Powerful Fat Tire E-bike w/ Torque sensor from Juiced Bikes
- Thread starter Ravi Kempaiah
- Start date
geddyleesnose
New Member
No hydraulic brakes, or torque sensor included, right?
I was wondering the same... the brakes are still showing as an option, yet the torque sensor is not. Maybe torque sensor is included now.
geddyleesnose
New Member
Think you're right but hope they clarify. Wanna pull the trigger on one of these soon.
when you add all available options it seems the price went up aprox. $100. Seems the torsion sensor is now included? I wonder how many founder series bikes were ordered and how many pre-orders they are sitting on.
I placed my pre-order two weeks ago and I feel a little info should be provided to us as to where we stand.
I placed my pre-order two weeks ago and I feel a little info should be provided to us as to where we stand.
I suspect everyone who has ordered would like to know where we stand. I wrote Juiced a few weeks ago about my order from May and they said they would deliver in late August. I don't know if that's still accurate but I haven't heard otherwise. I haven't received any correspondence from them since I ordered so if you want to know more, you'll probably have to email them yourself.
Last edited:
I don't think everyone who placed a pre-order should e-mail them. All that would do is use up resources which would be better spent building or whatever his workers do during their 9-5's. I am kinda pissed tho that I got no confirming e-mail from the company of my order, nor any type of schedule of production.
maybe just a simple e-mail thanking me for placing my order and helping my(Tora's) dream become reality would suffice.
maybe just a simple e-mail thanking me for placing my order and helping my(Tora's) dream become reality would suffice.
Klein Rider
Member
Depending on how you configure it I think the price jumped $350. Of course we don't know what the upgrades are included if any, or what they took out.
Those who preordered
Those who preordered
It may not be a huge price increase depending on what's included now. It never made a lot of sense to me to have so many options complicating an already difficult build process. Besides, if this is supposed to be their high performance line, I don't know why you would offer this bike in a lower power rating or without hydraulic brakes or torque sensor. They never should have updated the order page without updating what's included with the bike. Pretty sloppy. All that said, I hope Juiced hires a new marketing / customer relations person. I'd really like to see them succeed but they haven't managed communications well with this bike. If they're too busy to make regular updates to their customers on the status of their orders, it's time to hire a new person to do that job. There comes a time in every startup when the founder has to start delegating these tasks to other people. It looks like it's past time for Juiced. These making of videos are fun and interesting but they don't take the place of prompt and clear customer relations.
Luis Mtz
Member
Hi there, can you please send me an email to [email protected]
All accepted orders ( that go through the payment company) generate an invoice and you should get an email reply ( check spam folders)
BikeMike045
Member
We got the teasing good news but are still in the dark about what is most important: approximately how many bikes can be produced and shipped per week and where does my order stand in that number. AKA, a rough estimate of when I can expect my purchase. I hope they complete the update this week, it seems that it should be a greater priority. Obviously posting on here has no effect on their customer service so I guess I'll stop, 
Tora Harris
Well-Known Member
I just clicked in here to see what was going on. Sorry for the lack of updates. I will be more detailed.
Here in China the internet is a little bit different. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, IG, Snap, anything that is a blog -all of those do not exist... At all. In the best case when you type youtube.com, nothing happens. In the worse case your internet literally shuts down for like 15 min to let you ponder the "mistake you made". There are work arounds, but they don't always work or half works.
So, Basically my email box got filled up and nothing was getting in. So I upped it to the 25GB plan, but by "upgrade", apparently it proceeded to just "delete" my previous mailbox and create a bigger one from scratch. Its IMAP so this happened on all devices and computers like instantly so many messages got lost as I now try to build back up the mailbox.
Well in the process the mail provider crippled the account because it turns out spammers open up huge mailboxes then start sending a bunch of messages from IP addresses in China, which is basically exactly what it appeared i was doing!
Some people emailed in and asked about the pre-order and I addressed them directly but not in any mass way to everyone. I will post here and then edit it in the mass email list as it seems like many people with orders or interested in the project are here.
