I'll jump in as a 3rd party. Basically, we all live far away from each other. It's difficult to arrange a test when we can't put one e-bike next to the other. So, in the spirit of the discussion, basically the question is, will a cheapo or expensive e-bike that is direct drive, hub, etc kill over instead of a geared e-bike.
I won't get into which e-bike is better since we can't compare them side by side, but I will offer up a test on my own to document some real world results.
Using this to show you the hill.....
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3245297223527610557
Fast forward the video to index 33 minutes 50 seconds with the cursor. This hill is steep enough to allow a bicycle to roll over 50 MPH, so I think it will be steep enough and long enough to test some of my own e-bikes with. The hill section I measured from the video at 9.2 miles to 9.5 miles at the bottom and what I will test. Basically 0.3 miles or 1,584 feet. Since I don't want to drive to East TN to do a 20 mile, 10,000 foot climb in the Smokey mountains on the e-bikes, I would rather stick with local. Everyone will have to live with the fact that I'm going to have to drive up the hill to a marker, turn around, coast back down, and drive back up over and over until the batteries die. So I'll just count the laps, do some simple math for distance and post the results. This will basically be a 20% grade uphill test for the motor and batteries with about a 30 second "rest" between each lap. Since both of them freewheel, everyone will have to live with the 30 second "rest" on these results, especially given this simulates a constant climb up a 20% grade never ending hill which is way more than the average than anything anyone can find at the moment.
I'm not bias or have anything to prove, so my results will be reported no matter how good or terrible both of my e-bikes do.
I'll be using for my test:
- 36 volt Mongoose with 450 W Currie Motor
- 48 volt Crystalyte 406 Front Hub Motor
As everyone knows, these will be the worse possible test e-bikes, the Mongoose gets barely 18 miles per charge and my 406 Crystalyte is certainly not designed to climb hills like this. I suspect the Mongoose will win the distance test, but who knows, I might be surprised.