Disposable vapes are indefensible. Many, or maybe most, of them contain rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, but manufacturers prefer to sell new ones.
To make a point about how wasteful this practice is—and to also make a pretty rad project and video—Chris Doel took 130 disposable vape batteries (the bigger “3,500 puff” types with model 20400 cells) found littered at a music festival and converted them into a 48-volt, 1,500-watt e-bike battery, one that powered an e-bike with almost no pedaling more than 20 miles. You can see the whole build and watch Doel zoom along trails on his YouTube video.
I so so want to purchase an ebike.But the companies don’t seem likely to stick around for long though.
You pretty much should only buy one from a shop that has a physical location near you and can do repairs. Like everybody around me sells Trek, so if I ever got one, it’d be a Trek with a Bosch motor. Bike shops will not repair ebikes they don’t sell, even though they’ll repair regular bikes. And neither Trek nor Bosch are going anywhere.
I see your point, but I also saw Juiced Bikes go out of business last month after 15 years in the industry.
My problem with Ebikes is the number of regular bikes stolen. No way I want to haul a ebike up and down my basement stairs a couple times a day.
I bought one from Aventon. It was easy to repair and didn’t require anything special.
I’m going to build one. Total cost will be >$1k for the mid drive motor and battery (not counting the bike itself), but it’ll be way faster than the street legal stuff they sell at stores. They’re dead simple since they’re just bikes with a motor and battery pack, so any shop could work on it.
If you want something cheaper, there are other simple retrofit options as well.
So? As long as they deliver the ebike, what do you care about the financial health of the company after that?
Support. Warranties. Replacement parts.
Damn, this warranty is still in effect for a few more weeks, and the company’s gone…
Proprietary spare parts. The motors might be off the shelf so you could grab parts from a different manufacturer. But controllers and batteries are usually proprietary making repairs much more complicated and cost-inefficient