We did not want to send out a update until we understood the situation a bit better. This bike is very high performance and quite complex to make in this Chinese manufacturing environment due to many factors, we can go into that later.
We have already flown a limited number of initial units by express (at great cost) to the Juiced head quarters in San Diego for inspection and later to the first customers with golden tickets. Sorry some units were lost in the production and testing and we will remake those units for customers.
The next production that will cover all the pre-orders will start like early septrmber. Another production with even more units has been ordered. So we can start cutting down the wait times. This process takes time and gets somewhat reset when we need to make changes.
I have been here non-stop at the factory for 2 months and my visa is up so I must depart the country. I literally cant spend any more time in China and need to reset the visa. This is already the 2nd time.
So some people noticed the price increase, basically we got rid of the lower capacity bikes and made all the bikes with torque sensors. Overall the price is like 100 bucks more expensive. But we added more sizes and some other things that people who never tried the bike requested like suspension forks which is not strictly needed.
The idea behind the lower priced bikes was to make the bikes more affordable, but do it the right way and have 100% upgradability/scalability to even the highest performance level at a later date. While in principle it makes sense, what it ends up doing is guiding the wrong type of purchasing decisions and increasing the SKUs. Most people bought the higher spec bikes anyway as most HF buyers understand EVs.
We also ended up with a higher performance than was originally specified and the smaller packs would be drained relatively fast and lead to disappointment for the entry level buyer. We could solve the issue by making the performance lower for the smaller packs or some software hack like this, but screw it! We just got rid of the 13Ah packs and 750W options. There are loads of fat bikes out there with such performance and it's really easy to make these days. There is not much more to add to the conversation in that category.
Improved software.
We adjusted the software so it can run in 0- 750W or 1,000 W mode on the fly and gave it the ability to limit speed so it can be used on the road. We even added a handy cruise control feature which was not advertised.
These features are shipping with the new CrossCurrent S and and it would be a sand storm if the HF lands with less features than the CrossCurrent S. So we needed to take time to duplicate all the functions onto the HFs platform.
There is some myth out there that the torque sensor is harder to pedal, which is not necessarily true, so we added the ability to deactivate the torque sensor on the fly. This way even if you pretended to pedal you can still get very fast cadence-based assistance. Anyway the cruise control feature can lock in a base level speed and your pedal assistance on top of this will be amplified to increase the speed. This settles the argument and we can all move forward.
What is amazing about this bike is the torque sensing with such high power levels.
Cadence sensor-only hardware just kills that unless someone just really wants a cadence sensor or have limited ability to pedal and is understandable to not want to pay for something not used. So we gave the option with the software and ditched the cadence sensor hardware options to reduce complexity.
What makes the HF special on the performance side is the ability to continue the amplification effect even at the very high speeds and pedal force. Most bikes with torque sensors peak out at something around 500W -800W, so when you pedal hard, the amplification is clipped off due to the motors lack of power. If those bikes were to keep a linear amplification effect, the boost at the low pedal pressure levels would be so tiny that customers would not buy the bike.
So what most every manufacturer does is over-boost the assistance at the low pedal pressure at the expense of clipping the amplification effect when you pedal hard.
So some bikes feel jerky at low speeds and some less experienced customers equate this to being more "powerful" when doing the parking lot test ride.
The opposite happens when you pedal hard as it can feel like the bike starts working against your efforts. This happens because the controller stops increasing the power applied to the motor even when you pedal harder. Your body interprets this as feeling like the motor is working against you. Most stronger riders coming from normal bicycles will right away notice this and it's annoying.
This does not happen with the HF. With the HF's higher power levels, we can set the amplification to be amazingly controllable and stable at low speeds, but when you stomp down, it really goes. Whats amazing is the level of control you have even at the highest boost setting. And this continues up well past 30 mph which is way faster than most people can manually pedal a fat bike. The overall effect makes the bike feel like it weighs 10 pounds and your legs are insanely strong.
We did not need to put this capability into a fat bike, but it turns out that most fat bikes out there are kind of slow and goofy so it is a good place to start with our Hype Bikes line of high performance e-bikes.
