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When Is an Electric Mountain Bike No Longer a Bicycle?



Electric bicycles can fill an important need. Low-power electric-assist mountain bikes, like the Specialized Turbo Levo FSR we tested last year, can make riding more accessible to more people, making up for gaps in fitness and training or helping people pedal through injuries. But electric bikes can also exist solely to exploit legal loopholes. This HPC Revolution can reach speeds in excess of 60 miles per hour on level ground, putting motorcycle performance in places where it doesn’t belong.To get more news about volt electric bike, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.

What Is It?
Hi-Power Cycles is a small Southern California company founded in 2008 by brothers Chris and Derek Hunt. They started selling electric retrofit kits for existing platforms but now design and manufacture very fast electric bicycles from the ground up.To get more news about bluetooth bike speaker, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.
The Revolution we tested starts at $9,999 and is based on the slack geometry of a downhill bike. Like a normal downhill bike, it uses high-end RockShox suspension with eight inches of travel up front and nine inches at the rear, plus a 10-speed SRAM derailleur. Unlike a normal downhill bike, its rear wheel contains a 7.3 horsepower motor, the frame is built around a 1,800 watt-hour battery pack, and you can kick the bottom bracket to select a second speed on the single-ring front crank. The 85-tooth-equivalent gearing allows you to provide assistance to the motor, achieving a combined top speed of 60 mph.To get more news about ebike for sale, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.

Of course, that’s only after you reprogram it. The bike ships with a power and speed limiter that caps it at 20 mph to achieve legal classification as a pedal-assist bicycle. It also ships with instructions that enable the owner to remove these restrictions.

Because no one is going to buy an 82-pound bicycle, that essentially means HPC is selling a very light electric motorcycle that, thanks to pedals and post-sale programming, is legally considered a bicycle.Riding It
Adding a small battery pack and motor to a bike takes the weight up to around 50 pounds, which makes most pedal-assist electric mountain bikes feel cumbersome on the trail. Their makers extend a lot of effort to try to make the assisted pedal stroke feel natural and predictable and do their best to minimize the packaging compromises of the electric components.

But with the Revolution’s much more robust power output and twist throttle, you don’t need to ride it like a mountain bike. It has a lot more weight in the wheels, battery, and frame than a bicycle would, which makes pedaling through low-speed, technical climbs virtually impossible. On the Revolution, though, you don’t have to pedal through an obstacle—you can just grab a handful of throttle and power through it. Stuff you’d pedal through at 2 mph becomes stuff you take at 20 mph. On the bike, the uphill start to feel like downhill.

Having said that, the Revolution doesn’t actually feel like other electric motorcycles. The Alta Motors Redshift MX makes 42 horsepower and 120 pound-feet of torque and weighs 265 pounds. The KTM Freeride E-XC makes 25 horsepower and 31 pound-feet and weighs 238 pounds. Where those bikes are designed to please seasoned motorcyclists and perform on a motocross track, the 82-pound Revolution is nearly as easy to ride as a normal bicycle and simply flies along tight singletrack with the sort of confidence that the bigger bikes could never give you. With only the noise of wind and tires, it feels like you’re actually flying through the woods.