10 things you should know about eBike Motors

so as a continuation on this series we've been doing on just electric bike education and these various topics today we're going to be talking about motors more specifically electric bike motors and we're going to talk about some of the different terminology used the different types of electric bike motors and some of the common questions that come up so to start out i'd like to answer this question what is an electric mic motor and what does it do to have an electric bike you have many different components that make up this bicycle first you start with all the basic components you have as a traditional bicycle but as far as the motor system there's kind of a couple of main components you have the battery which is providing the power to the motor you have the controller which effectively regulates the power going into the motor and you have the motor which actually drives the bike now i'm going to keep most of this discussion today pretty simple in general but there's plenty of videos out there if you want to learn more about electric motors and how they work and all the finer details of that so you have these three main components you have the battery the controller and the motor and usually you have some sort of interface that you interact with it could be a throttle on some of the more basic electric bikes or some of the more advanced ones they have some different sensors that you interact with that tell the controller that you want power how much power you might want in telling the controller that the controller basically pulls power from the battery and push it into the motor and the more power that the controller pulls from the battery and pushes into the motor the more power you're going to experience the faster you're going to go the faster you're going to accelerate that sort of thing so that's in basic terms how that motor system works the motor can be placed in a variety of different places on the bicycle we'll kind of get into a lot of that stuff as we get down this list so another topic i'd like to cover more specifically related to electric bike motors is what are watts amps newton meters etc this one comes up a lot and i think it's often misrepresented this information you know a lot of times most people really focus on how many watts something is but i don't think that that's always necessarily the best representation of how powerful a motor is although in real scientific terms what is a measure of power so you know to keep it simple right watt is a is a measure of power and it's um for electric bike motor you have uh ratings of what the motor is really intended to handle you have like your nominal power or continuous power and that's really what the motor is intended to operate at at a continuous rate without having any real issues with heat or that sort of thing then you have your peak power and that's really what the motor can handle at its top power and it generally can only handle that for a shorter period of time it can't continually operate at that power so our different companies will publish different information in relation to this some will say this is what our nominal power is but actually their peak power might be much higher and some of them can operate at that peak power for extended period of time some of them might be a little bit more boastful about these numbers and say oh you know they actually publish what the peak power is and that can be a little bit misleading because if you're comparing you know the two could be a bit confusing there another thing good to be mindful of is there aren't really much of any independent testing sources for this sort of data so there the numbers are kind of a little bit all over the map and a lot of companies will like you to believe that their motor is much more powerful because they list it as 500 watts or 750 watts but all these things are not necessarily created equally i'll go more into just the specific terminology the next one i'd like to talk about is amps because this is pretty important the battery you have a voltage which if you want to learn more about batteries we did a little bit of a primer on that and you could learn more on that topic but the battery you have voltage and then actually the rate at which that voltage is flowing is called the amps if you wanted to actually get the watts of an motor or like the output the battery is putting to the motor you would take the voltage and you multiply it by the amps and that's how you end up getting the watts so for the most part you know you'll see controllers are regulating something for like 10 amps 15 amps maybe 20 amps at like the really higher peak power and that sort of thing so that's a good kind of indicator of how that power is flowing so that's kind of what an amp is more or less now this is not to be confused with amp hours this is something commonly used for batteries and that's just basically how long a battery can be run discharging one amp so if something was 10 amp hours that means that if you were pulling 10 amps from it it would take one hour for that battery to fully discharge if you had a 20 amp hour battery and it was running at 10 amps it would take two hours to fully discharge that battery running it consistently at 10 amps but you're generally not going to consistently run at that you know that power it really all depends on the specific bicycle and how you're using it so we talked about power which is one of the more common ways that people are raiding motors and electric bikes and that sort of thing but i think actually it's a little bit misleading because i think of power in a lot of ways almost like fuel mileage on a car if you actually look at it what's really more important is like how powerful it is or like how it can propel you if you will that