And if we were going to go this route, might as well rip up the rule book and make a fat bike that we would ride ourselves but, rather than just make one or two of them, we designed it in a way that can be reliable, produced a scale, made affordable and serviceable. And could we just push it right off the assembly line into a box and right onto a plane to go directly to the customers doorstep? And why stop at one model, why not make more form factors?
It turns out to be very difficult. First off most fat bikes just use the Bafang and similar 500-750W hub motors which are mass produced these days. We tried all of them and the performance just cannot be called "Hyper" anything.
The other way is to go with a mid drive, but the available strap on 1,000W mid drives out there are not torque sensing. They are also somewhat clunky requiring many gear changes as you move faster or need more torque.
Now some 1,000W mid drives with torque sensors are slowly coming to the market. But they still suffer from the need for constant gear changes for electric motors which technically don't really need to change gears.
Only the human needs to change gears as humans have insanely narrow power bands relative to electric motors. But since the human and motor's power are forced through the same transmission. The electric drive system is compromised and this becomes apparent when you try the really high powered mid drives. But it does work well for lower powered system. But it stumbles a bit when the human and motor power levels become mismatched.
Also you really need exotic derailures to cope with the power being sent through the transmission. Mid drives are already technically more complex and as a result more expense piled on more expense.
So we went with MAC Motors at the moment they completed the Fat spec motor. They usually make very high powered motors for DIY bikes with the "need for speed". This 1,000W motor is incredible, but has never been integrated into a torque sensing production e-bike. It also has some quirky features that makes it difficult to integrate. Like the strange position of the hall sensors and lack of a speed sensor. The motor is relatively light and I guess there are some compromises due to weight and the need to fit the motor into standard 135mm rear dropouts.
Our controller supplier is quite good. They make all of Bafang's mid drive controllers from the smallest to the largest. The have become masters at translating how you want the torque sensor to feel into code thats programmed onto the controller.
They tried in the past to tune the MAC motor and just gave up. We begged them to try again and It took many months and many failed or half working systems before we got the thing to work. We had to bring these two very different suppliers together to focus on jumping this hurdle.
Sometimes the MAC engineers went to the controller supplier to help work out issues. Many times we went there and spent days at a time at great annoyance to everyone considering the relatively tiny number of units of this project.
We also had to make our own wire harness because the motors wires are so big. Also the lack of speed sensor means we had to make provisions for an external speed sensor which is kind of clumsy since like every other hub motor has a speed sensor.
We wanted an advanced display with a silly number of features. Some did not appear to make sense, like deactivating the torque sensor, but they made each one of them.
It took way longer than expected, but amazingly at the end of the day it works! And its a beast and there is nothing like it on the market.
We feel that this is the maximum speed that this work can be accomplished in this industry for a production product. We know many full bike manufacturers are trying to pull off the holy grail. the 1,000W, high speed, geared hub, torque sensing e-bike.
There are many challenges and its very easy to walk into the ring and get right away punched out. And this is just on the motor side.
Another huge challenge is the battery. To power such a motor you need a huge battery, there is no way around this at the moment until scientist invent a better battery. For now we have to work with the materials that are available or the bike will never come out.
A huge battery takes up lots of space on a bicycle frame. We wanted the battery to look as slick as possible, to be backwards and forwards with every bike we made and will make, be lockable/removable and sit integrated low on the downtutbe. The pack cannot interfere with the optimum frame geometry for pedal powered bikes as we want it to feel like a real bike.
The capacity needs to be around 1KWh with readily available cells.
Such a battery just does not exist on the market.
Basically most everyone making factory-assembled e-bikes in China buys the battery case and tube and welds it to the frame and boom, we are in the e-bike business. The pack sits either integrated, bottle style, or rear rack style. Some are making triangle type, but they are normally not removable which makes it difficult for us to service and was ruled out.
So all the e-bike start looking the same. This happens because it is expensive and time consuming to make a battery case. There are companies that specialize in case making and you must only buy it from them.
But what if we want more battery capacity than already exist? You can use multiple batteries which we ruled out as being too goofy of a solution... Or you have to make it yourself and this is exactly what we did to reach our performance targets.
