The weekend is only two days long, so spending any part of it in traffic is uniquely offensive. Can this be avoided altogether?
Recently, my ailing eBike inconveniently died while I was only two-thirds of the way home. Unfortunately, the battery on my eBike, the cheapest and worst quality model I could find as a broke student, has increasingly played up lately. It’s not uncommon for my battery to throw a tantrum up a big hill or uneven road.
Speaking of the latter, despite supposedly registering 40-60% charge, my battery will often sputter out riding over the bumpy Sutherland Road along Auckland’s northwestern path. All of this is to say, you can only imagine my relief / excitement when the opportunity arose to trial a Bosch powered eBike. It felt like a hardcore urban cyclist’s dream come true, a chance to try an eCargo bike – the true car replacement thanks to their carrying capacity and smooth riding.
In my impatient eagerness, I actually picked up the wrong bike from Electric Bike Team (EBT), a bright yellow number set up with a back rack seat that can carry multiple kids, or even an adult. “Everyone always thinks about how cargo-bikes can carry kids, but people aren’t talking about the fact that kidless adults can pick up their mate from the pub on the back of one of these,” explained Helen, the EBT kaimahi who helped me out.
With Helen’s mandate in mind, my partner and I tested the first bike’s tandem capacity. Together we joy-rode around our suburb before journeying to our date night dinner spot. Our neighbours looked slightly confused as we rode past. Seeing two adults comfortably sharing one bike is clearly still a novel experience. After getting the tandem-bug out of my system, I returned to EBT in the Karanga-a-Hape gully to swap the yellow bike with a blue Riese und Müller Multitinker.
Don’t get me wrong, the former was an improvement on my ailing bike, but the latter was truly something special. With two massive pannier bags, a front-rack with in-built bungee cords, a lockable “glove box”, a handle for passengers, in-built lights, and one heck of a comfy seat, it has every trimming an urban cyclist could dream of. The Multitinker also hosts the Bosch smart system, representing a closed system of the best eBikes parts on the market: from the battery, display, and motor, through to the security system and even an app through which I could cast directions to the bike’s display or remotely lock it.
In-built security is a critical aspect of Bosch’s smart system. eBikes are unfortunately targeted by thieves, and there’s only so much a physical lock can do to deter a robber with an angle-grinder. “A lot of eBikes, if someone steals it off you,” notes EBT rangatira Maurice Wells, “they can just ride it the next day. There’s no key, there’s no electric locking.” That’s where the smart system comes in, it allows you to lock the bike’s electric functions, rendering it inert. To do that, “you have three choices,” says Wells.
Firstly, you can use the spring-loaded removable display as a tactile key. “It works quite well for the sort of people who, if I say ‘app’, they just say ‘no’,” says Wells. For more digitally-savvy cyclists, Bosch’s Flow app turns your smartphone into the key, either via an active locking function or the lazy option, which I opted for. “When your Bluetooth is on and you walk away from the bike it locks and when you walk back towards it it unlocks,” explains Wells.
The optional ‘Bosch Connect Module’ also acts as a GPS-tracker and harrowing alarm. “If someone’s tutuing with your bike,” says Wells, “it starts to sound an alarm. If they persist, the alarm gets louder and it notifies your phone.” Wells equipped the Multitinker I borrowed with a Connect Module. I can attest to its effectiveness since I accidentally set off the alarm when my phone was out of bluetooth range.
To test the Multitinker’s non-security features, on a foggy Saturday autumn morning, I rode it from my whare in Auckland’s inner west to the Parnell Farmers Market to tick off our weekly shop. My partner joined on her entry-level eBike acting as the control sample in this test.
One of the best things about biking, even when using a bigger-than-usual model like a cargo-variant, is that you can park right outside wherever you want to go. There’s no awkward car-dancing to find a close spot before having to park a couple blocks away and walk over. Per usual, there were zero free car parks but plenty of easy spots to lock up the bikes right outside the market’s entrance.
Inside the packed Parnell farmers market, improv-jazz blared from a rangatahi troupe, one of whom had curly hair the same colour as the red-bricked library they stood beside. Weaving our way through the swarms, we snacked on a gourmet pie, samosa and masala chai before packing our cane basket full of meat from Te Hiku, produce from Ngāruawāhia and fish smoked on the shore. On our way out, we used our last $10 note to buy some sunflowers for my partner’s nonna who lives on the other side of the isthmus in Blockhouse Bay.
With the kai stored in the panniers and the sunflowers safely secured to the front rack via the bungee cords, we set off through Pukekawa towards Blockhouse Bay. Along the way, we were guided by the directions popping up on the display. The whole time, despite Auckland’s undulating terrain, I could barely tell the eCargo bike was carrying anything – it was that smooth. It certainly helped that I was riding on auto-mode which automatically provides extra uphill oomph. By the time we’d dropped off the flowers, had a cup of tea and circled back home we’d ridden 30km over the course of an hour and a half.
By this point, my partner’s bike was on its last legs and in dire need of charging – despite it not carrying a single gram of the cargo and even after she coasted using momentum as much as possible. The Multitinker, on the other hand, had only eaten through 40% of its battery. So I stuffed a bunch of old clothes into the huge panniers and dropped them off at the hokohoko-shop up the road. Even after that, the battery had more juice, although I didn’t. If I did, however, the Flow app’s AI-powered range control feature would have been my best friend. It allows riders to choose a desired charge upon reaching their destination before automatically adjusting e-assist levels to ensure said charge target is met.
All in all, these errands are things we’d typically do via car due to the amount of freight, so having an eCargo bike hugely expanded the potential of what we could do on the weekend via pedal-power. And these days it seems like there’s an eBike out there for everyone. In the EBT showroom I noticed lots of commuter style bikes and all sorts of eCargo bikes, from smaller versions like the one I borrowed to big-boy tray ones that could comfortably carry my 40-kg huntaway-rottweiler. They also stock folding, mountain, road, tandem and trike bikes amongst others.
“You used to need an excuse to ride an eBike,” explains Wells, but that’s not the case anymore. Whether you want a powered pahikara to conquer hills, to get to work without getting sweaty, to carry a car boot’s worth of cargo or just to save time, any reason is valid. Ultimately, every Kiwi who swaps their car for a bicycle means one less gas-guzzler polluting our cities and grinding our productivity to a halt – plus it’s way more fun zooming along the bike paths or weaving around cars than it is sitting idle in queues of traffic.
