 Nm specifications. Which e-bike would you choose? Not the most expensive? While it turns out the weakest motor declared as 50 Nm is actually almost 70 Nm strong!

Like choosing a cadence for mid drive could one choose a average speed for doing the calculation (say 10kmh)?

There are several aspects of using a mid-drive as an excellent climber:

• If a low gearing can be used, the rider can pedal at a very high cadence even at a very low e-bike speed. That makes the mid-drive motor very efficient. Most of electrical power will be converted into the mechanical power at low losses to the heat
• For gearing ratio < 1:1 (alpine or MTB), the torque at the rear wheel will be amplified. That's why e-MTBs often have a (say) 34T chainring but a 51T "granny" cassette sprocket. The gearing here would be 34/51 = 0.667, the reciprocal being 1.5x, meaning 1.5 times amplification of the rider + motor torque on the rear wheel
• If the rider can spin the crank on climbing, often a high leg power can be delivered.

Examples:
-- The Bosch SX is a lightweight motor of derated peak power, designed for use with gravel and road e-bikes. In case the rider can pedal at the cadence of >100 rpm and a special assistance mode (SPRINT) is used, the motor will unleash its full 600 W of peak power if the rider also provides enough own leg power
-- Recently, I was riding along my friend riding a Bosch Performance e-bike. Her motor peak power was twice of what I had on my Specialized SL 1.1 motor. If we pedalled similarly, she was obviously faster than I on climbs. However, I once dramatically downshifted and mustered a cadence of 129 (it is a very high cadence). My max leg power reached 417 W, and the motor was saturated at 240 W. I just "smoked" my friend on that climb! It was as if I were lifted by an elevator up that hill!

The issue with the hub-drive motor is it hates spinning slowly. There is no relationship between your drivetrain and the motor. As your speed drops, the hub motor efficiency and torque drop as much as you can only recover by putting a very high leg power of yours (that was what @mschwett was talking about earlier).

 

[stompandgo]

Wow that is great stuff! I had a long phone call with the ‘40 Product Manager at TQ last week, trying to sort out those crazy claims of their customer services person, and one of the things I also wanted to check was whether they had addressed the derating that the HPR50 was known for. She said not only had the case design changed, to allow for greater cooling, but that also the 40 produced considerably less heat as it is rated at 200w and they had seen no derating in their testing. That would up the efficiency considerably. I’ll be looking out for Testmybike’s review of that one!

Did TQ give you any idea of what the future of the HPR50 looks like? Will there be further firmware/software improvements going forward?

 

[mschwett]

one very easy way to observe how fairly simple this is is to ride your bike up a known steady grade at fairly low speed with power pedals or cranks. below 10mph and above 5% grade you can basically disregard aerodynamic drag, and the differences between tires of the same general type are not too significant. do it when it’s not super windy.

i have very detailed topo files for the entire city i live in, and have ridden my s-works aethos, my scott addict e-ride (x20), and turbo creo up many of these hills hundreds of times. i’ve found bikecalculator.com to be quite accurate. if it tells you that it takes 250w to go up a 5% grade at 10mph, and your (human) power meter shows 150w average for that segment at 10mph average, it’s not rocket science to know the motor contributed 100w. it’s also interesting to check the power usage on your bike’s app (most allow you to very easily see wh used and time for a ride) to arrive at a rough estimate of the motor’s efficiency in this particular situation, which i have usually found to be in the 70-80% range for the three motors i’ve looked at - a bafang front hub, the specialized SL 1, and the x20. it would be a pretty major fail if the TQ HPR motors are as inefficient as that chart from the report shows - i feel like i’m missing something there, like we all were about the “drag/damage when off” issue.

as mentioned before, this all goes completely out the window at higher speeds where the collective nuance of rider position, kit, wheels, tires, frame aero, etc all contribute a ton to how much work it takes, interacting in complex ways with effective yaw angle, pavement condition, etc etc. one could spend a lifetime fooling with these parameters.

