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>> Court: This is the Volton EL Legs, I think it kind of stands for electric legs because
that's what it offers you, this thing is kind of like almost a road bike is what I would
call it because the tires are so thin and you've got these deep dish rims, this bike
is under 44 pounds which is phenomenal for an electric bike, that's really really light
and the weight is distributed fairly well across the frame, that's the battery pretty
low to the ground, it does have a rear hub motor so if you pick it up in the middle it
is going to tip back slightly but this is the kind of bike you can lift, you can carry
it around a little bit easier, you can park it in standard bike racks and the battery is
removable which is cool, so you can charge it at work or your apartment or wherever and
then it kind of starts to look like a normal bike which is neat. Now I should say
that removing the battery isn't the easiest thing in the world, it actually has kind of
a screw on connector on the bottom so it's not just like, you just don't unplug it, you've kind of got to screw it on
but generally speaking it works pretty well. It's pretty impressive power on this thing,
you've got a 500 watt geared rear hub motor, so being geared gives you a little bit more
torque, 500 watt is pretty large especially for a bike that is as light as this, the battery
pack is 36 volts, 10 amp hours, 10.4 actually which is fairly standard, so you're looking
at like pretty run of the mill battery; lithium iron, Samsung cell, so high quality
but in terms of power, kind of middle and then a larger motor which is just cool because
you're going to get that extra power I was talking about for climbing hills and stuff.
I'm actually at the electric bike super store in San Francisco California where they do
have a lot of hills and so, you know, having a bike like this that can get off those is
kind of nice and this is a more affordable, almost like an entry level kind of a bike
and you can kind of see that because the battery is not integrated and you know, some of the
components are sort of like after market, you've got like a light here that's not wired
in at all, so that's going to run on its own battery pack, a little bit inconvenient but
again you're saving a lot of money over all, the other tradeoff here with Volton is you
can kind of only find them online, the electric bike superstore has them but for the most
part this is going to be a bike you get off of the internet which means when you get it
you've kind of got to set it up yourself a little bit but the owner Joe at Volton, he offers
great support, I've owned one of his bikes and didn't really have any problems and he
was easy to get in touch with, so I'll jump back into some of the specs here, I love
the fact that it does have the fenders, you've also got the nice kick stand there, excellent
Wellgo pedals with the metal studs so if it is wet you're not going to slip off and
they just offer a lot of surface area. The interesting sort of a shock here with like
a neck shock, it's like the swing shock in it, it doesn't really offer you that much,
you know, shock absorption to be honest with you, I mean it looks cool, it's pretty light
weight as compared with like a full on shock but you know, I was on this earlier and it
kind of pushed down and, you know, look I mean that's not much room but it's better
than nothing and when you are working with tires this thin, I mean this is like, you
know, we're talking about road bike tires here and they work pretty well. Also you've
got disc brakes; front and rear which is nice because if your 500 watt motor, you're going
pretty fast on this thing, doing some city biking or maybe you're taking it out to ride
in the trails around the Bay Area and there's hills and you're keeping up with your road
bike buddies, it's nice to be able to stop, you know, and you've got extra motor so the
added weight of disc brakes are not a big deal, um it's got seven speeds here that's probably
one of the let downs or where you're not really using this quite like a road bike because
there aren't as many gears to choose from but again you have the motors supporting you
which is nice and the controller right here and actually the LCD computer is quite good,
I really like this thing, you'll notice there's a little bit of glare there, you can actually
just turn this to get the glare out of your eyes which I really like, it matches, looks
beautiful and it's got a little breakout box here for the different settings, five levels
of pedal assists, so you can kind of arrow up there and the higher you go the more power
you're going to get from the motor which is really nice, it uses a pedalec sensor,
you can kind of see that there's like a plastic disc right there, right there and that basically
just senses your pedal cadence, so this isn't like the super fancy torque sensing but again
it's a cheaper bike and frankly that works pretty well, anytime you're pedaling, the
motor kind of kicks in and you can set it to zero and just ride it like a regular bike
if you want but the really neat thing is in addition to pedal assist, you've got a twist
throttle so at anytime you can just twist that and the bike goes like you're at a stop
sign, you twist it and the bike takes off or maybe you want to zip forward just a little
bit, you can twist it and it goes which is supper cool. So actually I was going to try
to demonstrate that a little bit, got that twist throttle and its pretty quiet, I mean,
do you hear that?, it's just a little bit of a whir, electronic whir and again for
a bike that's so light it's great, I mean, it's a fun bike, I kind of like it but if
you're someone who isn't into that more aggressive like forward leaning kind of ride maybe you've
got a bad back, stiff neck or something, um, you might just want to stay away from this kind of bike
in general, you know, it's got the thinner tires and even though it's got that neck shock,
it doesn't offer a lot of range, so keep those things in mind if you're considering
this bike, it does look pretty nice and again they offer some pretty good support and that
front light is built in, so at least you'll have one light even if you lose the back light,
maybe the batteries run out or something like that, so for more info on this and other electric
bikes, the full written review, check out electricbikereview.com and I'll see you there.