Hey George and Ravi, thanks for the perspective. I think you're right about each shop doing it differently with regard to pricing. With any online purchase there's the added effort of time spent communicating and confirming a purchase, the risk associated with buying direct overseas, waiting for the shipment and possibly delays if it is sent improperly due to large Lithium battery regulations, assembling it yourself and dealing with maintenance and warranties down the road.
George, it sounds like your local bike shops offer great service if a tuneup is only $35. In Austin the lowest quotes I got were $80 and there were lines with waiting periods ranging from three days to a week. I personally dislike assembling ebikes (and really the whole experience of hauling the giant box around... I've also struggled with being home when the package arrives!) My full time job made it difficult but also provided the money to just buy one from a dealer. I felt pretty good about paying more for their services and felt like I made friends, they even helped me sell the bikes later when upgrading etc.
However you come by your electric bike, it's a neat piece of technology and I love that they are getting better and cheaper. As you may know, my first ebike was purchased online and it was a bad experience. Everything I mentioned above plus trying to resell a product that nobody around me on Craigslist had ever heard of. The shops wouldn't touch it and I knew I didn't have the parts or experience to fix it myself so I always felt scared riding it. I'm glad your bikes have turned out so well and with the right resources I think you can find good stuff! My experience happened before there was an ElectricBikeReview to visit or a forum to get this kind of help in (I didn't know much about Endless Sphere at the time and when I eventually did discover it, it seemed mostly like modding and kits).
Hi Court,
Well, Ravi is the driving force behind this community and he always brings a lot of depth to the discussion.
I think when I found the Sphere forum, it started to change my perspective. At first I though ebikes were pretty complicated, and there are elements that get complex. The integration of the two drive systems is difficult. Flykly, which still has no product, claims they will use the computing power in a smart phone to work this out. The upscale mid-drive systems are supposed to be super smooth. I think Toyota, with Hybrid Synergy, kind of defined this problem in cars, although I don’t think a Prius has pedals.
That aside, I was surprised that hub motors cost just a few hundred dollars, and they are generally thought to be reliable. I can point you to a video showing how to take a regular bike and turn it into an ebike in an hour:
http://www.electricbike.com/one-hour-electric-bike-conversion/
Now I’ve studied people who take old (light and cheap cars) and convert them to electric, generally with fork lift motors. You want complicated? And there is real danger here, with huge battery packs.
Maybe the toughest area is the battery systems. The building block is almost always the 18650 cell configuration. But, from there you have to cope with different chemistries, weights, and types of packs. A no-brand (from China) cell might cost a couple of dollars versus a Panasonic that you find for a multiple of the price. Since a pack may have 50 cells, it adds up pretty fast. I’ve dealt with battery chargers, solar controllers, and power supplies. I can generally follow a set of rules for battery types. But I honestly don’t know how much a battery pack costs, because I don’t know what the best choice is.
Even so, I think you could procure a decent bike for what I paid for mine, maybe $450. You might want to go with a different configuration. The disk brakes might get in the way. There are torque issues, so maybe a mountain bike frame is stronger. There are choices in that price range, even at Costco, the LBS, or Dicks.
So the $400 frame is in the garage. Your hub motor wheel shows up. I’d go with a low power system because I still want to do most of the work. I want help, but nothing more. That wheel is maybe $250. You buy a $400 battery pack. You buy the controller and the other parts you need, maybe for $200. You can get kits with ‘everything’, and all the parts and connectors mate. I may have left something out, but this seems to total $1300. If you happen to have a bike lying around, or you scrounge one from somewhere, you can probably save a lot there. If you buy an integrated kit, and roll the dice on a less than brand name battery pack (not a lead system) you could maybe squeak through for a thousand. I’m using a new bike you buy to build.
Anyway, lets say this is not a real lesson, but a benchmarking exercise. We aren’t going to build. We want one box. (BTW My UPS has some nice scheduling features for their deliveries.) Basically, if I can build a bike in this range, a manufacturer or a wholesale importer should be a bit lower. He’s a quantity buyer. But he has another markup, on a finished bike.
So after doing this, I was wondering why the Neo Cross is a $3000 bike. It’s better, I’m sure, and more refined, but I doubt the basic bike as a frame and components is that much better. The answer really seems to be that the $2800 bikes have a $1000 markup. And this is borne out by the prices wholesale dealers are offering, at least to some people. It’s an information age.
You can go at the thing from the other direction and ask “Well, who is assembling bikes (or having it done it China) but then charging a lower markup.” You are then asking who has few or no dealers, or a different kind of dealer. No dealers = Ebay = Web Direct, etc. I think Hebb started out with models that were engineered for him in China, and then he just went with a rebranded Chinese bike. I can’t say this was successful, or that his margins were lower. The bikes don’t seem to be available. Prodeco claims to assemble their bikes in the US, but I’m sure the drive parts are Chinese. The other parts appear to be decent. Volton seems to sell Chinese bikes at a fairly low markup.
Prodeco is listed as one of the high volume manufacturers on one of the business sites. I don’t have any numbers. Prodeco got in a lot of trouble with some support struts. I don’t know how it dragged on as long as it did. I don’t know if the problem is fixed. It’s discouraging, but it can happen. My guess is that warranty costing is almost impossible in a fledgling industry. Guess wrong and there goes the company. (I don’t know if Pedego or Prodeco was first but one sounds a lot like the other.)
Prodeco seems to have lower margins than the top tier vendors. Volton prices are not too far from assembly costs. There seem to be parts of the Volton bikes that are Chinese spec. You can’t get the part easily. I would avoid having Chinese proprietary parts at all costs. It’s what you get when you buy the $89 generator from Harbor Freight, and it means if something small goes wrong, you’re out of luck. I hope Volton gets out from under that little episode at Sphere. I wish they would do enough labor on their bikes to insure everything but the drivetrain is world standard parts, not local Chinese parts.
I’m in the market for plain vanilla. I like to ride, but I can see advantages to a motor. I’ve lost a step, maybe a whole staircase. I don’t like performance. If you look at the drag curve for bikes, you’re in deep trouble over about 15mph. The energy in the battery is going to move air molecules. How much of the energy? Well, maybe 80%. Is that really ‘green’? But I’m just not in a hurry. So I figure a nice bike with a 250 watt motor should be OK. I’m stuck on the battery, but with a warranty, I can roll the dice. I think I can carry stuff with a trailer, and the trailers carry a lot. People put their kids in bike trailers.
Maybe Prodeco and Volton, others who tend to sell on the Web, can get the kinks worked out, get a reputation that works for them. Prodeco seems to understand what parts work. It’s tough to just bring in a Chinese bike. Too many issues, especially down the road.
I don’t know why all the bike dealers (regular bikes) don’t get together and make a plain vanilla ebike in a couple of configurations and sizes. It doesn’t have to look bland. It would be like a ‘house brand’ for LBS facilities. They could make sure it is a bike they could fix, world parts. They could have a cooperative parts facility to rebuild drivetrains. They might want to try the Chinese mid-drive, but the hubs are more proven. Maybe they should just do conversions in the shop, or offer a bike as a bike, or an ebike. For finished bikes, they could do a hybrid and an MTB. If they had a few hundred bike shops signed on they, as a large group, could control the assembly. I think they could use a Chinese drive and everything else would be about like any bike. And, finally, if they marked it up maybe $200?
Walmart could do this. Home Depot could do this. Dicks or Big 5 could do this. There’s more in it for the LBS because they need maintenance dollars.
Best,
George
