So finally took the Sport on a ride I usually don't like taking with my regular bike. It's a nice paved trail except at the beginning there is this long incline. It's about a 7% grade just over a mile long and I'm usually looking for an extra lung midway through.
I actually got 1/3 up this long one and was thinking about trying it the whole way on 0 but the point was to test the ebike. So I put it in 1 and I could have left it there... very easy to pedal, seemed like there was no incline at all. I upped it to 2 and it was even easier... at 3 it was cheat mode because I was moving way faster than I should be... it was crazy how powerful a 500w motor could push uphill because I'm not a small guy. I was impressed.
It's interesting because the combinations of gears and PAS level really helps dictate the assist and really does flatten hills.
The rest of the ride has smaller inclines and then long downhill portions but I didn't use any PAS which surprised my wife because she thought I was using it on the subsequent inclines since I seemed to take them pretty quickly without much effort. This makes me feel like the Sport has pretty good gearing. Prior to this ride, I've gone a quite a few inclines on 0 assist (mostly underpasses or bridges) and it's easy to do.
There's another big hill I want to try out which is steeper and a shorter distance but I'm confident the Sport will flatten that one too.
I was concerned that a hub drive wouldn't be able to push my size up a hill and was wondering if I needed to get a mid-drive but it was fine... and I get too zoom-zoom (what my kid refers as using the throttle) every once in a while for fun.
One other thing... I went back down the hill halfway to ask my wife if she wanted to switch bikes but she's too macho. When I tried to go back up, it was hard because I forgot to gear down... and then I remembered the throttle and that gave me the push I needed to start pedaling again (so I now understand why some people are not too happy with the
Aventon set up).