Vado 5 motor failure

Vado50

New Member
So my Vado 5 motor died a couple blocks from home on my 15 mile commute 10 days ago. Assist vanished and the motor could be heard spinning, whining, and sometimes clicking when you went to pedal in a power mode. You could just stand next to the bike, push down on the pedal and it would spin internally and the bike would go nowhere. Possible broken gears and/or belt perhaps.

Took it to the shop and went straight past mechanic triage after he heard it. Specialized sent out a new motor and the service and replacement was no charge. Wondering if 2 year warranty is added to the new motor or if I’m Left with 1.4 years on the motor.

They also updated the firmware and my mileage was reset (have a separate cyclocomputer anyway) but the new interface had options to connect to iphone. I fired up the mission control app and logged in (worked finally) but it could not find my bike. Went to Bluetooth menu on phone and was able to connect to bike but then it said it needed another app from App Store but it redirected me to a blank page on the App Store. Went back to mission control app but still could find bike. Oh well, getting closer but at least it has a resettable trip meter apparently functioning clock that doesn’t reset all the time and a couple other improvements.

Other background on my Vado experience: Bike is 7 months old and has 2,400 miles on it. All street commuting with only 2 days in rain. No real issues apart from a frozen screen on power up that was only remedies by battery removal. Couple other times where the screen looked fine but no assist. Power cycle and/or battery removal resolves this as well. I’m amazed at the rate of chain stretch but I’ve been lubing the chain every 100 miles (every 3+ days basically). Other bummer was discovering chain length is about 120 links when most chains come 114 links. Overall I’m fairly happy with it. Seems like there aren’t (m)any other class 3 bikes that can support front racks which I prefer for commuting.
 
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