This route is very much going against the grain, difficult and full of challenges. We had to figure out and solve all of these challenges but the result is incredible. It has 1 kWh of energy, nearly double what's found on the average e-bike. The larger case has room for a massive 45A BMS, nearly double that of the average e-bike battery. It can super charge at 10A, that is 4 to 5 x faster than most e-bikes are doing. It works on just about every Current-Series e-bike we have ever made. And sets the platform for future expandability.
Rather than make the case longer which is what everyone else does, we made it slightly wider and shorter. This way we could fit the huge 12 Transistor controller into the frame of the bike so it does not need to be unsightly or strapped to some part of the frame like a wart.
This downtube style of case usually have the cells stacked like roman candles. This configuration is a massive headache for battery suppliers and they really hate to do it. We literally turned things on it's head and put the cells sideways in a grid so they can be automatically welded and easily fit into the case. It sticks out to the side a little bit (which we will fix later) but the compromise is well worth the performance.
We developed this somewhat in the open and already found some supplier presented the 3D printed clone at the trade shows. It really does not matter, because in China, everything is a copy and if you made something that is not copied, it just means that there is no money to be made from that product at the moment.
The battery packs now all have GPS integration capability. This is real tracking, sending actual coordinates data over the GSM network with its own sim card. This is insanely awesome as you can get a notification when someone so much as just touches your bike. If the crook rides off with it, they WILL be tracked down.
Some people noticed the brakes. The brakes are mechanical and that is due to lead time. Hydraulic disc brakes are harder to get hold of and dramatically increases the time it takes for the bikes to get to the market and most of all the good ones are made in Taiwan and have to be imported to get them to China. This double import is expensive and time consuming. It will improve later, but this is the current situation.
On the CrossCurrent we used the HD-715 hydraulic disc brakes. Those are like some of the highest performance brakes available. We put them on our mid grade bikes and this reduced the speed at which we could manufacture the bikes. Braking is very important but unfortunately sits way down on the list of things people find valuable. Now we use decent mechanical disc brakes and give the option to upgrade the brakes.
The frames now have 3 different sizes. This has been a huge challenge and I will go into this and many more details later. If you have some questions ask it here or send a email to [email protected].
For now I must get out of the country today and get my visa reset so I can come back and help with the production of this unique e-bike.
Again sorry for the slowness and lack of communication in making this e-bike. We will do some kind of compensation for Founder series pre-orders, like a awesome discount on our other existing or even on our upcoming bikes based on this powerful platform.
Thanks,
-Tora
Images:
The initial HFs are getting the latest software then boxed up and sent to go to the airport.
Here in China the internet is a little bit different. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, IG, Snap, anything that is a blog -all of those do not exist... At all. In the best case when you type youtube.com, nothing happens. In the worse case your internet literally shuts down for like 15 min to let you ponder the "mistake you made". There are work arounds, but they don't always work or half works.
So, Basically my email box got filled up and nothing was getting in. So I upped it to the 25GB plan, but by "upgrade", apparently it proceeded to just "delete" my previous mailbox and create a bigger one from scratch. Its IMAP so this happened on all devices and computers like instantly so many messages got lost as I now try to build back up the mailbox.
Well in the process the mail provider crippled the account because it turns out spammers open up huge mailboxes then start sending a bunch of messages from IP addresses in China, which is basically exactly what it appeared i was doing!
Some people emailed in and asked about the pre-order and I addressed them directly but not in any mass way to everyone. I will post here and then edit it in the mass email list as it seems like many people with orders or interested in the project are here.
We did not want to send out a update until we understood the situation a bit better. This bike is very high performance and quite complex to make in this Chinese manufacturing environment due to many factors, we can go into that later.
We have already flown a limited number of initial units by express (at great cost) to the Juiced head quarters in San Diego for inspection and later to the first customers with golden tickets. Sorry some units were lost in the production and testing and we will remake those units for customers.
The next production that will cover all the pre-orders will start like early septrmber. Another production with even more units has been ordered. So we can start cutting down the wait times. This process takes time and gets somewhat reset when we need to make changes.