 

[apctjb]

Great appreciate all the responses and help wrapping my head around some of the concepts. I think I am getting it but let me summarize a few things to make sure.

Assuming a 70 kg rider on a 10 kg bike climbs an 8% grade at 8 mph (3.58 m/s), the total power required is approximately 250 W (ignoring wind, road conditions, etc.) If the rider supplies half and the motor provides the other half (about 125 W), and you start with a 290 Wh battery (derated by 10% for BMS/wiring losses and 65% motor efficiency, giving 170 Wh usable at the wheel), battery runtime is 170 Wh ÷ 125 W ≈ 1.4 hours. At 8 mph, this equates to 8 mph × 1.4 hr = 11 miles (17.5 km) of continuous climbing at that speed and grade.

Am I in the right ballpark, and does that range estimate correlate to what those of you with road ebikes are experiencing? This is far less range than I was thinking...

 

[mschwett]

Great appreciate all the responses and help wrapping my head around some of the concepts. I think I am getting it but let me summarize a few things to make sure.

Assuming a 70 kg rider on a 10 kg bike climbs an 8% grade at 8 mph (3.58 m/s), the total power required is approximately 250 W (ignoring wind, road conditions, etc.) If the rider supplies half and the motor provides the other half (about 125 W), and you start with a 290 Wh battery (derated by 10% for BMS/wiring losses and 65% motor efficiency, giving 170 Wh usable at the wheel), battery runtime is 170 Wh ÷ 125 W ≈ 1.4 hours. At 8 mph, this equates to 8 mph × 1.4 hr = 11 miles (17.5 km) of continuous climbing at that speed and grade.

Am I in the right ballpark, and does that range estimate correlate to what those of you with road ebikes are experiencing? This is far less range than I was thinking...

in concept, yes. for the bikes i’ve owned the overall system efficiency is closer to 80% than your 58%, so more like 1.85 hrs to toast the battery completely, which at 8mph is 15 miles straight up an 8% grade… that’s 6,300 feet of climbing, or up Mt Diablo (near san francisco) TWICE. that’s a big ride, and in practice not all that common. and of course you’d get to come down for free, so 30 miles and 6,000 feet of climbing is certainly possible. for reference, most people around here consider a road ride “hard” if there’s 100 feet of climbing per mile. this example is twice that!

 

[apctjb]

for the bikes i’ve owned the overall system efficiency is closer to 80% than your 58%, so more like 1.85 hrs to toast the battery completely, which at 8mph is 15 miles straight up an 8% grade… that’s 6,300 feet of climbing, or up Mt Diablo (near san francisco) TWICE. that’s a big ride, and in practice not all that common. and of course you’d get to come down for free, so 30 miles and 6,000 feet of climbing is certainly possible. for reference, most people around here consider a road ride “hard” if there’s 100 feet of climbing per mile.

Thanks, the additional context of 6000 vertical is super helpful reality check. Does the 80% system efficiency you mention include battery derate/losses plus motor losses? That is more in line with my initial assumptions but the 65% efficiency being mentioned for the TQ had me rethinking about what type of range to expect. And yes most of the rides I do around here are 40-50 miles with 3000-4000 elevation gain (+20 miles of grinding up, some rolling stuff and 20miles mostly downhill on the way back.)

 

[mschwett]

Thanks, the additional context of 6000 vertical is super helpful reality check. Does the 80% system efficiency you mention include battery derate/losses plus motor losses? That is more in line with my initial assumptions but the 65% efficiency being mentioned for the TQ had me rethinking about what type of range to expect. And yes most of the rides I do around here are 40-50 miles with 3000-4000 elevation gain (+20 miles of grinding up, some rolling stuff and 20miles mostly downhill on the way back.)

those are nice rides, that was kind of my sweet spot too, 50-60 miles and 3000-5000 feet.

you don’t want to arrive home at 0% (and most systems will stop putting out full power before that) so another 5% is good. other losses are not meaningful.

i once rode almost a hundred miles on my creo with the motor turned off but the electronics turned on, for ride recording and the other internal meters and i think it used 1%!

compare that to our electric car, which routinely sucks up 5-10% of the total usage for electronics!!!

