Tons of dead, 1-2 year old prebuilt EVs out there

neptronix

neptronix

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So i went to my local bicycle collective last weekend ( a non profit bike shop that sells used stuff and teaches people to wrench )..

They have ~20 bikes for sale, 3 of which are electric.
The electrics are going for 1/5th of the price as new, but they're all a few years old, obviously bought during the pandemic..
..and another person rolls up with some Chinese prebuilt ebike to donate just as i'm looking.

They're literally going for half the cost of the nicer roadbikes and MTBs.. nobody wants these things.
Probably the best pick of them a specialized turbo vado that looks flawless going for $400.

I checked out these bikes. Every single one seems to power up but has a dead display and the motor won't operate.
..but these bikes all have what looks like working motors and batteries.

I'm kinda surprised we don't see a lot of prebuilt hacking on this forum.
For almost all these bikes, it would be a matter of replacing the controller and/or BMS and probably even unlocking additional power in the process.
You could probably make a business out of fixing and reselling these things... or just get a super cheap head start on a build.

Just a thought!

As for me, none of these interest me, even at $0.. i would much rather have the standardized, swappable parts built on a bike frame. I think most prebuilt bikes are garbage. But one man's e-waste is another man's treasure!
 
neptronix said:
They're literally going for half the cost of the nicer roadbikes and MTBs.. nobody wants these things.
Probably the best pick of them a specialized turbo vado that looks flawless going for $400.
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Depending on model a Specialized Turbo Vado is $3500 to $4500 new! I think nervagon has one and he thinks very highly of it? I would have snapped it up and see if I can get it going.
 
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neptronix said:
nobody wants these things.
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This is the ugly side of electric transport revolution - general wastefulness and production over-capacity. If they're dead, they're worth zero. Cheaper to buy new instead of spending on repairs. I wonder what happens to millions of rental e-scooters that go out of service, i think this is just a dark secret of the industry.
 
rafalg said:
This is the ugly side of electric transport revolution - general wastefulness and production over-capacity.
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Yeah, not limited to that industry alone.

The(slight) upside is a cheapskate hackers paradise.

I live in rural north central Idaho, you would not believe the stuff that I have pulled from the dumpsters and turned into usable things.
 
Major brand e-bikes have way too many intentional impediments and incompatibilities built into them. They are not only designed to limit or eliminate second life use, but to abbreviate their own useful lifespan for the original buyer.

Why this isn't a more widely acknowledged topic in the cycling world, and why people aren't more strongly discouraged from falling for the trap, is beyond me. But new cars are a thing, and Apple is a thing, so I guess most people are just too stupid to act in their own interests. Born and bred, and relentlessly trained, suckers.
 
Zambam said:
I would have snapped it up and see if I can get it going.
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You would have failed, unless you went to a Specialized dealer and let them take you for whatever ride they liked.
 
Chalo said:
You would have failed, unless you went to a Specialized dealer and let them take you for whatever ride they liked.
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Well the cool thing about electric drive trains in general, is; a motor is a motor, a controller is a controller, and a battery is a battery.

In other words, they are just modules with interfaces, don't like what you got, bypass it, yank it out, or replace with whatever suits yer fancy.

Nobody can encrypt electricity, or chemistry, or large hammers, or blow torches.
 
A-DamW said:
Well the cool thing about electric drive trains in general, is; a motor is a motor, a controller is a controller, and a battery is a battery.
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Trust me when I tell you the designers of closed system bikes are keenly aware of this, and they contrive elaborate countermeasures to prevent time and cost efficient customization or repair.

Bosch batteries for instance are specifically designed not to be reassemblable if you dare open one. Bionx motors will only answer the door for a Bionx display, and Bionx is kaput. Van Moof was worthless, unserviceable nonsense even before they failed and orphaned the bikes' fone-only control app.

By the time you're opening things up that are sealed up tight with security fasteners, and trying to bypass encrypted nonsense to get at the big wires directly, they already won. You're wasting more time and replacement parts on it than the value of whatever makeshift junk you can turn it into.

Best to start with a real bike and a real motor system, and warn others not to eat the poopoo just because they put colorful sprinkles on it.
 
Chalo said:
You would have failed, unless you went to a Specialized dealer and let them take you for whatever ride they liked.
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if you treat it as a bike with a motor and battery cells in it, throwing a BMS, controller, and throttle into anything means you bypass 100% of these locked down and unreliable electronics. No hacking needed ( unless that's your thing )
 
Chalo said:
Trust me when I tell you the designers of closed system bikes are keenly aware of this, and they contrive elaborate countermeasures to prevent time and cost efficient customization or repair.

Bosch batteries for instance are specifically designed not to be reassemblable if you dare open one. Bionx motors will only answer the door for a Bionx display, and Bionx is kaput. Van Moof was worthless, unserviceable nonsense even before they failed and orphaned the bikes' fone-only control app.

By the time you're opening things up that are sealed up tight with security fasteners, and trying to bypass encrypted nonsense to get at the big wires directly, they already won. You're wasting more time and replacement parts on it than the value of whatever makeshift junk you can turn it into.

Best to start with a real bike and a real motor system, and warn others not to eat the poopoo just because they put colorful sprinkles on it.
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New guy here! So what do you consider "a real bike and a real motor system"? I'm looking to buy or convert.
 
