Finally a rival of Juiced? Surface 604 Shred

Timpo

Well-Known Member
What do you think?

Top Speed: 32mph (52km/h) 😲

Until now, (in my opinion) Juiced was kind of in class of its own, Juiced offered high performance for affordable price.
Yes, I know you could probably find something like Juiced on Alibaba / AliExpress but that's a little different.

The EBR YouTube review showed that the top speed is adjustable up to 60km/h (37mph).
(Doesn't mean it will actually go up to 37mph)

For 2020, all the other Surface 604 bikes come with 12MOSFET 25A controller, maybe they're stepping up their game?
 
This does look very promising. A 27.5" 2.4"-2.8" model is the sweet spot for a high speed commuter bike, a configuration Juiced has ignored. That stem is dopey and I could do without a suspension, but that stuff is easy to change (though I'd love to see a model that comes stock with a setup like, much like a Stromer). There's a good chance you could wipe out the CCS/CCX/RCS models and replace it with something like this. One city model with fenders, rigid fork, downward stem and slick tires, and then an MTB version with the opposite. Maybe a 2.4" tire for city, 2.8" for MTB.


The changes I'm proposing aren't hard, it's a matter of swapping out parts on the existing CCX frame, but Juiced seems to never show much interest in parts changes for existing models, beyond the electric drivetrain, except when it caused ubiquitous parts failures lol like the spokes.

I started a thread in the general forum about how there are no decent commuter speed pedelecs with good value besides Juiced. Hopefully this will change soon.

Amego makes a decent model though: https://www.amegoev.com/amego-amego-infinite.html
 
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What do you think?

Top Speed: 32mph (52km/h) 😲

Until now, (in my opinion) Juiced was kind of in class of its own, Juiced offered high performance for affordable price.
Yes, I know you could probably find something like Juiced on Alibaba / AliExpress but that's a little different.

The EBR YouTube review showed that the top speed is adjustable up to 60km/h (37mph).
(Doesn't mean it will actually go up to 37mph)

For 2020, all the other Surface 604 bikes come with 12MOSFET 25A controller, maybe they're stepping up their game?
The acceleration on this Shred is unparalleled from any other ebike. Very powerful motor, coupled with nice controller. The throttle also does not stop at 20 mph. I've hit 31.8 mph. Not too fun when it's below 30f.
 
Looks interesting. Would need to test ride one. I had a Surface 604 Rook as a loaner bike from my shop and, despite having a torque sensor, it rode like a cadence sensing bike which is a deal breaker for me personally.
 
Amego is great, but it has 18A 9Mosfet controller. Performance wise, I don't think it can go 30+mph like Juiced or Surface 604.

The Juiced has 20A 9Mosfet for CCS and 25A 9Mosfet for CCX.

But the Surface 604 has 25A 12Mosfet, which is superior to CCX on paper.

Stromer is great, but it's expensive (why Juiced was in the class of its own, no competitors in similar price range) and has no suspension.
I know Stromer is trying to go for clean design and all that, but no suspension for a commuter bike? I don't know about that.

There's a reason the big boys have ditched suspensions. Trek, Specialized, Stromer. I put a rigid Salsa fork on my CCS. Made the bike way more agile and a 2.4" tire absorbs the bumps. Try it.
 
The acceleration on this Shred is unparalleled from any other ebike. Very powerful motor, coupled with nice controller. The throttle also does not stop at 20 mph. I've hit 31.8 mph. Not too fun when it's below 30f.

Really ? Isn't it powered by the ubiquitous Bafang Hub drive ? What do they do differently ?
 
Actually, I have.

I have a Juiced CrossCurrent Air, which came with mechanical disc brake, rigid fork, along with bunch of budget conscious components.

I later upgraded to suspension fork, made my commute so much better.
The Air had 45c tires, which has somewhere around 50-60% of the air volume a 60c tire would have. Plus Juiced rims are too narrow for 45c, let alone 60c.
 
I'm not sure how it goes so fast with a 500 w motor. I'm skeptical.
It does look like a good bike.

I also think Frey is a contender, but there are fewer buyers in USA.
 
I'm know I'm the minority here, but I don't put wider tires like other Juiced owners do.

