Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Best electric bike! VanMoof S3”.
Thanks to von moof for sponsoring this video, when i think of electric vehicles – and i feel like i’m not alone here, but i generally think of a tesla clean ultra minimal design. Generally speaking, a great software experience and, most importantly, they’re fun and fast to use and sometimes products come along, and i think people try a little too hard to make those comparisons to a tesla. This is the tesla toasters, the tesla toothbrushes, which are all marketing terms that have been sent to me via email, but every so often the product comes along with a comparison. At least, i think makes a lot more sense in that vein. Let’S take a look at the van moof s3 electric bike and see if it is the tesla bikes. I love teslas, but if yours ever gets stolen or lost uh elon musk is not sending essentially bounty hunters after your car van moof. Will i’m not joking uh we’ll talk about that in just a second so starting out like what is this thing? It might be a big surprise.
You might not be able to tell by the design it’s a bike, but it’s a bike that does more than just like regular bike things or does regular bike things better. So let me back up for those of you that know me and follow this channel. You know, i’m generally a big old fan of things that are electric. My entire job is obviously based on things that use electricity. More specifically, i mean things like teslas electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries, i’ve had all those things for quite a few years. Now that experience has made me wish there were more things with batteries in them, so naturally, electric bike was something that’s been of interest to me.
Something that i’ve talked about and covered uh quite a bit on this channel and i’ve ridden a few of those uh, but most for more for, like a moped than a bike kind of a mini motorcycle, you didn’t have to pedal to move and i think it’s Important to like note and distinguish here that this bike again will not act like a moped. You can’t just like press a button and kick back and relax. It won’t accelerate without you pedaling.
This is an electric pedal assist bike. So when you pedal the motors will kick in and make you go faster, but if you don’t pedal, um you’re gon na fall over friends. So that’s fine. It looks very sleek uh, but riding experience like matters too like if it looks good, but it’s not useful. Then, like why’d, you drop some bucks on a bike, so i don’t know about you, but since the beginning of 2020, my appreciation for like the little things um has come back to me and doing more outdoor activities has been a very nice side effect of the Past, like 16-ish months so having this bike around, has been great, it’s effortless to pedal and ride and largely thanks to electric pedal assist, but also because the bike electronically shifts for you, your pedal rate, pretty much stays the same, no matter what speed you’re going, uh And also during this past 16 months, i taught my middle son how to ride bikes. Now i go bike riding with my boys. No mercy for them, uh, they’re, about to get smoked. Daddy’S got a surprise. So, okay, so the bike top speed on this thing puts you around like 20 miles per hour, which is not crazy fast, but it’s also not slow either and it’s sustainable, considering if you don’t have to pedal that hard. If you want to reach that top speed, even faster too, there is a boost button on the right. If you hold that thing down, it’s going to use more battery to accelerate you faster for things like getting through intersection or going up a hill one concern that i’ve had with electric bikes in general if you’ve driven electric cars. You know there’s like that instant torque that can throw you back.
They pedal down a good pun, the torque at the very beginning of that curve. So you don’t get thrown off the bike, it’s a much more gradual, so you can still feel the torque and that speed kick in or that sort of power kick in uh. But it’s not nothing.
That’S going to like knock you off the bike which is nice to have here, so that button on the right is not the only button. There’S one on the left too, that you switch between your pedal assist strength mode. So you can decide if you want to use more or less of the battery, so i’m just gon na get in front of it. You probably got a question you’re wondering right now, because i get this all the time with anything electric but john. What happens if it runs out of battery? Well, you can still ride it like a normal bike, but since its gear is electronically controlled, you will be stuck in first gear.
So, while you’ll get to where you want to go, you’ll be pedaling fast to get there. But if you are stranded at least you can still use a bike, so this thing comes in a big box. You have to kind of build yourself and the setup and building process was actually really simple easy to do.
It had kind of a apple like mac. Pro unboxing feel the packaging was very thoughtfully, designed and actually useful for, while you’re building the bike, typically electric bikes have taken me hours to put together. I was able to put this one together in about 10 or 15 minutes. So, looking at this thing, you can tell like they clearly told the designers make it look minimal and sleek and in my mind’s, like mission accomplished, so the frame here is all aluminum.
