alt Hacker NewsIn my city, travel habits and condition, I find I wish for more torque and lower speed. Every place I want to go has significant hills that the motor can't handle, and easing climbing hills is the main reason I want an ebike. My ebike's minimum speed for the motor is 15kph, which is ok by myself, but my family likes to go slower, so I have to go fully manual with them. When I look at ebike ads it feels like nobody else cares about these two areas of performance. When I talk to local ebike shops they are unprepared to talk about torque and minimum speed.
Replies
Exchanging torque and speed is like the only function of the gears on your bike.
It was too early and a bit of a dangerous design, but the StokeMonkey was built for torque and worked great at low speeds.
Some pedicab folks in Austin used to use them.
Hill climbing video YouTube https://share.google/iLrHXvjAKMO4esAux
Design info https://share.google/iLrHXvjAKMO4esAux
Huh, it's you bike have a hub motor? The thing inside the wheel?
Mine sits between the pedals. That means I can just go down in gear and the motor helps with going up the hill.
Doesn't it help changing gears? You can even get sprockets changed to lower the gearing for more torque.
I fitted a Bafeng mid-drive motor to my city bike and it's fabulous for hills. Because the power goes through the existing drivechain you can get high torque simply by switching to first gear. No minimum speed, power kicks in after half a turn of the pedals. Coupled with hub gears you can change at rest it's a marvel.
Even at the European street legal limit of 250W it makes acceleration trivial.