e-bikes

Brompton C Line Electric review: Fun and foldable, fits better than you’d think

brompton, brompton c-line, Cars, e-bikes, ebikes, Features, folding bikes / Ari B / June 8, 2024

Brompton C Line Electric Review —

A motor evens out its natural disadvantages, but there’s still a learning curve.

Kevin Purdy – Jun 7, 2024 11: 00 am UTC

Enlarge / What can I say? It was tough putting the Brompton C Line Electric through its paces. Finding just the right context for it. Grueling work.

Kevin Purdy

There’s never been a better time to ride a weird bike.

That’s especially true if you live in a city where you can regularly see kids being dropped off at schools from cargo bikes with buckets, child seats, and full rain covers. Further out from the urban core, fat-tire e-bikes share space on trails with three-wheelers, retro-style cruisers, and slick roadies. And folding bikes, once an obscurity, are showing up in more places, especially as they’ve gone electric.

So when I got to try out the Brompton Electric C Line (in a six-speed model), I felt far less intimidated riding, folding, and stashing the little guy wherever I went than I might have been a few years back. A few folks recognized the distinctively small and British bike and offered a thumbs-up or light curiosity. If anyone was concerned about the oddity of this quirky ride, it was me, mostly because I obsessed over whether I could and should lock it up outside or not.

But for the most part, the Brompton fits in, and it works as a bike. It sat next to me at bars and coffee shops and outdoor eateries, it rode the DC Metro, it went on a memorial group ride, and it went to the grocery store. I repeatedly hauled it to a third-floor walkup apartment and brought it on a week’s vacation, fitting it on the floor behind the car driver’s seat. And with an electric battery pack, it was even easier to forget that it was any different from a stereotypical bike—so long as you didn’t look down.

Still, should you pay a good deal more than $3,000 (and probably more like $4,000 after accessories) for a bike with 16-inch tires—especially one you might never want to leave locked up outside?

Let’s get into that.

The Brompton C Line, pre-fold (mid-beer).

Kevin Purdy
Step 1: Release a clasp and pull the bike frame up, allowing the rear wheel to swing forward underneath.

Kevin Purdy
Step 2: Loosen the clamp and fold the front half back to align with the rear wheel, lining up a little hook on the wheel with the frame.

Kevin Purdy
Step 3: Remove the battery (technically unnecessary, but wise), loosen a clamp holding up the handlebar, then fold it down onto the frame, letting a nub tuck into a locking notch.

Kevin Purdy
Step 4: Drop down the seat (which also locks the frame into position), rotate one pedal onto the tire, and flip the other pedal up.

Kevin Purdy

Learning The Fold

Whether you buy it at a store or have it shipped to you, a Brompton C Line is possibly the easiest e-bike to unpack, set up, and get rolling. You take out the folded-up bike, screw in the crucial hinge clamps that hold it together, put on the saddle, and learn how to unfold it for the first time. Throw some air in the tires, and you could be on your way about 20 minutes after getting the bike.

But you shouldn’t head out without getting some reps in on The Fold. The Fold is the reason the Brompton exists. It hasn’t actually changed that much since Andrew Ritchie designed it in 1975. Release a rear frame clip and yank the frame up, and the rear wheel and its frame triangle roll underneath the top tube. Unscrew a hinged clamp, then “stir” the front wheel backward, allowing a subtle hook to catch on the rear frame. Drop the seat and you’ll feel something lock inside the frame. You can then unhinge and fold the handlebar down, or you can keep it up to push the bike around on its tiny frame wheels in “shopping cart mode.”

If you forget the sequence of the fold, there are little reminders in a few spots on the bike.

Kevin Purdy

After maybe five attempts, I began to get The Fold done in less than a minute. After around a dozen tries, I started to appreciate its design and motions. The way a Brompton folds up is great for certain applications, like fitting into a car instead of using a rack, bringing on public transit or train rides, tucking underneath a counter or table, or fitting into the corner of the most space-challenged home. It can also be handy if you’re heading somewhere you’re wary of locking it up outside (more on that in a moment).