 

[apctjb]

those are nice rides, that was kind of my sweet spot too, 50-60 miles and 3000-5000 feet

Can your Addict eRide with X-20 and ~236Whr battery make a ride like that providing 100W assist on the climb or would that require an extender battery?

 

[mschwett]

Can your Addict eRide with X-20 and ~236Whr battery make a ride like that providing 100W assist on the climb or would that require an extender battery?

yes, but only if you only use the assist on the climb. using assist on flats just makes you go marginally faster at a high energy cost.

if you use strava and a power meter (a real one, not their estimate) you can see the total energy of a human powered ride and spitball what level of motor power would be sustainable over the same course, and reduce the human contribution accordingly.

here’s an example in that ballpark

this ride was on my aethos but happens to be the exact same power meter i now have on my addict, so the numbers i see riding the addict are identical.

the addict is 10lb heavier but let’s ignore that - it’s also a bit more aero. if i wanted to do that ride on the addict with just the internal battery, the average power can only be about 50w. (236 x .8)/3.8 hrs. but use no power on the flats or descending, and 100w for the roughly 1.5 hours of actual climbing works out well! the difference between a rider supplying 200+w and 100w is the difference between a hard effort and virtually no effort at all.

you’ll start to get into trouble going uphill on pavement with this type of bike if >200lb and <150w, IMO. totally unsuitable for the much steeper grades of MTB.

 

[mschwett]

i’ll add that canyon uses roughly the same 6,000 foot metric that we arrived at in their literature, noting that the range extender exists to let you exceed it….

Alpine classics, all-day forays … every dream ride is within reach. With TQ’s 160-watt hour range extender nestled in your water bottle cage, rides in excess of 100 kilometers (and with more than 2000 metres of climbing), are here for the taking. Go big. You are now free to roam.

 

[Calcoaster]

If anyone hasn’t watched Yako’s canyon review with the hpr40 here’s a link. He has a couple more but this one is him testing it out on a long ride.

 

[mschwett]

Cool review. It appears he used about 75% of the range extender (100wh ISH) tooling around and then getting to the top of a 1300’ (or so) climb. More or less tracks with what you’d expect, depending on how much he used before going up. He also notes that he did it on level 2, but i don’t think he mentioned what power level he was seeing.

the bit about it having to learn your pedal style better to not cut the motor when it shouldn’t is concerning.

 

[Yako]

Did TQ give you any idea of what the future of the HPR50 looks like? Will there be further firmware/software improvements going forward?

Our chat was limited to the HPR40, ‘her baby’, I’m afraid.

 

[Yako]

Cool review. It appears he used about 75% of the range extender (100wh ISH) tooling around and then getting to the top of a 1300’ (or so) climb. More or less tracks with what you’d expect, depending on how much he used before going up. He also notes that he did it on level 2, but i don’t think he mentioned what power level he was seeing.

the bit about it having to learn your pedal style better to not cut the motor when it shouldn’t is concerning.

Thank you. Obviously these were just initial thoughts. Things are very skewed for others looking at my data - despite various ails I’m fairly fit, but over 250lbs…but unfortunately I have good and bad days where I use more or less assist. At least there will be ride data for a minimum of 6 weeks, over similar routes with lots of climbing, for when I compare the X20 and the HPR40.
I currently have level 2 set to 130w in the app, but there’s no access to power readings from the motor in the app.
A question about the X20 - the power meter readings in the Mahle app, of both motor output and rider input watts - are these software estimates, not from a physical power meter? Or might the Gain M10i have more bells and whistles?
For those of you with the X20, did you ever see a motor wattage over 214w? I didn’t…of course, the way the wattage is measured could be inaccurate.
The explanation as the the motor ‘blips’ seemed convincing - more importantly, they are now already rare, so perhaps some credence can be given to their interactive software claims.
May I also thank you all for helping me understand these systems better! Did you all notice from the graph that the HPR50 output peaked at around 65rpm and remained fairly level before finally dropping again? Is such a broad levelling off normal?

