Going all Steve Jobs on the e-bike Industry

I did my first big trial run on the Super Commuter earlier this week. I have to say I was a little disappointed. I thought I’d be able to ride from Rock Hill to Greenville in about 4½ hours, averaging about 23 miles per hour. Surely it wouldn’t make a difference that I was pulling a trailer and an extra bike—I have a MOTOR, and motors are impervious to workload. Or so I thought.

After speeding out of town on SC highway 5 in sport and turbo modes (the ones where it’s fairly easy to maintain 25+ mph—any who’ve ridden SC 5 between Rock Hill and York will understand), I did some math in my head about 15 miles in and realized I needed to get 60+ km out of the 500 watt hour battery I was using first or run the risk of running down the smaller two spare batteries I was hauling in the trailer. Running out of battery short of my destination at my brother’s place in Greenville on unfamiliar roads, probably after dark, maybe in rain, definitely with a 60-lb. bike and a 30-lb. trailer and another 20-lb. bike…let’s just say I wanted to avoid that. So I dialed it back from the upper two modes of the e-bike to the lower two, and only used the “tour” mode on uphills. And I watched my average speed drop from around 29-30 kph to, by the time I finished the first battery, around 25-26 kph. That’s 18.6-18 mph, down to 15-15.5 mph.  

“More like 10:30 or 11:00. Sorry I underestimated how much the weight of the extra bike would affect my progress” I texted my family in York. It wound up being after midnight. In the last hour, I grew increasingly frustrated and just wanted to be done. The streets were wet from an earlier rain (I only got rained on for 15 minutes or so in Spartanburg, and it was light enough it didn’t soak the streets), so it was also super humid, and a long gradually uphill stretch on Roper Mountain Rd. toward Greenville had my heart rate up in the 150s and 160s, and since I was near the end of the range of the second spare battery, I couldn’t use the motor to ease that much. I was keeping the Garmin in the data screen to see how far I had to go, when I realized there were turns coming up and I didn’t know exactly where they were, so I needed to swipe back to the map screen. But when I tried to swipe the screen, all it did was leave a new puddle of sweat. I stopped and tried to dry my fingers on my shirt or shorts, but there was no dry cloth anywhere on me, so I had to open the trailer, dig into my bag, pull out a pair of underwear, and use it to wipe off the screen. As I suspected, the intersection where I stopped was where I was supposed to turn.

I felt like going all Steve Jobs on the e-bike industry: “Your product is JUNK! How can you THINK of taking this to market?! I can’t say ‘Goodbye car’ if I can’t tow a trailer and an extra bike 100 miles in South Carolina summer heat and humidity WITHOUT BREAKING A SWEAT!” (Steve Jobs wouldn’t have said “junk”, and neither did I as I rode past empty business parks and around Greenville’s downtown airport at midnight; I wasn’t happy.)

Okay, so I realize my expectations were a little too high. The return trip was less emotional, but probably harder, since I wound up in midday heat 80 miles in. I was more conservative with the motor to start, and actually wound up taking a longer route through Lockhart instead of Hickory Grove, on some roads I’d never been on. I kind of regretted it, but it was a good ride. I made it home with enough battery life that I could use the turbo mode on McConnells Highway the last few miles into town. I still only averaged 25.5 kph, though. I need to do 35 kph avg to make it to Maryland in two days of riding. More on that later.

Here are some cows from somewhere in Cherokee County.