What do you think is the least reliable ebike component?

[deardancer3]

What do you think is the least reliable ebike component?

[Zoot Katz]

The operator.

[voicecoils]

Hall sensor failures are worth noting.

They can happen in motors or hall based throttles.

In either case it's a problem and an average end user will be left wondering what the heck happened.

[amberwolf]

And it's a good bet that improper handling with no static-discharge precautions at any point in their lives is a contributor to their failures, too. Based on my experiences at Honeywell Commercial Flight Systems Group in the late 80s/early 90s, and all the problems we traced down to ESD, most of them caused by people who knew better but still didn't follow precautionary guidelines (both within our plant and from external vendors), and some of them caused by vendors that didn't have any kind of precautions at all, and no training for their workers (regular tile floor with plasticy coatings that you could *feel* the static buildup from, if wearing normal tennis shoes, wooden or plastic-topped benches, workers in street clothes or worse in nylon lab coats!, the list could go on.

ESD doesn't usually kill something outright, it just sets it up for failure later under stressful conditions. If being inside a hot motor with all sorts of changing conditions around it, electrically and otherwise, isn't stressful, I'm not sure what would be. In the throttles it's more likely to be a mechanical stress, but can be water, sweat, dirt building up on it and shorting the leads out (or capacitively allowing current flow between them), voltage spikes or fluctuations from poorly regulated outputs from the controller or induction along the long wires from it, etc.

If the parts are "seconds" to begin with, or even outright fakes (other lower quality or rejected parts rebranded or restamped with a "better" spec'd part number), both of which are common enough in today's market for semiconductors, it would be no surprise to me if either or both of the above problems caused a lot of the failures seen on bikes, in all types of electronic components.

It's unlikely that most companies producing things care much where their parts come from, or do much to validate their origins and authenticity, given the huge problem the capacitor plague has been for NEARLY TEN YEARS. If the distributors that carried the parts were to test and validate their parts, and refuse to buy from vendors that repeatedly provide defective or non-passing parts, those vendors would either cut down or cease their problematic methods, or go out of business. But because parts are cheaper from places that dont' do as much (or any) validation, that's who they buy from, forcing the places that did do it before to reduce or stop their efforts to compete pricewise.

If the manufacturers of FRUs and TLAs (end-products) would refuse to buy from distributors that provided bad parts because of lack of validation, then the distributors would be forced to do the testing or themselves go under. The same thing applies here as above, that instead they'll buy the cheaper parts and eventually cause the opposite of what needs to happen, by making it so NO ONE validates anything, reducing the whole chain's quality control to almost nothing.

Ideally, consumers should do the same thing--buy only from sources that validate their products, but I already know that consumers aren't going to stop buying from manufacturers that repeatedly provide bad products, because consumers are even cheaper than companies are, and more willing to live with crap for a while until it breaks and they can now go buy a new one from another crappy cheap company. It's been getting more and more like that over the last couple of decades, and the economy (at least in the USA) is getting to where consumers can't *afford* to demand the best, by paying the premium prices for everything. Many can, still, but more and more people have to cut back more and more, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

In the end, the only parts that are really rejected outright are the ones that are simply dead off the original production line at the component manufacturer. Even then, I expect a significant number of the lower-end places will put as many of those dead parts as they can into batches of working parts, just so that they won't have wasted as much money. They know that not much testing of the parts will happen after they leave their hands, right up until it's in the end-user's hands.

I guarantee you that with many, perhaps even most products, a majority of any particular batch of them is not even powered up before it leaves the factory--I have repaired so many things over the years that could NEVER have worked, with caps, diodes, transistors, and other highly polarity sensitive parts in backwards, and even with wires missing from the power inlet to the PCB. Impossible that it was ever checked--just thrown together, stuck in a box and sent to a store to be sold. Not all this crap comes from China or Asia either--some of it is US-made, some of it from Canada or Mexico. Not much of the later three, most of it Chinese or India or other such places, but enough of it to tell me that many companies just don't care, or else they simply can't afford to care anymore if they are to compete pricewise with the places that really don't care.

So I think that the least reliable ebike component, aside from the operator (Zoot Katz is right), is everything else.

[317537]

The operator.

Damn you beat me to it.

I had to hose my GM down tonight. The operator at the time "not the owner" really loaded up the rack basket and trailer.

I warned her last week. Very soon "she" will be pushing it home if she continues to increase the loads during the up coming summer

[TPA]

Spokes, for us heavyweight types.