I have been here non-stop at the factory for 2 months and my visa is up so I must depart the country. I literally cant spend any more time in China and need to reset the visa. This is already the 2nd time.
So some people noticed the price increase, basically we got rid of the lower capacity bikes and made all the bikes with torque sensors. Overall the price is like 100 bucks more expensive. But we added more sizes and some other things that people who never tried the bike requested like suspension forks which is not strictly needed.
The idea behind the lower priced bikes was to make the bikes more affordable, but do it the right way and have 100% upgradability/scalability to even the highest performance level at a later date. While in principle it makes sense, what it ends up doing is guiding the wrong type of purchasing decisions and increasing the SKUs. Most people bought the higher spec bikes anyway as most HF buyers understand EVs.
We also ended up with a higher performance than was originally specified and the smaller packs would be drained relatively fast and lead to disappointment for the entry level buyer. We could solve the issue by making the performance lower for the smaller packs or some software hack like this, but screw it! We just got rid of the 13Ah packs and 750W options. There are loads of fat bikes out there with such performance and it's really easy to make these days. There is not much more to add to the conversation in that category.
Improved software.
We adjusted the software so it can run in 0- 750W or 1,000 W mode on the fly and gave it the ability to limit speed so it can be used on the road. We even added a handy cruise control feature which was not advertised.
These features are shipping with the new CrossCurrent S and and it would be a sand storm if the HF lands with less features than the CrossCurrent S. So we needed to take time to duplicate all the functions onto the HFs platform.
There is some myth out there that the torque sensor is harder to pedal, which is not necessarily true, so we added the ability to deactivate the torque sensor on the fly. This way even if you pretended to pedal you can still get very fast cadence-based assistance. Anyway the cruise control feature can lock in a base level speed and your pedal assistance on top of this will be amplified to increase the speed. This settles the argument and we can all move forward.
What is amazing about this bike is the torque sensing with such high power levels.
Cadence sensor-only hardware just kills that unless someone just really wants a cadence sensor or have limited ability to pedal and is understandable to not want to pay for something not used. So we gave the option with the software and ditched the cadence sensor hardware options to reduce complexity.
What makes the HF special on the performance side is the ability to continue the amplification effect even at the very high speeds and pedal force. Most bikes with torque sensors peak out at something around 500W -800W, so when you pedal hard, the amplification is clipped off due to the motors lack of power. If those bikes were to keep a linear amplification effect, the boost at the low pedal pressure levels would be so tiny that customers would not buy the bike.
So what most every manufacturer does is over-boost the assistance at the low pedal pressure at the expense of clipping the amplification effect when you pedal hard.
So some bikes feel jerky at low speeds and some less experienced customers equate this to being more "powerful" when doing the parking lot test ride.
The opposite happens when you pedal hard as it can feel like the bike starts working against your efforts. This happens because the controller stops increasing the power applied to the motor even when you pedal harder. Your body interprets this as feeling like the motor is working against you. Most stronger riders coming from normal bicycles will right away notice this and it's annoying.
This does not happen with the HF. With the HF's higher power levels, we can set the amplification to be amazingly controllable and stable at low speeds, but when you stomp down, it really goes. Whats amazing is the level of control you have even at the highest boost setting. And this continues up well past 30 mph which is way faster than most people can manually pedal a fat bike. The overall effect makes the bike feel like it weighs 10 pounds and your legs are insanely strong.
We did not need to put this capability into a fat bike, but it turns out that most fat bikes out there are kind of slow and goofy so it is a good place to start with our Hype Bikes line of high performance e-bikes.
And if we were going to go this route, might as well rip up the rule book and make a fat bike that we would ride ourselves but, rather than just make one or two of them, we designed it in a way that can be reliable, produced a scale, made affordable and serviceable. And could we just push it right off the assembly line into a box and right onto a plane to go directly to the customers doorstep? And why stop at one model, why not make more form factors?
It turns out to be very difficult. First off most fat bikes just use the Bafang and similar 500-750W hub motors which are mass produced these days. We tried all of them and the performance just cannot be called "Hyper" anything.