i look at more from the perspective of torque i look at the measurement of torque as more realistically what the electric motor can actually do torque is a measurement of just the force it's the turning force and if you think about it for electric motor this is really important because this is actually what's going to help you get up a hill and that sort of thing torque is going to be measured in newton meters commonly it's written as like a capital n and a lowercase m so you can see this number vary all over the place but on the high numbers it's probably somewhere in the 80 or so newton meters you can see things as low as 20 30 newton meters now this will also vary depending on where the motor is placed and like how you experience that torque but i find that this is a really important thing to think about when you really want the electric motor to help you get up a hill easier to start out uh faster and that sort of thing the the torque is really going to help significantly in this specific instance i think that that's really like what most people are looking to an electric motor for right you just want that assistance in those more troubling times and and some of those things are you know going up a large hill starting out carrying a heavy load this is where torque is really going to come into play now we could speak a lot deeper on a lot of this terminology and that sort of thing but i want to try to keep this pretty simple if you guys want to see maybe another video covered on this topic we have additional questions maybe you can leave them in the comments below and we'll try to address that in the future so the next question i'd like to cover are what are the different types of electric motors now this can be answered in a couple of different ways but today i'm just going to focus more specifically on the different placements of the motors and probably the two more common types of motors that we've seen historically now on the specific types of motors you'll generally see what's called a direct drive motor which had been more common historically but it's becoming less and less common these days the direct drive motor is a little bit simpler in its makeup but it can be usually a little bit heavier it doesn't have some of the mechanical advantage of this other type of motor which is a geared motor this motor we're seeing to be most common these days the benefit of a geared motor is you're able to use mechanical advantage of gears now electric motors generally like to spin kind of fast so adding gears to that direct drive motor brings a big benefit allowing the motor to spin faster but change the ratio of what the actual output is now the electric bike motor can be placed in a variety of different places one you'll see occasionally maybe not so common these days but it had been more common in the past more so for like these add-on kits and that sort of thing is a front wheel hub motor and basically what that means is you have the motor inside of the hub of the wheel and it's placed inside the forks of the bike now this motor placement style had historically been pretty popular but there are some downsides which i think probably encouraged some of the rise of these different motor systems which are on the market today one of the main ones is that it can be more likely to lose traction with the front wheel of the bike if you don't have enough weight on there particularly if you're going up a hill or something like that you might have even noticed when you're riding a non-electric bike if you're riding up a hill you might end up feeling like your front wheel is lifting off the ground a little bit now if you have an electric motor providing power there you could end up in a situation that you know this is like losing traction it could actually be dangerous at times so that's not something we generally recommend and something to consider if you are looking at a bike with this type of motor system on it the next motor placement will be in the rear wheel so it's like a rear hub motor this has been very popular probably one of the most popular motor system placements in history and this provides a benefit because at one you have more weight in the back so it just kind of can push you so you don't have that traction issue you might have with the front hub motor but it can produce some challenges and that it makes the back of the bike a little bit heavier especially if you have a battery on the rear rack which historically you have seen that a little bit maybe not so much these days but that has been a thing so having all that weight it can make the steering a little bit weird on the bike and and that sort of thing it's also inside of the wheel so it can potentially put more stress on the wheel so for us as a shop we don't actually work with those types of motor systems historically we have but we really prefer this last type which is a center drive motor now this motor is placed directly where the cranks are and from my perspective there's many benefits to putting the motor here one of the big ones is that it's actually using the bike's gears as a mechanical advantage so this is the only one where you actually have somewhat of a transmission if you will so it allows you to actually be a lot more efficient it allows the bike to potentially be a little bit lighter if you want to have a decent amount of output so you'll find this on higher performance bikes generally speaking particularly like mountain bikes and that sort of thing because it allows you to have still a lightweight wheel which can perform really well but still delivering a good amount of power especially when you shift through those gears and that sort of thing this is really helpful especially if you're climbing large hills now you think about it you're going up a large hill you shift