 

[stompandgo]

While @stompandgo is a fine and nice guy, we have known @mschwett from his best side for several years now. Mark in an accomplished road cyclist who has owned many analog bikes and e-bikes, and was always approaching cycling from the engineering and scientific side; he was not interested in how a human would provide their watts but how many watts were required to accomplish the goal.

Mark has helped me a lot with planning for my hilly gravel races. It was him to make me aware the rider and the e-bike must provide enough combined power to allow climbing up a certain grade at a certain speed. The gearing ratio -- he correctly reasoned -- was only to provide the necessary cadence so the e-bike motor could run at the max efficiency. Additionally, a rider who could muster a high cadence, was expected to deliver more leg power to the cranks than a slow "grinder".

I respect @stompandgo as an experienced road cyclist and a coach as well as his expertise in the bicycle mechanics.

You two should shake your hands and become friends instead of going to war and Ignore.

Signed:
The one who is the most quarrelsome person on these Fora (except his sworn enemies)

You know, Stefan, you're right. I don't know @mschwett or his background at all. Besides, he's just thinking out loud with math. If someone makes the mistake of taking his numbers as universal gospel, who am I to say. It's on them, not @mschwett.

What caused my reaction is my experience with this chart.

It's based on a bunch of empirical data, but I can't tell you how many times I've had to tell a rider who thinks they should be allowed to upgrade their category because of the numbers in this chart. It's way, way more than that.

Anyway, I apologize to @mschwett for blocking him. My list is empty.

 

[Chazmo]

Great stuff, @Yako . But, you really need to figure out how to look at your brake light while riding!

 

[Yako]

Great stuff, @Yako . But, you really need to figure out how to look at your brake light while riding!

I’ll begin combat yoga classes immediately.

 

[mschwett]

Thank you. Obviously these were just initial thoughts. Things are very skewed for others looking at my data - despite various ails I’m fairly fit, but over 250lbs…but unfortunately I have good and bad days where I use more or less assist. At least there will be ride data for a minimum of 6 weeks, over similar routes with lots of climbing, for when I compare the X20 and the HPR40.
I currently have level 2 set to 130w in the app, but there’s no access to power readings from the motor in the app.
A question about the X20 - the power meter readings in the Mahle app, of both motor output and rider input watts - are these software estimates, not from a physical power meter? Or might the Gain M10i have more bells and whistles?
For those of you with the X20, did you ever see a motor wattage over 214w? I didn’t…of course, the way the wattage is measured could be inaccurate.
The explanation as the the motor ‘blips’ seemed convincing - more importantly, they are now already rare, so perhaps some credence can be given to their interactive software claims.
May I also thank you all for helping me understand these systems better! Did you all notice from the graph that the HPR50 output peaked at around 65rpm and remained fairly level before finally dropping again? Is such a broad levelling off normal?

i didn’t realize that was your review ! fantastic and thank you for producing it, lots of work no doubt.

the rider input number in the mahle app is total nonsense, it comes from some kind of sensor in the bottom bracket and is way off. i can say this pretty definitively since i moved the dura-ace crank from my aethos to the addict with the dual-sided 4iiii power meter that it had, so i can see both values. before that, i also put a single side power meter on the left crank arm that came with the bike, and those two both matched each other in similar situations as well as the predictions. so i’m pretty certain that at least my x20 bottom bracket reads very, very low at low cadences, and just randomly low at normal cadences and low power, and arbitrarily low or high at very high power outputs.

on the x20 i have never seen a motor reading over 205w, which is part of why i believe it’s output, not the electrical input. the sensor list for the x20 also mentions a “motor torque” sensor so this value may actually be measured, rather than estimated from electrical usage and known efficiency curves.

sunday, after this thread, i rode up some pretty shallow hills to see if going uphill at speeds between 15 and 20 mph on full power would get to 250w, but i still didn’t see over 205.