[ad_1]

**/TL;DR: ebike good and cheap to 40mph, past that – shut up, buy motorcycle, save money./**

This is arguably a pretty hot take (depending on who you ask), but my perspective is unique and nuanced as I will explain in this essay. Also if you’d rather hear my stupid voice rant this instead of read it all, go here: [https://youtu.be/5BHIb9FEpSA](https://youtu.be/5BHIb9FEpSA)

## 0. [Mucho Disclaimers – “I have no belief, but I believe I’m a walking contradiction”]

Firstly I need to offer up some disclaimers though because I know people like to read a title and jump to conclusions, which if you do, good on you because it helps engagement and just makes you come off more ignorant than you need to (you’re chill bro, read a thing for once in your life first, or not, yolo). There are certain applications, certain use cases where building a very high powered ebike is the right fit, but these very niche applications are few and far between for the vast majority of people who are looking to get into ebikes. Some examples: if you’re using your ebike for dedicated off road track use where you want a ton of power because that’s the name of the game for that competition, this video and my perspective is not applicable to you, I’m not speaking to you. Or say you’ve got a side gig for some special photography where you make a “milli” (that’s a million dollars for you boomers 😉 ) a month selling bathwater or whatever, money is no object, this also doesn’t apply to you.

Also you’ll notice I have made many high powered ebikes on my youtube channel, and this isn’t a declaration of me changing my mind or ways of doing things. You may find this hypocritical or off-putting. Let me explain to you that this is not hypocrisy, I am fully aware of my own stupidity and nonsensicalness. I do things for no good reason all the time, willingly, I waste my own money on useless things and senseless endeavors without a rhyme or reason. A lot of people don’t think this way or act this way however and insist that I also think and act as they do, but I will not. In fact a lot of what I do on my channel regarding ebikes I don’t encourage people to emulate or follow (strongly discourage even).

This particular essay is largely coming from an economic perspective, I don’t personally have any hard stance regarding the ethical, legal or moral perspective on high powered ebikes although a lot of people in this community certainly do and if you are in this camp of thinking that high powered ebikes are the devil and should be banned, then to me that is just another set of points to even further my arguments.

>`I’ve been building ebikes for 6 or 7 years now, and I’ve learned quite a few things over that time, so hopefully I can impart some of the things I have learned and it at the very least makes you think or question what you may believe and why you feel that way.`

## 1. [Why would someone want a high powered ebike? – Speed is expensive]

Let’s get into why someone would want to build a bike like this in the first place, the answer is pretty straightforward and it all comes down to one thing, the need, for speed (top gun high five). Speed can be addicting and for most people, just like money, you can never have enough. All ebikes in general are pretty fast, this is if you compare them to what they are (or are supposed to be), bicycles. You’d be hard pressed to find any ebike that couldn’t go as fast as a traditional pedal bike but once you get up to the higher powered ebikes that comparison no longer really applies as they don’t share nearly as many parts with bicycles as they do with mopeds and motorcycles, and if you’re comparing them to their ICE counterparts they pale in comparison to what gas motorcycles can do in terms of speed.

>`Speed is expensive.`

When it comes to ebikes (and most other vehicles) speed is always more expensive. You want something with a faster acceleration or top speed? Expect to pay more than one that is slower or doesn’t offer one as high or as quick. Strangely this is largely irrelevant on ebikes and even more irrelevant with cars and motorcycles (or I should actually say that it *should* be irrelevant) but here we are. I’m not going much at all into the legality but if most ebikes are regulated to a certain speed, and all cars are regulated to a certain speed, then it doesn’t really matter if your ebike can go 30mph or 3000mph, if you’re obeying the rules it’s irrelevant.

## 2. [Contrarian argument, “I don’t care bro, I wanna go fassst” – Batteries anyone?]

What if you’re a rebel without a cause, and you don’t care about playing by the rules? Well you’re going to have to pay for that, handsomely. Most ebikes that are produced operate at 48V, this is a good balanced voltage because it’s relatively safe to be around for the amount of power it facilitates. If you want to go faster, 48V just isn’t going to cut it and you will need to move up to 72V. I’m not going to go into voltage potential and how this plays a part in speed, I’ll save that for another video (or essay) just “trust me bro” if you want to go fast you need at least 72V to get there, and when it comes to speed and volts, the more the merrier. Where this equation comes to crush your dreams of taking your ebike on the freeway “just for fun” is the unprecedented uppercut to your wallet. Higher voltage packs require more battery cells, and more cells is more money, you get the idea. You also don’t get to partake in the savings of economics of scale because the manufacturers that do make 72V packs, don’t make nearly as much of them due to demand, so of course they will fetch a higher price. Doubly screwed economically just off the first metric, and we’re not even close to being done yet. If you want to go really *really* fast you may need to even make your own battery because no manufacturer can make the ridiculous output requirements you think you want, or you’ll have to pay someone to do it, which you guessed it costs a lot more than just going on Amazon and getting a decently priced 48V pack.

