My Trek T80+ bike is now two years old (review) and the battery is getting weaker. The Bionx battery system design seems to be something like seven years old.
A replacement battery for this bike costs $819, i.e., substantially more than what a Chinese consumer would pay for an electric bike with a similar battery capacity and a healthy fraction of the $1,300 that I paid for the (discontinued) bike.
Given the reductions in costs and improvements in battery technology that we’ve seen in the electric car world, it seems reasonable to expect cost reductions and improvements in the electric bike world, but there is a bewildering array of battery sizes, shapes, and connectors. Our local bike store has bikes costing from $2,500 to $5,000 with at least 10 different types of mutually incompatible batteries. Next year’s battery might be better, but it seems unlikely to fit on last year’s bike.
Readers: Is the lack of a standard for batteries, with the possibility of lower prices and better quality every year, keeping smart American consumers from spending $2,000+ on an electric bike?
Related:
- if a 50-lb. bike isn’t hard enough to pedal: a 160 lb. electric bike (48-mile electric range (downhill in a tailwind?))
- eBikeSchool links to Chinese component suppliers
Just take your bike’s battery package apart, it will have standard elements, replace elements and you are done.
I’ve been commuting to work by electric bike (also a BionX system) for the last seven years. Compared to a regular bike, buying an electric bike is expensive: the electric motor and battery basically doubles the cost of the bike. But compared to insuring and operating a second car, it’s super-cheap.
If you’re that concerned about not getting any exercise at all, you must be wary of the female preference for large men & how losing male gut status will cause your partner to take everything you have. These bikes are trivial to modify, but sadly the western world has lost all interest in teardowns.
I recently picked up a Boar Electric Fat Bike, from Surface604.com. The Samsung lithium-ion battery ($500) and other brand name component were deciding factors in my choice. Love the style, and so far it’s great!
Russil: What have you noticed about battery performance? How has it been affected by (a) battery age, and (b) charge cycles? How many batteries have you gone through in seven years?
This is slightly related, in terms of being a gripe about lack of battery standardization:
The aluminum air battery can deliver an energy to weight ratio of 1.3KWh/Kg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery
The lithium ion battery of a Chevy Volt can deliver less than 0.1KWh/kg.
https://media.gm.com/content/dam/Media/microsites/product/Volt_2016/doc/VOLT_BATTERY.pdf
If electric car makers agreed to a common form factor, then the economics of scale of mass producing aluminum air batteries could make sense. The same economics would apply to bikes as well.
The problem with an aluminum air battery is that it is not rechargeable, but with all the excess manufacturing workers, and all the capital chasing minuscule yields, wouldn’t it make sense to establish a new industry, based on delivering and re manufacturing batteries? For same battery weight, a tenforl increase in range could be possible.
Yikes! Significant battery capacity loss at 2 years? And BionX has a good reputation, too. I hope you have been riding the heck out of this e-bike.
Philip: my commute isn’t very demanding (about 10 km each way, with some hills), so I don’t use much of the battery capacity! After riding pretty much every weekday for four or five years, and charging it twice each day (once at work and once at home), the battery capacity had declined somewhat, but not enough to cause any issues on my commute. I finally had to replace it when it wouldn’t charge at all. I don’t recall what the problem was, but the bike shop owner was pretty impressed that it’d lasted for four or five years of daily use.
Not long after that, my bike was stolen. (I’d locked it up to a street sign, not realizing that the entire sign could be unbolted from the ground.) Fortunately it was covered by home insurance, so I got a replacement bike.
About a year later, the second bike was stolen! (This time I’d locked it to a bike rack; the bike thief had removed the bolts securing the bike rack to a concrete pad.) I’d put a Tile Bluetooth tracker in the battery, but apparently there aren’t enough people running the Tile app in Vancouver for it to show up. So now I’m on my third bike. I’m much more wary about locking it up outside anywhere.
To make a long story short: in my experience, a BionX battery was still usable after four years or so. Since then, I haven’t had a bike long enough for declining battery capacity to become a problem!
Canadian criminals sound pretty handy. I wonder why they don’t just get jobs in construction, auto repair, bike repair, or something else that requires the skills that they’ve acquired.
Separately, it seems as though insurance underwriters should be asking “Do you have a $2,500-$5,000 electric bicycle?”
We’ll, that . . . and the $2000+ price to begin with . . . and the fact that I don’t use my bike for transportation. I use it for exercise, and a motor would eliminate most if not all of that.
Lon: I am going to guess that people with electric bikes get more exercise than the typical owner of what the New Zealanders call a “push bike”. Remember that the motor won’t push unless it senses torque from the pedals. You work just as hard on an electric bike, but you go farther. This provides an incentive to use the bike more.
A Citation Jet-owning friend said “the faster the airplane the more hours per year you will fly it.” E.g., the jet that cuts trip time in half might result in 4X the total mileage covered and therefore 2X the number of hours. He’d worked his way up through single-engine piston planes, the Beechcraft Baron, the Lycoming-powered Piper Malibu Mirage (literally caught on fire as he was ferrying it from the factory), etc. So he had personal data. I think the same thing is true for anything that makes the bike more useful against the sedentary alternative of driving a car (or riding in an Uber).
There are folks who can rebuild your ebike battery for about half the cost of a new one, or if you’re even more motivated, you can buy your own chinese spot-welder and make your own. https://syonyk.blogspot.com/p/bionx-battery-pack-rebuilds.html is one blogger who does this for fun!