I mean the reason is probably finding them, because most people don't bother trying selling broken ebikes or try to ask way too much. They are worth something but not very much considering how much of a pain the high end ones are to hack and how crap most of the parts on the cheap ones are. So unless you have a place where people are donating them it's just hard to find them unless you are doing a lot of work to find them.
 
neptronix said:
if you treat it as a bike with a motor and battery cells in it, throwing a BMS, controller, and throttle into anything means you bypass 100% of these locked down and unreliable electronics. No hacking needed ( unless that's your thing )
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What I'm saying is that most of these motors and batteries are designed to make it needlessly difficult and complicated to do exactly that. Integrated controller, CANBUS with proprietary interface, potted or adhesive-plastered cells, multi wire enable circuits... just burrowing deep enough into the components to reach past the perimeter guards really takes the value out of the project.

I had a wall full of old Jump bike packs at one time. Extracting the cell bundles of just a couple of them to the point where I could repurpose them convinced me that it wasn't worth the effort, compared to other cheap second life packs I had access to.
 
neptronix said:
I'm kinda surprised we don't see a lot of prebuilt hacking on this forum.
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Hm, from my experience, there is just very little interest in hacking prebuild bikes in a DIY manner. People are preferring to buy plug-and-play tuning dongles for a lot of money than just flashing an alternative Firmware, that opens the system for less then 10$....

The scooter community is much more active in hacking their vehicles....
 
drhughes said:
New guy here! So what do you consider "a real bike and a real motor system"? I'm looking to buy or convert.
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A real bike is one you would willingly ride for transportation if it didn't have a motor. A real motor system is one you can install and use any way you like-- not just one way, on one kind of bike, if you have registered it through the app or persuaded the dealer to unlock it.
 
stancecoke said:
Hm, from my experience, there is just very little interest in hacking prebuild bikes in a DIY manner. People are preferring to buy plug-and-play tuning dongles for a lot of money than just flashing an alternative Firmware, that opens the system for less then 10$....

The scooter community is much more active in hacking their vehicles....
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Sounds like you could make a lot of money selling dongles.

Too bad normies don't know about open source, lol.
 
There is some good news-- most cheap and maybe nasty no-name (or bad name) e-bikes are easy to retrofit, adapt, keep running. The biggest problem is usually some goofy in-frame battery, which is a simple enough matter to circumvent. The break point seems to be in the $1500 retail range-- less than that, and you probably have a relatively generic open system.
 
neptronix said:
Sounds like you could make a lot of money selling dongles.

Too bad normies don't know about open source, lol.
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Maybe I'm wearing my tinfoil hat a little too tight but Google seems to be contributing to that. I came across ES many years back through a random search on BLDC motors and controllers iirc. Try a similar search these days and all you'll get is pages of folks selling vaguely related stuff, patent details and maybe a couple of generic Q&A sites, Endless Sphere wont come up unless mentioned specifically in the search. The same for open source code, either the community just ain't what it used to be or Google is actively steering people away from it. I'm guessing pretty soon all those really helpful youtube vids, like "how to remove the door card on a 2010 ford focus" will be disappearing too, can't have people doing that kind of thing themselves when ford dealers could be making money from it.
 
stan.distortion said:
Maybe I'm wearing my tinfoil hat a little too tight but Google seems to be contributing to that. I came across ES many years back through a random search on BLDC motors and controllers iirc. Try a similar search these days and all you'll get is pages of folks selling vaguely related stuff, patent details and maybe a couple of generic Q&A sites, Endless Sphere wont come up unless mentioned specifically in the search.
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Maybe you're getting noise from the pointless Google AI. Try poking the "Web" tab instead of looking at "All". When I do that (with incognito mode on), Endless Sphere shows up just after the first Ten Blue Links.
 
stan.distortion said:
Maybe I'm wearing my tinfoil hat a little too tight but Google seems to be contributing to that.
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Interesting, I gave up on (G)oogle many years ago in favor of DuckDuckGo.
Surprisingly, when answering a post on ES that is maybe 30min-1hr old, I'll copy a sentence from the post for research, the ES post will sometimes be the first search result.
 
Chalo said:
Maybe you're getting noise from the pointless Google AI. Try poking the "Web" tab instead of looking at "All". When I do that (with incognito mode on), Endless Sphere shows up just after the first Ten Blue Links.
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Hadn't thought of that. Didn't seem to make a whole lot of difference in a search for "diy bldc controller", ES came up about half way down the second page for both "web" and "all" but will bare it in mind for future searches (y)
 
You're not the only one that's noticed Google search is getting worse.
Google boosted up reddit and boosted down forums over the last couple of years.

Been a real negative for the independent web, including us.
The SEO work we did this year is helping us recover, and there's more on the way. The bad news is, the more SEO work we do, the more newbie flood we get. So i'm rationing the rate of progress we make.

Back to the topic; i feel like a prebuilt hacking section would be useful at this point so we can possibly foster the liberation of all this locked down crap. What do you fellas think?
 
neptronix said:
i feel like a prebuilt hacking section would be useful at this point so we can possibly foster the liberation of all this locked down crap. What do you fellas think?
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I reckon that's a good idea. It's a different sort of wizardry that deserves its own sandbox.
 
The only thing i'm cautious about is that i don't want this site to become electricbikereview's forums.
Don't want to water down what's great about ES, you know.

But at the same time, we have some ebike hackers here doing interesting stuff and seem to draw the open source crowd.

Unlocking a bricked bike for a song, i feel like, does play to ES' classic ethos in a modern way that will become more relevant over time i think. Weren't many of the first ES members prebuilt scooter hackers..?

What's most important to me is that we keep up with the times but always orient towards the nerds & the enthusiasts versus the casual ebike consoomer..

If we do 'change with the times', let's say, i think one requirement would be a very obvious differentiation between factory stuff vs homebuild central.

Interested in hearing everyone's thoughts on the matter.
 
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