It has a headlight and tail light integrated into the frame and along the inside of the frame are the batteries for the bike itself, which is kind of crazy to see the single charge here? Will last you anywhere from 37 to 93 miles, depending on how long you’re gon na maintain the speeds and boost modes on so, if 93 miles from the bike’s built-in internal batteries isn’t enough for you, they do sell an additional battery. That’S going to give you an extra like 28 to 62 miles. It’S a big range, obviously, depending on how you’re going to use it. So the nice part about the additional batteries it’s easily removable, so you can bring it inside to charge it if you want or if you don’t need the additional range and want to use the bike’s internal battery for even more sleek minimal and lighter look you’ve got That option so, although with like how expensive this bike is and the batteries are, you know expensive too, you might just not want to leave it somewhere without a lock on it, and this thing is not cheap.
It’S about two thousand dollars for the bike itself and then an extra like 350 ish. If you want to add on an extra battery pack, although not required to use the bike, so it is an investment so for all that money got ta drop. Clearly you, like. Don’T want to lose it or have it get stolen and when this bike this is a crazy thing, and i don’t use this term often you literally don’t have to worry about that for two reasons. First, it’s compatible with apple’s find my system, which is awesome. As far as i know, it’s the first bike to actually do that. You register the bike through the bond move app and then you can add the bike to your find my network. So if you’ve got an iphone or ipad or whatever be able to track it using the location anytime, so if you don’t have an iphone you’re, not an apple you’re, in the android side of things, you actually use the von move app as well to track it And also control things like the bike’s pedal, assist strength, modes, locking and unlocking the bike and everything else, because the bike actually has a lock built into it.
But there’s a big one. There’S another way to find your bike, and this sounds like a joke or an april fool’s prank. It is not von moove offers a service. Well, it will guarantee you.
They will find your lost or stolen bike within two weeks. They’Ll replace it for you with a new one of equal value, so they have what they call, including this bike hunters that literally go out and hunt for your bike like dog, the bounty hunter style, um, there’s even a whole series where you can follow around these Bike hunters, as they search for lost von moof bikes, it’s i mean i have a weird sense of entertainment, maybe but it’s fun for me to watch and i feel like watching a reality show at times cause man. Some of those bike. Hunters are not messing around uh when they said they’re getting the bikes back just take my word for it they’re getting their bikes back, but one other thing that makes this bike unique. Is the matrix display it’s integrated into the frame itself? It’S going to serve as a really cool way to see like battery percentage speed modes and whether or not the bike is locked.
So i mentioned that you can lock the bike itself and to do that. You just kick in the kick lock by the rear wheel. There’S no bike locks, no keys, nothing! If anyone tries to steal a speaker on the bottom start, making an extremely loud noise for a very long time making a nightmare for whoever stole it and also drawing a lot of tension to your bike. That has a speaker built into it. And if that’s not a big enough deterrent, um bike, hunters bike, hunters bikes got to stop too brakes are really good.
Surprisingly, good, actually they’ve got hydraulic braking systems, so you can like reliably stop when you need to even when you’re riding it like those pretty high max speeds. You know that’s 20 inch miles per hour, there’s a lot of things to like about the s3, but it’s not without its fault. I did have some issues getting it set up in the von move app. I actually had to contact them to get the bike paired up, but to be fair, they were able to help it and fix everything from their end and since then it’s worked great. I also kind of wish that the front headlight was attached to the handlebar. Instead of the frame i get that having it on the frame keeps the light more stable at night, but i’d kind of prefer to have sort of the light turned to where i was going on the handlebars. It’S a small complaint, and maybe it’s just me.
So that’s the von move s3 and i answered the beginning: does it deserve the tesla bikes title? It’S a product that puts a lot of emphasis on design functionality and technology that gets out of its own way. It’S not tech for tech’s sake, and in that ways i think it really does sort of follow that tesla mantra. I absolutely love this bike. Sometimes i wish it did, have some moped functionality but to be a commuter bike. That’S a full substitute for a car.
If you live in a city, the very least, this could be one of your primary modes of transportation. It’S fast, it’s very light for what it does and it does things that no electric bike i’ve ever seen can do if you’ve got the cash to spend and you want a bike to get where you need to go. You owe it yourself to at least check out the von moof s3. If you do want to check it out, we obviously have links down below .