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>> Court: This is the e-JOE Epik. It's a folding electric bike with a lot of extra features
at a pretty good price. Let me go through some of the specs on this thing. So, it comes
in two flavors actually, there's the Epik and then the Epik SE which actually has a
rear cassette and like seven speeds. This one's a single speed bike. And, you know that
works out pretty well, it keeps the chain from you know, rattling around. There's going
to be less maintenance and the gear's fairly standard. It's kind of like if you're a kid
and you've got a, you know single speed bike. It worked okay; going up hills could be a
little bit trickier but you know, that's where the pedal assist and the electric motor really
help on this bike. So it's kind of neat, it comes in a few different colors. There's like
black, red, blue and then kind of a green color. Its got these nice fenders, front and
rear. And its got lights built in. Now the rear light isn't actually connected to the
system, so that means extra batteries and a little bit of extra messing around, but
the front light is. So as soon as you turn the bike on there's actually a switch up there
on the controller that lets you activate the light. So I think that's pretty cool. Its
got that rear rack, you know that's just kind of handy if you're carrying around a bag or
panniers or something. A lot of times you keep a bike like this on a boat or maybe in
your RV, something like that and it's just nice to have that extra carrying capacity.
You've even got the, you know kind of like spring loaded gripper right there which is
pretty cool. So yeah, in terms of folding, you know the bike is fairly easy to deal with.
Um, let me just kind of get over there and grab the thing and show you. Just slide this
up, pop that out like that and then the frame folds right there. And you can actually see,
that's the battery pack. And you can charge this on or off the bike which is super cool.
Not a lot of folding electric bikes allow that, especially ones that have batteries
built into the frame. Erch, I'm going to try to fold this back up real quick, there we
go. And it's kind of nice that they offer that because you know, you could take the
battery pack off, makes this bike even lighter weight. The bike's already pretty light weight,
it's like 37 pounds. Um, you know, very liftable. The other folding points are right here, the
neck sort of slides up and down, the seat slides up and down or completely off. And
then that folds down that way. There aren't any, you know, magnets or clasps built in
to keep it folded. You might want to carry a bungee cord or something with you. But otherwise,
you know, it works fairly well. The seat actually kind of does that swivel up and that's because
some of the other Ejoe bikes have a battery that sits right there. So it's, you know,
overall a pretty cool little bike and I feel like the price point is really a good selling
point here, it's under $1,500 and you've got kind of the standard rim brakes and stuff
that you're dealing with. So overall I think the components are fairly decent. And in terms
of the drive system here, what we're looking at is a 250 watt geared rear hub motor. So
the gearing means that it can offer a little bit more torque, little bit more power for
the smaller size. 250 is kind of small but that's sort of standard in Europe. And frankly,
for a bike like this that's sort of light weight, that's, you know that's pretty good.
It's not too bad. The battery is 36 volt 7 amp hour. Again, right there in the downtube.
You can charge that on or off the bike. And again, that's pretty, you know kind of middle
of the range there. Seven amp hours isn't a whole lot but that's part of what keeps
it light weight. So, you know, overall a decent system. It's Lithium polymer, which is, you
know there's Lithium-ion, Lithium Iron Phosphate and Lithium polymer is a step up from Lead
acid and stuff. It might kind of have like a medium lifespan. But the fact that it's
replaceable is pretty cool and this is a pretty big operation. They're, you know, I feel like
they support their bikes pretty well. And overall, this bike rides fairly well. I've
been cruising around parking lots and stuff here, and alley ways. And it feels decent
going over the bumps. There's no shock absorbers or seat post shocks or anything but the tires
are a little bit bigger and they're like Kenda thorn resistant tires. But you know, they're
not pre-Slimed, it's just kind of standard, standard issue. But again, you're saving some
money and frankly it works well enough. This only comes in one size. I'm about 5'9" and
it feels pretty good, you know the seat's adjustable up and down. So let me just hop
on and you know I can show you the motor. But first, this is the control panel right
here. You just turn the bike on, you can see it light up. It shows you how much power is
left. There's no speedometer, nothing really fancy up here. There's three different modes
of pedal assist, so low medium and high. And it uses a pedelec sensor, you can kind of
see in there. So there's like a little sensor and it just, whenever your crank passes it
tells the motor "activate" and then this is basically telling it how strong the motor
should be. Well the cool thing is, you can actually use the trigger throttle in conjunction
with the pedelec system at any time. So you can just press that and it will go; you can
stop pedaling. And if you want, you can turn off pedal assist completely and go scooter
style which works pretty well. So I was impressed, again I'm not super heavy I'm like 140 pounds,
but the bike you know the geared motor design is pretty effective at getting you going.
Especially on the flats. I'm just going to put it in low here and show you the motor.
And you can listen for it. [motor whirring] Well, pretty smooth, pretty quiet and efficient.
I'm going to do the twist throttle, or the trigger now. [motor whirring] Kind of what
you'd expect, um not too bad. You know it's a fairly polished folding electric bike at
a pretty good price. I'm going to go ahead and put on the wide angle lens so you can
see what the riding position looks like here. There we go! I'm going to go up to medium.
[wind and motor noise] You can kind of see the handle bar position there. [wind noise]
So there you go! Woo! Haha, pull over. That's the E Joe Epik, for the full written review
and more electric bikes check out ElectricBikeReview.com I'll see you there.