The other way is to go with a mid drive, but the available strap on 1,000W mid drives out there are not torque sensing. They are also somewhat clunky requiring many gear changes as you move faster or need more torque.
Now some 1,000W mid drives with torque sensors are slowly coming to the market. But they still suffer from the need for constant gear changes for electric motors which technically don't really need to change gears.
Only the human needs to change gears as humans have insanely narrow power bands relative to electric motors. But since the human and motor's power are forced through the same transmission. The electric drive system is compromised and this becomes apparent when you try the really high powered mid drives. But it does work well for lower powered system. But it stumbles a bit when the human and motor power levels become mismatched.
Also you really need exotic derailures to cope with the power being sent through the transmission. Mid drives are already technically more complex and as a result more expense piled on more expense.
So we went with MAC Motors at the moment they completed the Fat spec motor. They usually make very high powered motors for DIY bikes with the "need for speed". This 1,000W motor is incredible, but has never been integrated into a torque sensing production e-bike. It also has some quirky features that makes it difficult to integrate. Like the strange position of the hall sensors and lack of a speed sensor. The motor is relatively light and I guess there are some compromises due to weight and the need to fit the motor into standard 135mm rear dropouts.
Our controller supplier is quite good. They make all of Bafang's mid drive controllers from the smallest to the largest. The have become masters at translating how you want the torque sensor to feel into code thats programmed onto the controller.
They tried in the past to tune the MAC motor and just gave up. We begged them to try again and It took many months and many failed or half working systems before we got the thing to work. We had to bring these two very different suppliers together to focus on jumping this hurdle.
Sometimes the MAC engineers went to the controller supplier to help work out issues. Many times we went there and spent days at a time at great annoyance to everyone considering the relatively tiny number of units of this project.
We also had to make our own wire harness because the motors wires are so big. Also the lack of speed sensor means we had to make provisions for an external speed sensor which is kind of clumsy since like every other hub motor has a speed sensor.
We wanted an advanced display with a silly number of features. Some did not appear to make sense, like deactivating the torque sensor, but they made each one of them.
It took way longer than expected, but amazingly at the end of the day it works! And its a beast and there is nothing like it on the market.
We feel that this is the maximum speed that this work can be accomplished in this industry for a production product. We know many full bike manufacturers are trying to pull off the holy grail. the 1,000W, high speed, geared hub, torque sensing e-bike.
There are many challenges and its very easy to walk into the ring and get right away punched out. And this is just on the motor side.
Another huge challenge is the battery. To power such a motor you need a huge battery, there is no way around this at the moment until scientist invent a better battery. For now we have to work with the materials that are available or the bike will never come out.
A huge battery takes up lots of space on a bicycle frame. We wanted the battery to look as slick as possible, to be backwards and forwards with every bike we made and will make, be lockable/removable and sit integrated low on the downtutbe. The pack cannot interfere with the optimum frame geometry for pedal powered bikes as we want it to feel like a real bike.
The capacity needs to be around 1KWh with readily available cells.
Such a battery just does not exist on the market.
Basically most everyone making factory-assembled e-bikes in China buys the battery case and tube and welds it to the frame and boom, we are in the e-bike business. The pack sits either integrated, bottle style, or rear rack style. Some are making triangle type, but they are normally not removable which makes it difficult for us to service and was ruled out.
So all the e-bike start looking the same. This happens because it is expensive and time consuming to make a battery case. There are companies that specialize in case making and you must only buy it from them.
But what if we want more battery capacity than already exist? You can use multiple batteries which we ruled out as being too goofy of a solution... Or you have to make it yourself and this is exactly what we did to reach our performance targets.
This route is very much going against the grain, difficult and full of challenges. We had to figure out and solve all of these challenges but the result is incredible. It has 1 kWh of energy, nearly double what's found on the average e-bike. The larger case has room for a massive 45A BMS, nearly double that of the average e-bike battery. It can super charge at 10A, that is 4 to 5 x faster than most e-bikes are doing. It works on just about every Current-Series e-bike we have ever made. And sets the platform for future expandability.
