Skip to main content

ebikes

See All Stories

This e-bike fits seven riders, and that’s not even the craziest thing about it

If you’ve ever looked at a cargo e-bike and thought, “Sure, but where am I supposed to put the other six people?”, SixThreeZero may finally have the answer.

The company’s latest addition to its growing e-bike and e-trike lineup, the Long Range Luxury Rickshaw, is already a fairly ridiculous machine in its standard form. It combines three wheels, dual motors, rear passenger seating bench, and enough battery capacity to make many electric motorcycles jealous. But start adding its optional passenger trailers, and you can essentially build yourself a seven-person electric bicycle train.

Expand Expanding Close

This funky solar electric scooter could handle your commute without ever plugging in

There are plenty of ways to build a small electric vehicle. These days, the prevailing options have been to make it faster, give it more power, slap on bigger tires, or keep adding features until your humble little scooter has somehow turned into a 150-pound electric motorcycle.

Or you can be brave and go in the other direction to ask a simpler question: How much vehicle do people actually need for all those short trips around town?

Expand Expanding Close

I tried taking the budget-priced Ride1Up Roadster V3 e-bike off-roading. Here’s what happened next

The Ride1Up Roadster V3 is, for all intents and purposes, is a budget-focused daily driver urban bike. It’s not really a gravel bike. Maybe if you stand back a bit and squint, you could give it a bit more of a gravel bike interpretation. But ultimately, it’s a lightweight, affordable urban e-bike with decent multi-role tires that I mostly use for cruising around bike lanes and city streets.

So naturally, yesterday I took it on a 38 km (24 mile) ride where I spent most of the time off-road.

Expand Expanding Close

Ride1Up just launched a 28 MPH German mid-drive e-bike for an insanely low $1,295

ride1up prodigy V2 electric bike

There are cheap e-bikes, and there are good mid-drive e-bikes. Those two circles on the Venn diagram don’t overlap nearly as often as we’d like. But Ride1Up’s newly launched Prodigy V2 Eco is doing its best to smash them together with a surprisingly low $1,295 price tag.

And this isn’t a $1,300 bike with some no-name mid-drive motor you’ve never heard of. At the heart of the Prodigy V2 Eco is a German-made Brose TF Sprinter mid-drive motor pumping out 90 Nm of torque, paired with a 504 Wh battery using Samsung cells.

Expand Expanding Close

Thinking about buying a second car? Here’s a $1,000 alternative

Being a one-car family works great right up until the moment two people need to be in two different places. Maybe your spouse took the car to work, but you need to grab groceries. Maybe you’ve got to pick up a kid from daycare. Perhaps you’re meeting a friend for coffee, heading to the gym, or just running some mundane errand that happens to require going a few miles across town.

Those are the moments when a second car starts sounding awfully convenient.

Expand Expanding Close

This family of four put 1,000 km on a cargo e-bike instead of buying a second car

xtracycle hopper

I’ve been working in the electric bike industry for nearly two decades, and publicly reviewing e-bikes for around half of that. I used to say I’ve touched hundreds of e-bikes, but now that I’ve lost count, I wouldn’t be surprised to find I need to add a digit to that. With so many saddles that I have to sit on, I get to ride a lot of e-bikes for a few weeks, but I rarely get to spend months on any one bike. So when I finished my one-month review of the Xtracycle Hopper electric cargo bike and had a unique opportunity for a longer-term project, I jumped on it.

My best friend and his wife have a couple of kids and are a bike-friendly family, so I made him an offer: take this bike and ride it as much as you guys can. Now, having just hit 1,000 km (620 miles) on the thing, he’s back to share his experiences with me. And by extension, with you all.

Expand Expanding Close

Macfox X1S e-bike review: More mini-moto than bicycle, yet still street legal

There’s a fairly wide spectrum of moped-style electric bikes these days. Some are essentially conventional e-bikes wearing motorcycle-inspired designs, while others lean so heavily into the mini-moto experience that the pedals start to feel like little more than a legal technicality.

The Macfox X1S definitely falls closer to that second group.

Expand Expanding Close

This new anti-theft device can keep your e-bike protected for up to a year straight

E-bike theft is one of those problems where a good lock is only half the battle. Since no physical lock can ever give you a 100% guarantee of safety, if a thief actually gets away with your bike, knowing where it went can suddenly become a lot more important.

Now connected e-bike specialist Comodule has unveiled its latest solution, known as Astra, and one of its most interesting tricks is the ability to keep tracking an e-bike for up to 12 months – even when the bike is sitting in storage.

Expand Expanding Close

Illinois just made 40 mph e-bikes street legal – but there’s a huge catch

Illinois just signed a sweeping new electric bicycle law that, among many other changes, finally answers a question that has been hanging over the rapidly growing market for high-powered electric bikes: What exactly are we supposed to do with all of these 35 and 40 mph “e-bikes” that don’t fit into the normal three-class electric bicycle system?

Expand Expanding Close