## 3. [Frikken air, how does it even work? + cool boy graphs and examples]

Let’s depart from batteries for a second and talk about air, it’s the crap you breathe and while it may look transparent from your perspective it’s actually quite girthy and gelatinous, and it’s also the enemy of speed. Physics are cool bro, push on a thing and you feel it pushing back at you, that’s actually how you can feel anything at all, things give you resistance and your nerves pick that up as something happening and through magical interpretive electrical signals in your head you can feel things. Well, air also does that, it just also doesn’t seem that way because you’re usually not moving fast enough. Who here in class has ever stuck their hand out the window of their car on the freeway? It was quite a different feeling than waving your arm while sitting in your office chair at work. The faster you go the more air or wind resistance there is. The faster you go the more money you need to spend to overcome that resistance. You’re essentially subscribing to the onlyfans of air and simping for each extra mph you achieve, you’re being a paypig to molecules that you can’t even see. Pathetic.

Here is something I learned quickly when I first got into DIY ebikes. 0-40mph is quite nice, not a whole lot of wind resistance, sure there is some but it’s mild. Once you hit 40 things start getting harder and harder for you, the amount of power you need to go even marginally faster after 40mph gets exponentially more difficult (nature’s speed limit, if you will).

>`It is of my experienced opinion that the sweet spot for ebikes (at least in this day of November 2023) that are using traditional bicycle frames is: 1500W, that’s still a lot of watts but there are a lot of unique properties of this wattage that are economically very attractive. For one, a 1500W kit is quite common now, and can be had for very cheap. Secondly you don’t need a crazy battery to push for 1500W, 48V will get you there easily, no need for expensive, larger heavier 72V packs. Thirdly this will get very close to the 40mph threshold but not exceed it.`

—————————[ MAGICAL GRAPH(IC) ACTION ]————————–

Here are some real world numbers from my own experience.

$200 1000W hub motor kit @ 48V will roughly get you to 27mph
$250 1500W hub motor kit @ 48V will roughly get you to 34mph
$600 3000W hub motor kit @ 72V will roughly get you to 45mph
$800 5000W hub motor kit @ 72V will roughly get you to 54mph

—————————————-[ WOW ]———————————————

Do you notice anything peculiar here? To go from 1500W to 3000W it’s more than double the cost, but it’s not a double speed increase, not even close. To go from 1500W to 5000W that is a near triple the cost but not even close to doubling the speed, I hope this drives my point across.

Going 40mph on a bicycle is very fast, and quite scary, the difference between 20 and 40 is much more dramatic than say 40 and 50, yet you’ll have to pay most of the increase in cost to go that extra 10mph. It’s simply not worth it economically.

## 4. [Devil’s advocate redux: 2 contrarian 2 furious + pay more pig]

Fine, that’s all well and good, I don’t care I’m already into findom so I’m just going to buy the biggest battery that will not even really fit on my bike and it’s going to go 100mph. Actually no. Just a battery isn’t going to do it, if you don’t believe me hook up your brand new 600A 120V battery to your 36V controller and see what happens. Oh? You were thinking of buying a new controller anyway? That’s cool. Hook it up to that 500W motor, it should make everything so much faster now. Hmm, were all the phase wires supposed to fuse together as one and instantly demagnetize all of the magnets in your motor, that doesn’t seem like going faster to me? It does seem very expensive though.

Ok 8000W rated motor should do it, now we’re talking. Those center pull rim brakes should be fine for slowing down from 70mph right? I hope you have some suspension going on because hitting a rough patch on the road at freeway speeds can be quite sketchy on a rigid frame “bicycle”. Maybe time to invest in more than just a helmet too, losing skin is cheaper but is a longer investment time horizon. You sure you want to run those Amazon basic branded tires to 80mph? Seems much safer if you upgrade those to motorcycle tires, might also need some motorcycle rims to go with them. For some reason the steering is twitchy as hell anywhere over 50mph, think I might add a stabilizer