I have 700 x 35c tires. Usually Continental or Michelin.
I tried Schwalbe Marathon Plus, but it was heavy, had poor grip, expensive, poor durability, maybe I had a lemon, I don't know.

Yeah, the Marathon Plus ride quality is awful, it's only virtue is puncture protection. Juiced also doesn't kit its bikes with tubeless ready rims and tires (like the Jamis Sequel), so you can have puncture protection with a quality ride. And there's no bigger promoter of tubeless than Marathon's maker Schwalbe.

The Schwalbe G-One Speed has a terrific ride - light, supple, low friction. Supposedly the durability is lower, but you'll still get thousands of miles. You want to order from Germany though, since they have crazy markup in North America, ~$35-40 vs $80. The Almotion and Supreme lines look promising too.
 
Until now, (in my opinion) Juiced was kind of in class of its own, Juiced offered high performance for affordable price.

They still are. No one else offers a 52volt, 1K watt hour battery.

Yup. How are 27.5" x 2.8" wheels/tires, small diameter ?
Awesome ride. Like it better than any fat tire ebike out there, and most MTBs, though its really just a great road/hybrid bike (for our rough Illinois roads replete with all sorts of potholes,crumbling cement,pavement cracks, hotpatches, misplaced sewer covers,and tar bumps everywhere) that also does nice on trails. Regular road tires less than 2" wide, are 'cyclecide' on many of our roads here. Cadence seems fine to me.

I like 650b's as well, but rather ridiculous to claim that you need 2" tires minimum on city streets.

I commuted for nearly 10 years on 23c tires. I still ride on 30c tires. This is where riding skills come in. You should always be alert, looking far ahead, anticipating traffic, scanning road conditions. Keep your elbows bent to absorb shock. Choose the proper line well in advance. Stand up and/or bunny hop where necessary.

Most of my commuting these days is on a 40 lbs city bike with two panniers and rack bag rolling on 30c's. The largest tire I ride is 1.5" 26" tires. And the roads locally are in pretty awful shape. So are the paved trails actually.
 
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Yup. How are 27.5" x 2.8" wheels/tires, small diameter ?
Awesome ride. Like it better than any fat tire ebike out there, and most MTBs, though its really just a great road/hybrid bike (for our rough Illinois roads replete with all sorts of potholes,crumbling cement,pavement cracks, hotpatches, misplaced sewer covers,and tar bumps everywhere) that also does nice on trails. Regular road tires less than 2" wide, are 'cyclecide' on many of our roads here. Cadence seems fine to me.

This is where bike riding skills come into play.

Keep your elbows bent to absorb unanticipated shock.
Scan the road surface and traffic continually several car lengths ahead.
Use your mirror and/or look behind you.
Ride defensively.
Learn to bunny hop or at least get up off the saddle w/serious potholes just in case.

I commuted on a road bike with drop bars and 700x23c tires for nearly a decade. Road surface conditions were abysmal. But I enjoyed the huge speed advantage of a 21 lbs road bike on skinny tires vs a mountain bike or city bike.

Riding on narrow-ish tires isn't just doable, it's a lot of fun. The raw speed is addicting. Even fat 4" tires transmit a lot of shock on a hardtail over bigger bumps, especially if the tires are inflated to minimize rolling resistance. The only way to truly minimize shock is to go with full suspension, and that means significantly more maintenance and weight and compromises your ability to load a real rack.

Obviously Surface 604 and Juiced have some differences.

But what I meant was that people that are looking for cheap high performance commuter might cross-shop between Surface 604 and Juiced.

It doesn't matter if the bike had 52V or 48V.
Would you pick a 52V that's restricted 20mph over 32mph 48V Surface 604?

I comparing them by the performance.

You might disagree, but I think that 25A 12MOSFET equipped Surface 604 bikes are worthy rival for Juiced.

Are prospective customers cross shopping? Yeah, absolutely. I'm one of them. But juiced has a clear marketing edge for two reasons:

-a 52 volt battery
-superior range at this price range

The surface604 looks like a great bike. The wheel size in particular appeals to me. 650b+ strikes a nice compromise between fat tires and 1.8" 700c or whatever width juiced uses on it's ccx/s.

I'm sure both bikes are very fast with the fastest top end in the industry for "class 3" or whatever these bikes actually are. The reality is, juiced has generated enormous buzz and has been the superior player in the marketing game.