Brompton C Line Electric review: Fun and foldable, fits better than you’d think Read More »

Turn almost any bike into an e-bike with the Clip

Cars, Clip, e-bikes, friction drive / Ryan Harris / June 1, 2024

Easy e-bike —

Dead simple to use, the Clip offers up to 12 miles of electric range for your bike.

Eric Bangeman – May 31, 2024 10: 11 pm UTC

Clip attached to a mountain bike — Enlarge / The Clip attached to a late-90s vintage mountain bike.

Eric Bangeman

Shortly after World War II, a French manufacturer by the name of Solex started selling mopeds. These were not your “typical” moped that looks kind of like a motorcycle with pedals—the mopeds made by Solex were essentially bicycles with a small, two-stroke engine mounted over the front wheel that could propel the rider around 100 km on a single liter of gas mixture. The downside: Solex mopeds were loud and cumbersome to ride due to the weight distribution, and they never really caught on in North America.

Clip, a startup based in Brooklyn, New York, has come up with its own twist on the Solex. Its only product, the eponymously named Clip, is a friction drive unit that attaches to the front fork of any bicycle, turning it into an e-bike. At $499 for the Commuter model and $599 for the Explorer, it is a relatively inexpensive way to turn just about any bicycle into an e-bike for a fraction of the cost of a new one.

Enlarge / The Clip mounts to the front fork just below the brake caliper.

Eric Bangeman

Weighing in at 8.8 lb (4 kg) for the Commuter model (the Explorer is a pound heavier), the Clip is at its essence a portable friction-drive. There’s a detachable controller that mounts on the handlebar and the unit itself. The Explorer model, the one we reviewed, has a 192 Wh battery that takes an hour to fully charge. Its range is pegged at “up to 12 miles,” a claim that is pretty accurate based on our testing, and the top speed is 15 mph. The Commuter model offers half the battery capacity, charge time, and range.

Twelve miles may not seem like a lot, especially in contrast to e-bikes with ranges that exceed 70 miles. But the Clip isn’t designed for long, leisurely rides. It’s a tool for folks who want to resuscitate old bikes that might be gathering dust in the garage. In my case, that bike is a 1997 Gary Fisher Marlin mountain bike that is now only ridden once or twice a year.

Clipping the Clip to your bike

The Clip arrived in a box with a single sheet of instructions glued to the inside with a pair of QR codes. One leads to the product manual, but the other one has a surprising function: scheduling a one-on-one orientation session with Clip, which is unusual and fantastic at the same time. Mine took about 20 minutes.

Enlarge / The Clip remote. Hold the red button down to go; the white button below will regenerate the battery.

Eric Bangeman

In theory, attaching the Clip to a bike is simple, and it is fairly easy once you get the hang of it. First, remove the remote from the Clip, which attaches to the bicycle’s handlebar with a clever rubber loop. Next, grab one side of the Clip, slide the button on the handle, and push the handle forward. Then align the top edge so that it sits just below the brake caliper and pull down on the handle of the Clip. If you’ve done it right, you’ll hear a satisfying click, and the white LED battery charge indicators on the Clip will light up. The wheel of the Clip should now be resting on the front wheel of the bike, so congratulations—you now have an e-bike.

Enlarge / The view from the top.

Eric Bangeman

Operation is dead simple. Press and hold the red button to activate the friction drive. Press and hold the white button for some regenerative braking action. The lack of displays and apps means we have to take Clip’s word that the regen function can restore 12 to 18 percent of the device’s range. In practice, it acts as a low-key brake as it sends charge back to the battery.

Immediately after mounting, I found that I had to pedal for a second or two before a button press would register with the Clip. After that, it worked like a charm. Positioning the remote close to the grip worked the best, and I gradually got used to holding the button while pedaling. Remembering to switch to the regen button while slowing down was a bit harder.

