I've talked recently with a couple electric bicycle dealers who see a coming change in the electric bicycle market. It's real interesting thinking about this change and stands to be a good thing.
For example BestBuy and REI both are starting to sell electric bicycles. REI I understand because they already have an extensive bicycle shop in the store, but BestBuy is a head scratcher. Especially as BestBuy will also be selling an electric motorcycle. In the case of BB it's a limited number of stores and I think today I'll go over to the one nearby and see what's up with them.
I wonder if anybody else is seeing this...
I absolutely understand the need for improving the state of the electric bicycle industry. A lot of the conversion kits are just a box of parts with little fit and finish. For instance I have a crystalyte kit from Electric Rider and while the instruction booklet was pretty good you end up with a bit of a hack job doing the install. And isn't it true in most cases that hub motor installs require filing the dropouts? Filing the dropouts creates a risk of dropout failure, and there have been stories of e.g. breaking forks causing bad injury. Well, usually the broken forks were due to torque stress rather than dropout failure.
It would be very cool if electric bike conversion kits were very very simple to install so that literally anybody could do it, successfully. Right?
And for electric bicycles to make more of an impact on reducing petroleum use with all those consequences -- electric bicycles need to be very extremely simple to adopt and very highly reliable.