Rather than make the case longer which is what everyone else does, we made it slightly wider and shorter. This way we could fit the huge 12 Transistor controller into the frame of the bike so it does not need to be unsightly or strapped to some part of the frame like a wart.
This downtube style of case usually have the cells stacked like roman candles. This configuration is a massive headache for battery suppliers and they really hate to do it. We literally turned things on it's head and put the cells sideways in a grid so they can be automatically welded and easily fit into the case. It sticks out to the side a little bit (which we will fix later) but the compromise is well worth the performance.
We developed this somewhat in the open and already found some supplier presented the 3D printed clone at the trade shows. It really does not matter, because in China, everything is a copy and if you made something that is not copied, it just means that there is no money to be made from that product at the moment.
The battery packs now all have GPS integration capability. This is real tracking, sending actual coordinates data over the GSM network with its own sim card. This is insanely awesome as you can get a notification when someone so much as just touches your bike. If the crook rides off with it, they WILL be tracked down.
Some people noticed the brakes. The brakes are mechanical and that is due to lead time. Hydraulic disc brakes are harder to get hold of and dramatically increases the time it takes for the bikes to get to the market and most of all the good ones are made in Taiwan and have to be imported to get them to China. This double import is expensive and time consuming. It will improve later, but this is the current situation.
On the CrossCurrent we used the HD-715 hydraulic disc brakes. Those are like some of the highest performance brakes available. We put them on our mid grade bikes and this reduced the speed at which we could manufacture the bikes. Braking is very important but unfortunately sits way down on the list of things people find valuable. Now we use decent mechanical disc brakes and give the option to upgrade the brakes.
The frames now have 3 different sizes. This has been a huge challenge and I will go into this and many more details later. If you have some questions ask it here or send a email to [email protected].
For now I must get out of the country today and get my visa reset so I can come back and help with the production of this unique e-bike.
Again sorry for the slowness and lack of communication in making this e-bike. We will do some kind of compensation for Founder series pre-orders, like a awesome discount on our other existing or even on our upcoming bikes based on this powerful platform.
Thanks,
-Tora
Images:
The initial HFs are getting the latest software then boxed up and sent to go to the airport.
Attachments
Thanks for the update. A little confused on the timeline though. You write that, "production that will cover all the pre-orders will start like early septrmber." Does that mean that production for the preorders hasn't started yet? If so, does that mean late October now for delivery of the preorders? I suspect that's the only information most of us want to know.
Tora Harris
Well-Known Member
If we can get started in early sep, we are looking at mid sep to be done. We can ship by air which takes 7-10 days or ship by sea which takes 24 days to arrive to our warehouse.
Tora, while I thank you for the detailed information you supplied to us all, I myself do not appreciate your long winded reply.
My logic in business is if your going to build the best you include the best from the getgo. You as the designer/manufacturer knows best what this bike needs. Torque sensor, 21AH battery, Hydrolic brakes should not be an option, period. These are all items which should be standard on a bike of this caliber. Talking for myself I do not need an explanation of all the pitfalls in your quest to make this happen. I understood that my preorder would help finance your dream of building a great performance e-bike at a crazy cheap price. Yes when I prepaid $3000, for my bike I added all the bells and whistles for I felt they were necessary. I also preordered to lock in the price.
I think at this point in time you owe to all your customers a confirming e-mail of an invoice (not the PayPal generated) order receipt, thanking them. And some type of realistic lead time based upon when there order was placed. Everything i’ve Read in the past and even when asked to Luis have been answered too vaguely.
My logic in business is if your going to build the best you include the best from the getgo. You as the designer/manufacturer knows best what this bike needs. Torque sensor, 21AH battery, Hydrolic brakes should not be an option, period. These are all items which should be standard on a bike of this caliber. Talking for myself I do not need an explanation of all the pitfalls in your quest to make this happen. I understood that my preorder would help finance your dream of building a great performance e-bike at a crazy cheap price. Yes when I prepaid $3000, for my bike I added all the bells and whistles for I felt they were necessary. I also preordered to lock in the price.