into a low gear and you have that mechanical advantage so you're not putting so much stress on the motor you're not putting so much stress on yourself you'll also find when these motors are paired with good sensors they'll produce a very seamless ride experience because you're pedaling with the motor it's providing power at the same place so you kind of just feel a little bit stronger than you normally are and it produces a really natural and predictable result i prefer this because it makes it such that you don't really have to think too much about your riding or the motor or how it's going to react and i think this is really important we'll talk a bit more about the sensors in just a moment but i just wanted to give you some perspective on that there can be some disadvantages in comparing this and other more common motor system like the hub motor now a center drive motor could potentially put more wear on your drivetrain your gears and that sort of thing because you are delivering more power there so some people will say it's a good idea to get a hub motor because you're going to put less stress on those gears and that sort of thing so there's always a bit of a trade-off some of the manufacturers have been solving this with offering different drive train options or finding other ways to put less stress on the drivetrain the main manufacturer we work with specifically is bosch and they have a technology called shift sensing and the idea basically is that they can sense when you're shifting the gears this is when you potentially put the most amount of stress on your drivetrain and chain and actually lets off the power during that time which is kind of a split second and it's pretty amazing that they're able to do that but it really helps to preserve the life of the drivetrain but we're finding more and more common that a lot of the manufacturers are actually going to internally geared hubs where this actually becomes a lot less of a factor because all the gears are inside and you're not having that variation in the chain line and that sort of thing but both of them work really well and it's definitely something to consider and the next question is what different types of power delivery are there now there's a couple different types the first one is probably the most rudimentary and the simplest in its form and it's a throttle activated system and basically it's just as you would find on a scooter or motorcycle and you just twist the throttle or you can push the throttle in some cases and it just delivers power and it can deliver power generally proportionate to how much you twist it or how much you push the lever or whatever the case may be that's really simple and that type has been around for a very long time but what happened over time is people found that oh yeah when i'm riding you know i don't feel like i want to be like worrying about this so there was kind of this evolution that happened over time and it was introduced what's called pedal assist pedal assist basically is this other type and becoming probably the more popular type these days particularly in our shop that i mean that's really all that we do is pedal assist basically this technology what it is is it senses that you're pedaling and it delivers power proportionate to your pedaling now in early days of pedal assist it was pretty rudimentary you had what's called a cadence sensor and the sensor just basically senses how fast you're pedaling the challenge is that it will produce somewhat unpredictable results at times so the engineers that were working on this problem i guess they were trying to find different ways to deliver power a little bit more predictably and they introduced an additional sensor and this sensor is called a torque sensor the torque sensor basically it senses how hard you're pedaling so now you have how fast you're pedaling and how hard you're pedaling with that data you can produce a lot better result but these days we're seeing it more common that there's actually three sensors being used and the third one is the speed sensor and that's basically sensing how fast the bike is going overall and based on all this information you're able to provide a pretty seamless result or at least these manufacturers are i don't know that i can figure out a way to do that i'm not an engineer but from my experience the manufacturer that we choose and we feel like they really do the best job at this is bosch they're using these three sensors and they're taking a thousand sensors per second which is pretty amazing when you ride the bike with this motor system on it it really is very predictable it kind of gives you the power exactly when you want it exactly how you want it and you don't really have to think about that so that makes a safer experience it makes a more enjoyable experience from my perspective and what i really like about this is it encourages you to pedal you have this throttle system which is still used today and some people it makes sense and from my perspective i think that most people don't necessarily need it but there are some people that do need this and we actually made this whole video about throttle versus pedal assist and you might want to check that out if you want to go a little bit deeper into this topic but basically we have the throttle the pedal assist and some bikes will have both what i found is most of the cheaper bikes have throttle on them like they're not as good quality because it's kind of a simple thing to do it really doesn't take any extreme effort to figure out how to put a throttle on the bike but pedal assist at least you know advanced pedal assist it's not necessarily the easiest thing to achieve and that's what from our perspective you know we try to just work with the best manufacturers in this because you really want to produce