E-bike for a 5-mile commute: is a $1,000 e-bike actually worth it, or am I better off with a regular bike and the bus?
My commute is 5 miles each way, mostly flat. A decent e-bike runs about $1,000 and I keep hearing they change everything for commuting. But I also see $600 ones on Amazon and $2,500 ones at the bike shop. I do not want to pay for a battery that dies in a year or brakes that cannot stop the thing. Is $1,000 the sweet spot, or is a regular bike plus a bus pass the smarter money?
1 answer
- Spend the full $1,000, skip the $600 ones
At $1,000 you can get a bike with name-brand battery cells and hydraulic disc brakes, and that is what actually matters when you are riding it every day in traffic. The sub-$700 bikes cut corners exactly where you do not want them to: cheap batteries and weak mechanical brakes. Buy from somewhere that will service it, because a mail-order bike with no local support is a paperweight the first time something breaks.