The extra 10 pounds of gear attached to the front wheel messes with the weight distribution, leading to one or two “whoa” moments my first time riding with it attached. But I figured out how to handle the bike and its new center of gravity fairly quickly. If you’re feeling lazy, you don’t need to pedal at all, and the Clip will eventually get you moving around 15 mph. Start pedaling, and you’ll feel the Clip adding to your effort—unless the road is wet. The Clip works best on dry roads; leave it at home if it’s raining.

Enlarge / At the end of the ride, unmount the Clip and take it with you.

Clip

Once you’ve reached your destination, grab the handle, pull it back toward you, and remove the Clip from the bike. Drop the remote back into its spot, and carry the Clip with you.

There are loads of e-bike conversion kits to choose from, but I have a hard time imagining something easier to install and use. And that’s what makes the Clip such a good product—there’s no messing with tools, installing motors, and mounting batteries. The Clip literally clips to your bike and electrifies it. I wouldn’t use it for a trip to the grocery store because I wouldn’t want to lug the Clip up and down the aisles. But for quick trips or short commutes, it’s a fantastic way to give new life to an old bike.

Turn almost any bike into an e-bike with the Clip Read More »

Unleash the beast: High Performance Cycle’s electric mountain bike

Cars, e-bikes, e-mountain bikes, hpc, mountain bikes / Ari B / April 4, 2024

Image of a large, dark green mountain bike against a grey stone wall. — John TImmer

I found myself in the air long enough to give some thought to how I could land while remaining atop the bicycle I had been riding the instant before I hit the jump. Based on similar experiences while skiing, I immediately recognized that this invariably meant very bad things. A few seconds later, as I was brushing dirt out of the abrasions I had just picked up, I contemplated where I had gone wrong.

Once again, I had misunderstood HPC’s Trailblazer e-mountain bike. Doing so had become a feature of the time I spent using the bike.

The Trailblazer looks like a solid, hefty beast of a bike (that’s not an insult—I got compliments on its looks while taking a train to some trails). It’s covered with components that are likely to be unfamiliar to people who know the default sets that come with bikes from large manufacturers. But if you do some research on the components, you realize that the Trailblazer was specced by someone with deep knowledge and fairly particular tastes. And the ride the bike provided has some surprisingly subtle qualities that took me a while to adjust to.

Spare parts

High Performance Cycles offers two models of Trailblazer, the base and the Pro, and both have the same carbon fiber frame. They differ almost entirely based on their components, with the Pro having mostly top-of-the-line material befitting its $9,000 price tag and the base model costing $6,400 for very-good-but-still-a-step-down level components. You can increase the price of either by purchasing more capacious batteries, faster chargers, lights, or even an internal geared hub. (Note that the company has just updated the specs for 2024.)

You can also pay to boost the motor to one capable of speeds that will make you a danger to yourself and others, which will also make the bike illegal to use on anything but private property. Let’s get one thing out of the way here: Making an e-bike that can reach 65 km/hr (40 mph), as some Trailblazer configurations can, is a mistake. But HPC sent me the low-end model that behaved as a standard Class 1 e-bike, with a maximum speed of 32 km/hr (20 mph), so that’s what this review is about.

Enlarge / The suspension system from DVO.

John Timmer

Most of the components you’ll find on mountain bike frames come from just a handful of manufacturers. And HPC relies on some of them (notably SRAM drivetrains). But smaller design companies stay afloat through a combination of replacements for broken parts, tempting people with upgrades, or offering some specific features that aren’t well-served by the more generic designs of major manufacturers. The Trailblazer leans heavily into those.

For example, the tires come from Kenda and have a reputation for great grip at the expense of high rolling resistance—a drawback that matters less when you have an electric assist. The forks and shocks come from a company called DVO and have an adjustment that, based on what I’ve read, should help compensate for the added weight of the hardware. Bafang, which provides the motor, isn’t a household name, but it’s a major player in electrified cycling. I’d already identified the WTB Volt as a highly rated saddle and was pleased to find one on the bike to try out. I could go through the rest of the bike’s specs and say similar things about the other components.