>`…do you want me to continue this scenario?`

## 5. [“Someone, make it make sense!”]

Now that you’ve invested over 6 grand into your “bicycle” it finally goes as fast as you want it to. It goes 73mph, that’s amazing. Well, it was amazing for about 3 days, and then I saw this other guy on youtube, and he went 76mph, and I’m not some chump, I want to be the guy that is faster than all the other guys. I want all that attention from strangers on the internet telling me how cool I am, well some of them are telling me I’m stupid and crazy and how I’m a terrible influence towards others, but a lot of them are saying how cool I am! What can I do to be that guy, what do I need to buy to make me faster? You mean my $1700 custom battery, it doesn’t output enough amps and I need to buy the $2500 one? I guess I can try and sell this one and get that one, alright I mean I already spent $6000 on my bicycle, when I think of it another $2000 isn’t that much right? Now my bike goes 82 miles per hour and I’m the king of the ebikers, they all wish they could be me. Damn that guy posted another video, and now his bike goes 90mph? F***.

>`As with most metrics of achievement things quickly devolve into a carrot measuring contest where everyone wants to be the big man on campus. I personally don’t see this practice as a real benefit to anyone beyond maybe taking your bike to a track and competing for sport. At best it puts yourself in danger, and at worst incentivizes others to attempt to “beat” your high score. Again I don’t have a strong stance on this, but I could certainly see how others would. People are going to do as people do however, so I don’t see this ever stopping regardless of what anyone thinks of it.`

So you’ve modified your bike with all kinds of motorcycle parts and it’s very expensive and it goes highway speeds, that’s really cool man, that’s a great achievement. How many times did you go 80mph, oh only that one time? It was so scary and you felt like you could lose control at any time and die? I guess that’s kinda fun though. You don’t ride it on the freeway? If you did how far do you think it would go with that battery at 80mph? Only 6 miles?? Yeah you’re right I could see how dumping hundreds of amps sustainably would drain the battery very quickly, and that motor and controller do get really hot, I wonder how long they will last doing that repeatedly. Do you think the battery will degrade faster by pushing it so hard and needing to recharge it so often?

## 6. [Another alternative view (Khaled: “another one”) + calling it for what it is]

I hope you guys are getting my point. Let me offer an alternative view, if it looks like a motorcycle, it rides like a motorcycle, it uses a lot of motorcycle parts, but doesn’t go nearly as fast as a motorcycle (not even half as fast), it costs 4x the amount a used motorcycle would, you never have to replace a $2000 battery, it gets about about 30x the range @70mph and you can immediately fill it up and go 30x more, you can ride it legally and safely on the highway and get to a destination very quickly. Billy, did you ever ask yourself “why don’t I just buy a motorcycle?” Well yeah, but this one, it’s electric and it’s a bicycle! Well, that’s true Billy, that’s very true.

As well as ebikes I ride a 2001 Honda CBR600F4i, I’ve owned this bike for 8 years now and I bought it for $1600. It goes 155mph from the factory (and could be modded to go even faster) it gets 50mpg and the only things I ever had to do on it were change the oil and replace the tires. I can ride it legally on the freeway, it is very stable at high speeds as it was designed to operate safely at those speeds.

ebikes will never be able to do what motorcycles do because that’s not what they were designed for. The only electric motorcycles that can touch my gas powered bike in terms of performance cost $20,000 and up and I don’t see that gap becoming much smaller anytime soon.

>`If you want to go faster than 40mph on a bike, in my opinion, economically you’re really looking for a motorcycle, not an ebike.`

## 7. [Seventy Times 7: a conclusion]

“but I’m not going to go fast very often, I don’t want to have to pay for registration and insurance or gas, I want to ride on the sidewalk and bike trails” Find me a scenario where the frequency, the amount of times you’re going to be going over 40mph is justification for paying 6x the cost of just getting a nice 48V 1500W bike. If you fit that application, that very niche spot of riding your ebike over 40mph often enough to justify the increase in cost then I applaud you, this video does not apply to you, you are in the 0.1 of 0.1% of ebikers. If you’re not in that percentile and are thinking of getting a “very fast ebike” then I hope my arguments have opened your eyes to more sensical economic (and safer) choices.

Will I personally continue to waste my money and build stupid bikes that go too fast? Of course I will, not because it’s the smart thing to do but because what else is there to do here now? Last year I already began gathering parts for a 60-80KW build and it should be pretty fast. I’ve already made 20+ 1500W bikes and honestly, they’re still the best in my opinion, and I’ll continue to make more and I’ll continue to preach the gospel of this balanced platform as I really do think it’s the smartest and best choice for someone looking for an ebike that will give them the best of all the worlds at a fair price.

If you agree let me know. If you disagree present your arguments and lets fight in the comments. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.

[ad_2]

View Reddit by HTLL_OFFICIAL – View Source