Comment by ornornor
4 years ago
There are alternatives that don’t involve DRM or Bosch at all.
I built our ebikes around regular bikes using a TSDZ2 torque sensing motor and an em3ev 52V battery. Total cost around 600$ + bike + tools. The battery is already assembled so no risk of setting your house on fire. The torque sensing makes it really natural (like having bionic legs), the whole thing has an open source firmware if you want to replace the Chinese made one (https://github.com/OpenSourceEBike/Color_LCD) and you can use any battery with it. With a 850Wh battery we get around 100km range.
There is also the cyber bike for which you can buy plans and build from scratch but that one is more of a motorcycle and you’ll probably need certification + insurance to use it legally.
Where I live you can't legally cobble together your own s-pedelec, you need type approval.
The EU is large. Did you or anyone else by any chance do any research on EU countries with a fairly flexible certificate of conformity approval procedure for L1e-B/speed pedelecs?
I'm starting to research my options for a twice weekly 2*65km commute. Most of it is ideally suited for speed pedelecs, along a canal and an old railway converted to cycle highway. The commercial offerings don't suit my needs. I wouldn't really want to pay a lot of money for a DRM offering either. That would be different for a DRM free version with serviceable battery packs.
A lot of the problem would go away if the Bosch DRM could be broken in some way, or at least convinced to accept non-Bosch batteries...
Stay tuned for that one.
Same here. The tsdz2 based bike is limited to 25 km/h so it’s a bicycle and not a s-pedelec.
The so called cyber bike is though and it wouldn’t be legal either where I live.