The E3 Nitro can be ridden in three different modes enabled with the press of a button on a small detachable screen affixed to the bike’s neck. on a Friday morning and landed me at my destination 90 minutes later with only a slight sheen of sweat and coating of gritty particulate. That was more than sufficient for my cross-city trip, which began at 8:10 a.m. Coupled with a 36-volt lithium-ion battery pack that nests in the seat tube, it can travel up to 35 miles on a single charge. The most technologically sophisticated two-wheeler to come from longstanding Simi Valley e-bike maker Currie Technologies, the E3 Nitro is powered with a 500-watt motor centered in the rear wheel hub. Electric bicycles are finally becoming viable, with larger, more efficient motors and battery packs that are designed into the bikes’ structures for better handling, as well as aesthetics. But I’m also interested in circumventing the area’s increasing amounts of traffic as cheaply and expeditiously as possible. Like a lot of commuters, I’m loathe to sweat. to the coast, without any heavy breathing on the part of the bike or its rider. The trip was my last hurrah on board the eFlow E3 Nitro – an electric bike designed to easily traverse hill and dale or, in my case, the potholed asphalt connecting Northeast L.A. It’s about 10 cents to fully charge the bike, which translates to a fraction of a penny per mile to ride it.Last week, I did something I would never attempt on a pedal bicycle: I rode 25 miles across Los Angeles to Santa Monica during rush hour. What’s most efficient about the Express is the cost. That would require reversing the polarity of the motor to send energy back to the batteries - a bit of technological wizardry that’s inefficient and offers almost no benefit because the brakes on a bicycle aren’t used nearly as often as they are on a larger, motorized vehicle that’s moving with the whims of traffic. Pedaling doesn’t help charge the batteries. I found that if I fully charged the bike when I got home and unplugged it before going to sleep, it lost one dot, or one-fifth of its charge, by morning and another one-fifth on my ride to work, but I could get another round trip on the bike before it needed to be plugged in. There are five lighted dots on the battery pack that disappear one by one until you’re out of juice. Reading the bike’s level of charge is simple, but it isn’t precise. It takes four to six hours to fully charge the batteries, which the manufacturer says can travel 31 to 62 miles per charge, depending on the power setting. What does take time is recharging the battery pack. That’s faster than my commute by car or even motorcycle, when I factor in the time it takes to gear up, park, walk to my cubicle and gear down. That was slow enough that I needed to stay right and scan parked cars for unexpected door openings but fast enough that my 5.75-mile commute was a mere 21 minutes from door to desk. But at such a fast pace, I did look like Miss Gulch pedaling away in “The Wizard of Oz,” which is why my average speed was more like 15 mph. My heart wasn’t pounding to the point of explosion and sweat wasn’t flying off my face. In the five days I spent commuting on the iZip Express, my top speed was 32 mph. What wasn’t normal was the planetary drive system, which combines the power produced from pedaling with the output from the motor - a system that allowed me to reach higher speeds with less physical effort. I twisted the right grip to select among the nine speeds on the freewheel, and I adjusted the tension on those gears with my left - just like I would on a standard, multispeed bicycle. Speeding up and slowing down, I moved through all 27 speeds on the Shimano drive train with a combination of two movements. I just pushed a button on the 36-volt lithium-ion battery pack to turn on the bike, pushed another button to select the level of power-assist, started spinning and the Express whirred to life.
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