Been riding Rad bikes for three years now and I didn't find the brakes dysfunctional or underpowered unless they were either worn out or out of adjustment. If one does not maintain a tool then one should not complain when the tool doesn't work the way you like.
The author reports ubiquitous problems with Rad brakes rapidly going out of alignment. Plus bike shop(s) telling him the same thing. That's a much bigger sample than one person, i.e. you.
"Roughly a month after my younger son got his RadRunner, he mentioned that the brakes weren’t working so well. I went out to the garage and discovered that I could easily squeeze both brake levers all the way to the handlebar grips—meaning the brakes weren’t working at all. But I know that the cables on new bikes can stretch, so I did some googling and watched a couple of very useful YouTube maintenance videos that Rad Power had produced. Then I made a few adjustments to get the disc brakes back in seemingly perfect working order. But a couple of weeks later, I saw my son dragging his sneakers on the ground to help stop the bike and found that the brakes were once again useless.
Thus began a regular cadence of brake repair. I make a point of inspecting and adjusting my kids’ brakes every two or three weeks. In two years I have purchased more than 10 sets of brake pads. I bought and installed Kevlar pads, which are more durable, and I also brought the bikes into a few shops to see if their mechanics could address the issue better than I could. (Neither effort fixed the problem.) Perhaps because I’m an experienced bike rider, I felt a great deal of concern about the situation, knowing that I live in a community with steep hills and busy streets and worrying about my kids being suddenly confronted with a braking failure.
Then I started talking to my neighbors. During the pandemic, hundreds of teenagers in my community took to the streets on RadRunners and other inexpensive DTC e-bikes with mechanical disc brakes, and I discovered that many of them were having similar issues. Some parents were clued into the problem and were either scheduling regular maintenance with local shops or learning how to make the fixes at home, while others had no idea that their kids were riding heavy electric bikes that couldn’t stop properly without frequent maintenance. I started a thread on Nextdoor with a summary of the problem and how to address it, and soon I was DMing with parents who wanted tips on barrel and caliper adjustments.
One of my neighbors—his name is Ezra Holland and he lives about five blocks from me—says that almost immediately he started noticing disturbing braking issues with the RadRunner he purchased early in 2022. Two or three weeks after he got it, Holland, an experienced road cyclist, noticed that the responsiveness of the brakes was poor, and he decided to remedy the problem by tightening the cables that run from the levers to the calipers. But he learned that this only bought him a few weeks, and that after tightening those cables a few times, one of the calipers clicked into a different position where there was zero braking action. “That is pretty scary,” he says.
Thus began a year of education, vigilance, maintenance, and communication with Rad. Holland now buys pads in bulk on Amazon; he checks and adjusts both calipers every two weeks, always on alert for a failure. He’s experienced the rear brake fail going downhill and is especially concerned about that happening while his 17-year-old is using the bike. Rad has sent him new brakes and new pads, but Holland says that in his ongoing phone calls with the brand, customer service reps and supervisors have told him that other customers aren’t experiencing braking issues like he has. But he alone knows a half dozen friends and neighbors struggling with the same problems. “I just got to a point where I started questioning my own thinking, because they keep saying I’m wrong,” he says. “I start thinking that maybe I’m just making a fuss here for no reason. Which I think is not fair, because I think it’s not true.”
Holland says that in his most recent exchange with Rad customer service, the rep emailed him that it is “not uncommon” for owners to adjust their brakes “every couple of hundred miles or so.” Which in his case would be every few weeks. “That’s totally unreasonable,” he says, adding that the same rep urged him not to explore swapping out the mechanical disc brakes on the bike for hydraulic brakes for safety reasons. “I found that hilarious.”
