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>> Court: This is the Volton Alation ST 500, ST stands for step through, it's got a little bit of
a smaller frame and 500 stands for the 500 watt geared hub motor. It's a really balanced
bike and the battery is built into down tube there, keeps the weight down to the ground
and sort of evenly distribute it and in conjunction with that front shock and these 26 inch sort
of mountain tires, it just rides really well, it's a solid bike, anyway the motor being
geared is a little bit lighter, a little bit torqer version and they do offer a less expensive 250 watt
version and this bike comes in three colors; white, black or red. The battery uses Lithium
based Samsung cells and offers 36 volts of power, 11 amps hours of capacity and that's
pretty average. In addition to the electric drive system on this bike you've got front
and rear fenders, front and rear lights and the front light is actually wired in, its
running off that primary battery pack, the rear one is not, and you know, that's one of the
cost saving measures I think they probably chose when building this bike but it still
works well enough, it's kind of nice that they included it for safety, you've got a
key here so you can kind of lock that up, you can charge it right on the bike, it's not
especially easy to remove the battery pack on this thing, it's kind of meant to stay
in there and stay locked, so that's one thing to keep in mind if you're commuting and you
actually want to remove the battery pack. The other things I like about this are this are these
nice solid metal welded pedals, it's got a decent seat here, it's kind of standard and
you've got an excellent control system, I really like this one because you've a little
break out controller right here, five levels of pedal assists, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and as
you go up you get more power, we've also got a twist throttle, so anytime with this bike
you can twist that throttle and get extra power or maybe at a stop sign and you don't
want to pedal, you just twist that and go. The way it uses, the way it runs on pedal
assist mode is there's a pedalec sensor, it's that little plastic plate in there and there's
magnets that go around, so this is a little bit less responsive than some of the higher
end torque sensing pedal assist bikes out there but again you're kind of making some
tradeoffs here in terms of price and I think that they chose well when they, you know,
got Shimano components, seven speeds to choose from, you've got your shifter up here, it's
pretty well laid out, this is kind of standard, everything fits pretty well, the buttons are
pretty accessible and again I like the way it performs and the fact that it's got a shock
so if you're in a city or something like this where you've got bumps and stuff and actually. So if you're in a city that's got bumps and stuff, I'm actually
in San Francisco the bicycle super store downtown and you know, you want that extra power for
getting around. Let's hop on, you can listen for the motor as soon as I start to pedal,
here we go. Nice, you can kind of hear that, I'm going to switch hands and use the twist
throttle here and just show you what that's like from standstill, here's the twist throttle
and the other nice thing is this bike has disc brakes, so you've got plenty of stopping
power. Again all around I feel like you get a fairly good feature set, nice kick stand
and everything. Back in 2012 I reviewed the high step version of this bike which has a
stronger 48 volt battery versus the 36 on the low step, frame is a little bit larger
but I did an unboxing and I took it off road, spent some more time with it and just talked
about what it's like to buy an ebike online, so if you're interested, do a quick search
on the site for that, It's the Volton Alation 500 2012.