Enlarge / I ended up liking the WTB seat a great deal.

John Timmer

Overall, the parts list felt quirky, and it might give someone who’s expecting big names some pause. But every component I looked into had some features that made it a good (or at least interesting) choice for an e-mountain bike.

Unleash the beast: High Performance Cycle’s electric mountain bike Read More »

Study finds that once people use cargo bikes, they like their cars much less

cargo bike, cargo bikes, Cars, e-bike, e-bikes / Ryan Harris / January 31, 2024

Hop in, we’re getting groceries —

Even some one-car households ditched vehicles in favor of cargo bike-sharing.

Kevin Purdy – Jan 31, 2024 7: 37 pm UTC

Trek Fetch+2 with cargo panniers attached — Enlarge / It’s not likely to totally replace your car, nor will it probably be your only bike. But access to a cargo bike can reduce car trips, and even car ownership, a study from Germany suggests.

Cargo bikes started as something you’d see in images from Europe—bakfiets loaded up with groceries or sometimes kids. Now they’re getting more popular, and seemingly for good reason. A new study out of Germany suggests that once you let people try them, they tend to have a real impact on car use, and even car ownership.

The study, from Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, surveyed people using a cargo bike share (CBS) system from 58 different programs and initiatives in Germany, controlling a collective 751 cargo bikes. Out of the 2,386 active CBS users surveyed, 45.8 percent had one car in their home, and 54.2 percent lived without a car. As you might notice, this mix of cargo bike shares and car ownership is not representative of the US, but using a cargo bike, even one they didn’t technically own, still impacted ownership decisions in even one-car households.

A bit more than 18 percent of survey respondents said they either got rid of their car or decided against buying a car, and 80 percent of those people said they did so for environmental reasons. Nearly 49 percent said they ditched a car for financial reasons, 42 percent because they had “no interest in driving a car,” and about 10 percent due to the safety risks of driving a car (with the survey allowing for multiple reasons).

The average age of the study’s participants was 41.6 years old. Notably, 73.2 percent of those surveyed were in “metropolitan urban regions,” 11.8 percent in “regiopolitan urban regions” (i.e., suburbs), and about 15 percent in rural regions either close to or outside a city.

Ratings of cargo bikes and cars across different “motives” for using them, on a 1–5 scale for importance, by the Germans surveyed for a study.

In perhaps more unsurprising news, people who actively signed up to use cargo bikes think they’re pretty great. Those surveyed rated cargo bikes higher when considering motivations for different forms of transport, on a 1–5 scale. Cars significantly won out among those who considered themselves car-dependent in travel speed, comfort, and weather independence.

Interestingly, respondents gave cars a roughly 3.4–3.5 out of 5 in traffic safety, and those who considered themselves “car-reduced” rated cargo bike use just below that, around 3.3. Those who considered themselves “car-dependent” rated cars’ traffic safety higher, just above 4.0 on average, and similarly provided higher ratings for speed, comfort, and weather independence.

As Ars’ John Timmer noted in a cargo bike review from the fall, cargo bikes are somewhat specialized for what they do—but because of their build, they’re definitely second bikes. Cargo bikes, however, can often replace even a weekend-scale grocery trip and give you exercise, fresh air, and lower environmental impact.

As suggested by the survey, and the experience of cargo bike enthusiasts I’ve met, they can’t do everything a car can, but cargo bikes can work if you’re willing to put in the effort. Folks in notably bike-oriented Germany have suggested they can use even fewer cars with the advent of electric-assist cargo bikes and often feel good about doing so.

Transportation Research F, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.trf.2023.12.018 (About DOIs).

Study finds that once people use cargo bikes, they like their cars much less Read More »