I think at this point in time you owe to all your customers a confirming e-mail of an invoice (not the PayPal generated) order receipt, thanking them. And some type of realistic lead time based upon when there order was placed. Everything i’ve Read in the past and even when asked to Luis have been answered too vaguely.
I got a confirmation and receipt when I ordered. This will be the last prepay pre-order I make though. Too risky. Live and learn I guess. Sounds like I'll be lucky to see my bike before November. So much for this season.
BikeMike045
Member
It's always bike season when you have no car. LOL. Part of the reason I ordered this was for winter ice and snow commute. I ride bikes below zero sometimes, as I have no car and hate walking or spending on cabs even more than I hate cold wind. Thanks for letting us know more, the Chinese internet restriction explains a lot, and now we have a general idea what to expect.
hurricane56
Active Member
I put down an order in the batch immediately following the founders series orders. While I'm eagerly awaiting the bike to ship, I definately agree with others that Juiced needs to give a more concrete timeline for shipping and final delivery. Just having some basic information to set one's expectations goes a long way, and like Tora has acknowledged, most of the HyperFat buyers seem to be ebike/EV enthusiasts, expectations are high for the product and people are willing to wait.
The thing that sucks the most about this waiting game is the pre-order process and shifting time-table have made this purchase feel too much like a early crowdfunding campaign. I forked over more than $3k to purchase this bike hoping that Juiced had the reputation to stick to delivery timelines, but I do acknowledge that it was a risk that I took when purchasing.
Without sounding overly critical, because I really want Tora and the everyone at Juiced to succeed, I wanted to offer the following suggestions as both a customer and operations management professional.
1. Setting expectations - The bike was still under development when you started accepting pre-orders. I feel that most people knew there were working prototypes, but the scale of the component integration challenges should have been highlighted much more clearly early on. Also, I would find it difficult to believe that you'd be willing to ship an entire batch of bikes by air cargo. Are you willing to actually do this for all of the bikes in the first couple of batches?
2. Communications - The frequency of communications on social media, forums, website was not frequent enough. It would have been nice to get at least a bi-weekly update. The other thing that seemed to come at the wrong time was a few videos released on YouTube (model riding CrossCurrent Air, and Easter Egg video). It gave me the impression that your communications people would rather make hokey videos instead of communicating with customers that had paid in full. Many of the videos that you made yourself highlighting the bike components and features were a lot better than watching a cheesy infomercial, etc.
3. Pre-orders and payment - If you decide to collect pre-orders again it really should be for a reservation retainer instead of payment in full. Unless you can guarantee a solid delivery timeline, full payments shouldn't be expected from customers.
Best of luck out there and I'm looking forward to receiving my bike in October!
The thing that sucks the most about this waiting game is the pre-order process and shifting time-table have made this purchase feel too much like a early crowdfunding campaign. I forked over more than $3k to purchase this bike hoping that Juiced had the reputation to stick to delivery timelines, but I do acknowledge that it was a risk that I took when purchasing.
Without sounding overly critical, because I really want Tora and the everyone at Juiced to succeed, I wanted to offer the following suggestions as both a customer and operations management professional.
1. Setting expectations - The bike was still under development when you started accepting pre-orders. I feel that most people knew there were working prototypes, but the scale of the component integration challenges should have been highlighted much more clearly early on. Also, I would find it difficult to believe that you'd be willing to ship an entire batch of bikes by air cargo. Are you willing to actually do this for all of the bikes in the first couple of batches?
2. Communications - The frequency of communications on social media, forums, website was not frequent enough. It would have been nice to get at least a bi-weekly update. The other thing that seemed to come at the wrong time was a few videos released on YouTube (model riding CrossCurrent Air, and Easter Egg video). It gave me the impression that your communications people would rather make hokey videos instead of communicating with customers that had paid in full. Many of the videos that you made yourself highlighting the bike components and features were a lot better than watching a cheesy infomercial, etc.
3. Pre-orders and payment - If you decide to collect pre-orders again it really should be for a reservation retainer instead of payment in full. Unless you can guarantee a solid delivery timeline, full payments shouldn't be expected from customers.
Best of luck out there and I'm looking forward to receiving my bike in October!
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