that really seamless experience but as i said you know some will have both but you know it's it's really up to you you know i recommend testing bold and see what you like and this next question comes up quite a bit and it might seem obvious to some but for many it's not can i ride my e-bike without power the answer is yes so in simple terms that's the answer i will say that electric bike can tend to be a little bit heavier than a non-electric bike so you might find that it's not as easy to ride without power and you might want to consider getting a bike that's not terribly heavy if you do consider that you want to ride it often without power there are some other factors that come into play you know it's talking about those different types of motors out there the direct drive motor more specifically is a motor that can produce a little bit more resistance when pedaling without power so if you do want to ride a bike without power or do it often i would recommend going with a electric bike with a geared motor this is also a big focus these days for a lot of the electric motor manufacturers to make them easier and easier to pedal without power just to make them as natural as possible many of the manufacturers have been focusing on ways to improve the experience there because i think a lot of people are buying these electric bikes for exercise and there might be some scenarios where it makes sense just to ride it without power i mean obviously there's also that scenario where if your electric battery dies and you just want to get home or whatever the case may be you don't want to feel like you're pulling a really heavy weight there so now another question that comes up all the time is how many watts do i need and in our shop actually most of the bikes that we sell are rated at 250 or sometimes 350 watts but a lot of manufacturers will tell you that you need 500 watts or 750 watts or a thousand watts which is actually illegal in most places i think that it's actually a little bit more confusing or maybe not as simple as as some will make you believe as i mentioned before watts is not always the best measure of power in relation to electric bike motor especially the way that manufacturers publish that information many of the motors that we offer that might be rated at 250 watts their peak power is well over 600 watts some of them up to close to 800 watts so although it has this lower nominal rating it has plenty of peak power and it's got plenty of torque so from my perspective i think it's much better to look at torque than it is to look at watts but many manufacturers will want you to focus on watts because it's an easy way for them to communicate that oh we have more power but it's really there's nobody out there independently testing this or anything like that so but don't take my word for it i would really recommend testing one i mean if you test a bike with a 250 watt bosch cx motor against many other manufacturers 500 or 750 watt motors you'll notice a significant difference and for the most part you'll probably notice that the bosch motor is way more powerful so don't be fooled by the numbers that a lot of these manufacturers put out there now another important question in relation to electric bike motors is how fast can they go now what a motor is actually capable of and what it actually is allowed to do those things can vary greatly but generally speaking the motors that we'll find here in the u.s are going to be regulated to 20 miles an hour or some will go 28 miles an hour in europe you might find it more common that you'll have motors that go like 15 and a half miles an hour or 25 kilometers per hour or in some cases 28 miles an hour with the specific speed pedelec bike this is 45 kilometers per hour and there might be some regulations in like where you can use these different bikes and what's required for their use for example some of the faster bikes you might be required to wear a helmet maybe you might be required to have a license plate like in europe for example not necessarily in the us but as i mentioned it could be the case that the motor is capable of going much faster and sometimes people will actually build electric bikes that can go faster than those things but the actual regulations in the us and and in europe and most other places in the world will restrict the speeds and so the manufacturers usually build their controllers to restrict the speeds to to that specific regulation and although it can certainly be thrilling to go beyond those speed limits i would definitely caution you about trying to do that one it's not quite as safe and two you know you might be breaking some laws and might get yourself in trouble and potentially put a bad name on the electric bike industry that's really just getting its start and we don't really need people out there kind of messing that up from my perspective well i try to cover the most common questions asked but if you have your own questions you want to leave them in the comments we'll do our best to answer them and perhaps add them into a future video i think we should probably make this like a part one and we'll do like a part two afterwards including some of those questions well i hope you guys enjoyed this and i look forward to seeing your future video well see you soon you

Channel: Propel

Views: 68,339

Keywords: electric bike, electric bikes, e bike, propel bikes, propel electric bikes, best ebike, 2021 ebike, ebike motors, electric bike motor, How fast can ebike go, ebike speed, ebike motor questions, bosch motor system, bosch ebikes, Watts, amps, newton meters, geared motor, throttle, pedal assist, ebike power, different motors ebikes, how to choose motor, top motor questions, ebike faq, e bicycle review

Id: jSRsTzKpKNQ

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021