[oldhaq]

Tyres and tubes, though perhaps the easiest to repair.

[deardancer3]

What do you think is the least reliable ebike component?

A little surprising so far, a lot more wiring problems than I expected. One would expect some wiring problems, especially considering that this is high current in a high vibration environment. Still, Good manufacturing could possibly have anticipated and prevented much of this.

Anyway, please add details on your survey entry, details about the failures you have seen.

thankx

D

[deardancer3]

just a bump.

[dogman]

I didn't vote, because the least reliable component is obviously the charger. ( at least the cheap ones) After that, the bike parts, spokes, tires etc.

[vanilla ice]

I vote charger as well.

[deardancer3]

woops 2 votes for charger.

and now since i tried to add charger to the survey, it wiped out the old results.

Fetcher, anyone, save my a$$.

[mrgarci1]

I've had controller, charger, spoke, and other bike-platform related failures. I think the major problem is shoddy quality control across every one of these items - wheels being shipped with machine-spoked rims, bikes not being built to handle the stresses or weight of the extra components, poor testing/design of electronics.


But the most consistently unreliable part is still the operator.

[MattDog]

Operator....absolutely...with any vehicle

[deardancer3]

OK, How does the Ebike operator fail? Do they neglect to press the throttle or plug the charger in?

[317537]

OK, How does the Ebike operator fail? Do they neglect to press the throttle or plug the charger in?

They forget to release the throttle, apply breaks, plug the charger in, stop at the stop sign, indicate before turning, slow down in shared zones and then overload the poor bike until its dies.


All of the above and more.

[Zoot Katz]

"I was just riding along when all of a sudden. . . " fill in the blanks with any variety of hokum.
"Here, hold my beer and watch this."
"Why didn't somebody tell me?"
"Oh, that's what that thing does!"
etc.

[fechter]

woops 2 votes for charger.

and now since i tried to add charger to the survey, it wiped out the old results.

Fetcher, anyone, save my a$$.

Sorry, I don't know how to recover that data.
I think everyone will just have to vote again. members can only vote once, and it seems to have reset that counter as well.

[deardancer3]

I am sooo em "bare-assed".

My first pole, then tried to correct a goof up by not having "charger", deleting all the data, telling folks to re-vote, then the voting time expires..

Hey Fetcher, can you reset the timer and give another 5 days? Or should I just give up and go sulk in the corner?


( I was surprised with all the wiring and operator problems)


sorry

[Ypedal]

Only option is to set number of days at " 0 " to make it never expire, but in the process the existing votes get reset, no way to retain them ( i think it assumes the options changed making the existing votes null... doh.. but correct in a way ) ..

We need a scripting expert in here..

[ejonesss]

the battery is probably the most failure prone.

i have read somewhere that battery technologies have not gotten robust enough to be reliable long term.

lead acid does not like being subject to cold especially the flooded since the liquid could freeze and split open the case if the weather gets cold enough.

lead acid is a little more tolerant of being discharged and charged they will still shorten in life if discharged too far too many times and if over charged but unlike lithium they do not need a bms (the controller's lvc is good enough).

[recumbent]

I picked charger from the list, but wiring has also given me grief couple times. The Anderson connectors corrode, or foul-up with constant sparking, or maybe the loss of spring tension, but had to change a couple after a years useage to get a good reliable connection.

[SpeedEBikes]

My blinky lights. I've had more bike light failures than anything. Followed by rear view mirrors.

The least reliable component is the one you've had most recently fail. My most recent failure was a controller that I was operating at -20F with a 50+ mph headwind (riding 25+ mph into 25+ mph wind).

I've had failures of just about every sort. But currently I consider all my ebikes very reliable. If I was going to set out on a cross country journey I'd carry extra brake pads, tire and tube, a couple spare spokes, a couple lengths of wire with connectors, a spare controller and perhaps two chargers.

An awful lot of sketchy controllers and chargers have been sold, but it is getting much easier to find good ones now. Most failures were do to mistakes on my part, poor choice of connectors, inadequate heatsinking, ventilation, weather/moisture protection, etc.

[Ykick]

'experienced every failure on your poll and a couple of 'em more than once! i couldn't pick just one so I went with my least reliable component: other drivers...

operator coming a close 2nd.

[RythmshiP]

I posted controller but really the brake to controller transmition is not good and needs a upgrade on my bike