Which is frustrating since the shred seems like a quality product which is very under-appreciated. I don't know why surface604 is so lax with it's marketing. They seem far less aggressive and seem to generate little buzz in internet discussions. That's not necessarily a reflection of actual sales figures, but if we were to extrapolate/guesstimate sales figures based upon internet discussion alone, we'd have to conclude that juiced seems to be winning out in a big way.
 
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I commuted for nearly 10 years on 23c tires. I still ride on 30c tires. This is where riding skills come in. You should always be alert, looking far ahead, anticipating traffic, scanning road conditions. Keep your elbows bent to absorb shock. Choose the proper line well in advance. Stand up and/or bunny hop where necessary.

While you evidently like having your wits tested, to the point of risking injury daily lest your senses fail you, this is not for everyone, not for most people I daresay. It's also an approach to bicycle design that ensures the use of bicycles remains a marginal, niche activity. Which in turn puts you in danger, because society won't build safe places to ride when it's only a few doing it.

Imagine...
I commute daily on 60c tires. I don't have to always be alert, keeping my elbows bent with my eyes glued on the pavement.

There will be a time when your senses fail you - due to age or simple momentary inattention - and a more forgiving bike may be the difference between injury and mere nuisance.

Plus, when you aren't laser focused on the pavement nine inches ahead, you have more 'bandwidth' to look up, to where the cars, pedestrians and other cyclists are.
 
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While you evidently like having your wits tested, to the point of risking injury daily lest your senses fail you, this is not for everyone, not for most people I daresay. It's also an approach to bicycle design that ensures the use of bicycles remains a marginal, niche activity. Which in turn puts you in danger, because society won't build safe places to ride when it's only a few masochistic weirdos doing it.

Imagine...


There will be a time when your senses fail you - due to age or simple momentary inattention - and a more forgiving bike may be the difference between injury and mere nuisance.

Plus, when you aren't laser focused on the pavement nine inches ahead, you have more 'bandwidth' to look up, to where the cars, pedestrians and other cyclists are.

Conversely, e-bikes enable a population to get irredeemably fat, lazy, out of shape and immobile, and to rely exclusively on the technology: throttles and 1000 watt motors seem to be quite popular, eh? Which is exactly the direction we're headed in.

This is what's so frightening about e-bikes: I dare say 80% of the riders are elderly and borderline infirm. Take a look at the average age of the posters on this forum and their list of injuries and physical limitations. It's quite frightening.

Add to that take a look at statistics on bicycling fatalities. They continue to increase. Why is this?

There is no safety tech in place that protects an e-bike rider from automobile traffic. None. All you can rely on is your skill, defensive driving practices and some minimal level of athletic ability, definable as reaction time, strength, visual acuity, etc.

Defensive driving is your first and last line of defense. There are lots and lots of crashes being reported in this forum, by riders who are well into their retirement years.


There will be a time when your senses fail you - due to age or simple momentary inattention - and a more forgiving bike may be the difference between injury and mere nuisance.

Plus, when you aren't laser focused on the pavement nine inches ahead, you have more 'bandwidth' to look up, to where the cars, pedestrians and other cyclists are.

I'm in my 40's and my fitness level is probably in the top 10% of people in my age group. Which isn't saying very much. Even the thought of a tiny "climb" of 200 to 300 feet will have most people of any age shaking their head in exasperation. They can't even conceive of it. To me, this much climbing which only takes a couple of minutes is about as taxing as walking down the block, yet it's unfathomable to most people.
 
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There's a reason the big boys have ditched suspensions. Trek, Specialized, Stromer. I put a rigid Salsa fork on my CCS. Made the bike way more agile and a 2.4" tire absorbs the bumps. Try it.

E-bikes are so heavy, even a 4" tire pumped to psi's allowing for reasonably low rolling resistance won't reduce shock from bad roads to any appreciable degree. I've ridden e-bikes with 2" to 4" wide tires, and ebikes are always far more uncomfortable and transmit much more shock than a standard 20 to 30 lbs. bicycle with far narrower rubber.

As far as bicycle design, the size of a company doesn't ensure quality design. In fact, it can often ensure the opposite. Trek used to design some really nice bikes in the late 80's and 90's. Even into the 2000's, they still managed to produce some nice designs due in large part to Gary Fisher's input.

