“It's a nice-looking full-featured little e-bike: mid-drive, belt, internal gear hub, integrated battery, shifting and torque sensors etc. This and the properly-sized mudguards make it usable for inclement weather. Generally, it's best for city rides and commuting.
The drive is silent. Being a mid-drive configuration, it effectively multiplies the pedal torque, so the rider can still choose to have a good exercise by pushing harder and/or selecting a lower level of assistance.
It's main drawback is the very limited gear selection (3 gears). Of those, 1st gear is practically useless: the motor is powerful enough to push through the steepest (road) hills (~15%) on the 2nd gear, yet has problems with higher cadence. At the same time, the 3rd gear is only usable downhill without assistance: its comfortable cadence starts at 25 km/h, which is the (stupid) legal limit of assistance. If this artificial limit is raised (which is possible with a CAN device), the assistance would only help to about 37-40 km/h: the motor torque naturally drops at higher cadence, and even 40 km/h requires well over 100 RPM cadence on the top gear.
Of course, like any e-bike, without assistance it turns into a very poor bicycle; probably even worse than most due to inefficient (but maintenace-free) belt drive and small wheels. But it's stil ridable and will get you home (perhaps on that otherwise unusable 1st gear). On the other hand, its claimed assistance range (~72 km on the lowest assistance and half that on the highest) seems to be true, maybe even better. I've never ridden it to depletion yet, but I had some 65 km on mid-to-high assistance (over several rides) on a single charge, and the computer still showed 12 km left on max assistance and the battery had green light. (That said, I probably push it beyond the assistance speed more than most normal riders).
Of other things to keep in mind I would mention:
- Due to the belt drive, removing the rear wheel (to fix a flat) must be a bit more involved process than for a normal chain drive. The online-only manual doesn't even discuss this (nor any other mechanical maintenace).
- Due to small wheels, the pedals are close to the ground. It's easy to touch the ground while pedaling through a turn (at speeds > about 25 km/h).
- The front basket is connected to the frame rather than the fork and thus does not rotate. Theoretically, this is better, but this is a bit disconcerning at first, and requires more attention when manoeuvring in tight spaces.
- The display/control is not particularly well designed: it always starts on the same mode/settings rather than on the last-used mode, and resetting the trip data (which I normally do before each ride) requires so many button presses that I'm considering putting a normal bike computer to it.
- The bell is very poor and should be replaced.
- I got a dead charger with the bike. But 99bikes promptly replaced it.
Overall, it's a nice secondary or commuting/all-round bike for those who still want to have an exercise during their commute yet struggle with hills or time.”
“Now that we’ve had a chance to fully experience the ride & feel of our new E-Bikes we couldn’t be happier with our choice. Pedal for health & activity, while enjoying the extra capabilities of longer distance rides & hill climbing.”
