Gwylan
Veteran
- Location
- All at sea⛵
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Pale Rider
Legendary Member
People tend to overestimate the mileage required for short distance delivery work.
Watching a few YouTube vids by riders confirms most deliveries are a lot less than two miles or even under a mile - customers tend to order from a nearby takeaway.
Average earnings seem to be between £10 and £15 an hour, which equates to between two and three deliveries or about five miles of riding.
Thus an eight hour shift is around 40 miles, which is within the range of a large battery, even if the bike is illegally overpowered.
Another factor is that in the UK most town centres are all but flat, so these guys are not doing many battery sapping climbs.
A reasonably well engineered ebike will easily handle that type of use, so maintenance would be no more than you would expect from a pushbike used in the same way.
I always have a mismatch between the bars lit up on the handlebar control and those stationary on the battery whilst under charge. The handlebar display has just shown 2 bars but the battery under charge is only currently 1 bar full. On Saturday the battery had not reached the full 5 bars on charge although the handlebar display had five lit up. In between it has done 27.56 miles and climbed 1888ft. Depending on gradient and headwind assist levels get varied with stretches of no assist. The battery is a Giant 36V 11360mAh capacity and 409Wh energy.
ebikeerwidnes
Guru
- Location
- Z’ha’dum
As far as the bars on the display are concerned - I have always found - on several ebikes - that it takes ages for the first bar to disappear but then the rest go at a gradually increasing rate
I can sometimes get back from a 20 miles ride having - apparetnly - still full charge
then the next ride uses the first bar quite quickly and then by the end of the same 20 miles I have lost 2 or 3 bars
The cheaper systems seem to accelerate the "bar disappearance" more then the more expensive (i.e. Bosch) one
I can sometimes get back from a 20 miles ride having - apparetnly - still full charge
then the next ride uses the first bar quite quickly and then by the end of the same 20 miles I have lost 2 or 3 bars
The cheaper systems seem to accelerate the "bar disappearance" more then the more expensive (i.e. Bosch) one
youngoldbloke
The older I get, the faster I used to be ...
The Mahle app for the x35 system tells you the percentage and range left (it calculates estimated range depending on your past usage and input history), and I find the last 20% of charge disappears very rapidly compared with the first 80%.
I think that's because it won't let the the battery get completely drained. The assistance stops at IIRC less than 10% battery remaining.
Tomm Williams
Active Member
- Location
- Northern California
That might be the case as well with Fazua as I took mine out for a test run to try and determine maximum range and just couldn’t seem to kill it.
bonzobanana
Guru
Those figures don't tie up with what I've seen. Many shorter journeys are only around £3-£3.50 with longer journeys maybe up to £6-7 especially if a double order which many are. It's not just delivering the order its going back into the town centre to get another order so a 1.5 mile distance is a 3 mile journey approx unless a double order where there are two drops before going back into the town or city centre. From what I've seen about 40 minutes of the hour is travelling time maybe more, with almost no time spent at the delivery end mostly unless in a tower block but often some waiting at the restaurant but even then I've seen many gig economy videos where as soon as they turn up its available to take. I'm sure I've seen 70 and 100 mile distances achieved over one shift and one of the reasons they have upgraded their ebikes is because the range was too limiting on many shop bought ebikes so they had to upgrade. Of course there are so many variables in play here but surely the reason you see so many gig economy riders on these type of ebikes is to increase their range. They have become the default type of ebike purely because they have the necessary range which most standard ebikes do not. It's the right tool for the job basically. However I accept throttles are almost a necessity for the stop/start traffic in urban environments which could be another factor. It should also be pointed out that direct drive hub motors have low torque output. It's pretty much a necessity to have to pedal at times to conquer steeper hills.
However I've seen loads of different ebikes used. I've not seen mid-drives used in the videos I've followed but a wide assortment of ebikes both pre-built and kit but all hub motor based both geared and direct drive hub motors plus a few super fit types who use standard bikes. I'm not very good at remembering youtube channel names I must admit but a few I remember are 'London Eats', 'Atlanta Delivers', 'Gig Hustle' and 'Pompey Bite's'. There are quite a few more I have watched but can't remember the names.
Also there are loads of hilly towns and cities where these riders operate. I've seen some real nasty hills on the videos. In fact I've seen one or two videos where the riders are really annoyed that they have to keep travelling up the same hill as the orders keep coming from the same area. I don't think all towns and cities are flat.
I saw a video where a Bosch based mid-drive ebike was used off-road with a lot of tough climbing and the battery lasted about 40 minutes of riding and I think was 500Wh although it could have been 400Wh possibly but the point is that is an average of about 600W being used on a 400Wh battery certainly not 250W. Yes in normal use they last much, much longer but that is not a 250W ebike. The whole point of a throttle based ebike is you only use the throttle when you need it, you have full control of when the motor is powered at all times. So its easy to be conservative with power.
fasteasyfree
Active Member
I think it comes down to programming. As a battery is drained, the voltage drops. So in order for a motor to maintain the same power output, the amp draw needs to go up. Power = amps X voltage after all. Which means it drains faster.
The cheaper systems are literally reading the voltage level and using that for the percentage (which drops increasingly rapidly, assuming a constant power output). A smarter system would account for the accelerated drop, and give a different weighting to the reported voltage.
The discharge is quite a flat line, most range guessometers will use this profile to estimate range
My own bike matches this curve above, initially 100% battery quickly drops away, then remains steady until it becomes a little erratic when near fully discarded.
My wife's bike, we use voltage and when the voltage drops 0.5V for an acceleration or hill climb, we know that full depletion is not far away. She then backs off all sudden power demands and cruises as smoothly as possible. This can give another 10 or so miles
My own bike matches this curve above, initially 100% battery quickly drops away, then remains steady until it becomes a little erratic when near fully discarded.
My wife's bike, we use voltage and when the voltage drops 0.5V for an acceleration or hill climb, we know that full depletion is not far away. She then backs off all sudden power demands and cruises as smoothly as possible. This can give another 10 or so miles
wiggydiggy
Guru
I just plugged my bike and my stats into that (Raleigh Motus Active Line, Powerpack 400) and I'd agree - it says 50 miles but I typically get 60 as quite often I'm riding faster than 15.5mph so that saves. The bars act weird for me, it can stay on 4 or 5 bars for seemingly ages then once hits 3 it seems to be on an ever increasing faster downward journey.
The most frugal journey I got was I needed to do a 22ish mile trip for something urgent, but had forgetten to charge and had 11 miles on Eco! I managed to nurse it around without too much unassisted riding and it dropped to zero 1/2 a mile from my house.
I've never used the inbuilt USB charger on it though (for phones etc), wonder how much charging a dead phone would reduce the range by.
Pale Rider
Legendary Member
Someone cleverer than me could calculate how much charge it would take to fill an empty phone, but I'm going to venture very little in comparison to the capacity of the Bosch pack.
Transferring that to range impact is harder, but I expect it would be barely measurable.
Also worth bearing in mind the Bosch management software cuts the power to the motor when the battery is close to empty to prevent over-discharge.
This also means any hard wired lights still work enabling you to ride home, albeit unassisted, safely in the dark.
I daresay the display and usb port would still work as well.
In that case, the loss of range would be zero.
