I have three ebikes. But they’re not the kind you’re thinking of.
Mine don’t have batteries and motors in the hub. Instead, they have power meters and computers (what the Cool Kids call “head units”) and radar devices. They help me to know where I’m going, how fast I’m going, how hard I’m working and which direction the wind will be blowing in the second hour of my ride.
They even let me ride through virtual worlds with dinosaurs and bears that can never quite get the honey.
Oh yeah. My bikes are wired. The list includes:
Computer (Garmin 1040 Solar)
Connected apps, including:
Ride With GPS
Strava
TrainerRoad
Zwift
E-tube
Garmin Connect
Training Peaks
(… and more, but I don’t want this to get like a list of biblical genealogies.)
Varia radar
Electronic shifting—Ultegra Di2
Apple Watch (although I’ve been looking at Garmins lately, a sentence which terrifies my wife)
Heck, I even had a helmet that would detect a crash (which was wrecked in a crash)
So yeah, even though I can’t artificially make my bike go faster by pushing a button, it’s still every inch an ebike.
No kidding—I spend more time plugging stuff in for my bike than I do for anything else. By a mile. If I had a battery-powered ebike, I’d worry that I’d overload my electrical system daily.
This is from a guy with an iPad, MacBook Pro, Kindle Oasis, etc., etc., to infinity and beyond. (If you suspect I may have issues, I won’t argue with you.)
I rode with a guy awhile ago who had no electronics at all on his bike. And he didn’t even have his phone with him. He said he “wanted to just ride,” the way we did when we were kids. I remember those days. Happy, carefree days, just riding, our shaggy, 14-year-old hair blowing in the wind. Pretending we didn’t hear Mom calling us for dinner because we had 15 more minutes of sunlight to pedal.
Boy, did those days suck. I mean, don’t you have to know where the next Strava segment is? How are you going to grab the next KOM if you don’t have the numbers? And that big hill you just started up—how are you going to pace yourself without Garmin’s ClimbPro? What about doing a completely new route without Ride With GPS’s turn-by-turn directions?
Here’s the really terrifying question, though: if my power went out overnight, could I even ride the next day? After all, nothing would be charged. Oh, the humanity! It would be a WKRP Turkey Drop-level disaster.
Or I’d just get on my bike and ride like I was 14.
(How many devices do you have to charge for a ride? Tell me in the comments below. I’d love to hear if you’re as obsessed as me.)
Just the battery in the bike, after 68 years, I am still 14. Trying to get the wife on one so she can be too!!!
The Varia radar is the greatest cycling innovation since the wheel. It connected to my Wahoo head unit without any drama and the improved situational awareness is simply amazing.