The company is so large now and cover so many different product lines, there is not a single model (bicycle, component or accessory) which is even remotely close to being the best or among the best. The trek powerfly for instance is probably my least favorite emtb I've ever ridden, and I've demo'ed at least 15 models if not more.

Their isospeed road bikes are just laughably overpriced and the tech is so bad it's silly. Redshift offers a superior suspension stem and seat post for a grand total of just $400 combined, yet their products surpass the performance of trek's isospeed which starts at $4K: 10x the price for inferior tech.

I have a lot more respect for Specialized but again product quality varies immensely. Their road bike geometry ime is among the best in the industry. They just get it right. From what I've read, their stumpjumper geometry has improved dramatically in the past year or two. However, as recently as 2015/16, the stump jumpers were notorious for suspension bob. There are lots of bikes with this problem, but they don't charge anywhere near the premium that specialized does. You can purchase a YT or GT or Fezzari with identical spec for thousands of dollars less.

Stromer of course is notorious for their lack of reliability and rock bottom customer service, easily the worst in the industry according to reports here. Not to mention, they aren't even a "big" company so they don't fit this definition at all.

I've been test riding and demoing Trek bikes on and off since 2009, and have owned multiple trek and Gary fisher road and mtb's since 1989, but I've been disappointed almost every time I've ridden a trek in the past 10 years.

Stromer isn't even a big company, and they put absolutely zero thought into frame geometry. Trek and Specialized design quality is spotty. Specialized has made some really nice road bikes recently (past 5 seasons or so) that I can vouch for, but their mtb's not so much. Trek has been pretty much a train wreck in design in most every product line for at least a decade, riding on the coat tails of their own brand prestige for at least that long. But Lance has long been disgraced and every other company has caught up to OCLV tech and surpassed it.

Bottom line is that none of the companies mentioned are industry leaders in design or performance. Not even close.

Their eschewing of suspension is simply a cost cutting measure that at least Trek and Specialized can afford to get away with because of the size of their companies.

On the mtb side, the best bikes are being designed by smaller boutique brands such as ibis, yeti, spot, and a few others. In terms of value, specialized and trek are getting trounced by direct to consumer companies such as yt, fezzari, spot, and many others.

2" tires supporting a 70 lbs e-bike isn't going to offer any meaningful shock absorption.
 
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Studies of ebiking have found owners actually get more exercise, and are people who would not have been biking otherwise.

People dying from riding are mostly getting killed by cars, solo deaths are pretty rare.

There aren't many 1k watt ebikes, and the old fogeys certainly aren't riding them, so you're just making that up.

I'm younger than you are, but you missed my point, which wasn't about me personally - but that an approach that requires all your wits at every moment will a) kill lots of people, as it already does, and b) exclude lots of people. Your response basically endorses this as a positive outcome.
 
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Conversely, e-bikes enable a population to get irredeemably fat, lazy, out of shape and immobile, and to rely exclusively on the technology: throttles and 1000 watt motors seem to be quite popular, eh? Which is exactly the direction we're headed in.

This is what's so frightening about e-bikes: I dare say 80% of the riders are elderly and borderline infirm. Take a look at the average age of the posters on this forum and their list of injuries and physical limitations. It's quite frightening.

Add to that take a look at statistics on bicycling fatalities. They continue to increase. Why is this?

There is no safety tech in place that protects an e-bike rider from automobile traffic. None. All you can rely on is your skill, defensive driving practices and some minimal level of athletic ability, definable as reaction time, strength, visual acuity, etc.

Defensive driving is your first and last line of defense. There are lots and lots of crashes being reported in this forum, by riders who are well into their retirement years.




I'm in my 40's and my fitness level is probably in the top 10% of people in my age group. Which isn't saying very much. Even the thought of a tiny "climb" of 200 to 300 feet will have most people of any age shaking their head in exasperation. They can't even conceive of it. To me, this much climbing which only takes a couple of minutes is about as taxing as walking down the block, yet it's unfathomable to most people.
I'm inclined to believe you but with that much trash talk you should back it up with a video of yourself climbing a hill of at least 500 feet without any e-assistance.
 
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