Hey guys, in this video we're going together on a bike ride where I share my first impressions about the Brompton Electric. Hopefully you'll be able to learn a bit more about it and have a somewhat immersive experience.
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How Much Faster is the Brompton Electric for Everyday Rides?
Transcript:
Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. Today is a different video, we'll be doing a “Ride with Me” in the city. I’ll be riding the Brompton Electric (I almost said DRIVING the Brompton Electric, that's horrible), I’ll be riding the Brompton Electric and I wanted you to have the experience of riding the electric Brompton. Now, ideally, I wanted you guys to be able to feel the push of the bike when you're going up a hill or when you're going off on a traffic light, but unfortunately that's not possible. So the idea that I have, and hopefully this is gonna work, is to give you all the data, to give you the speed, the grade of the hill, if I’m going uphill or if I’m going downhill, also the elevation plot, and a clean sound of the motor, so you can hear when the motor is engaging, when the motor is disengaging, when it's low power, when it's high power. I came up with this contraption to record the sound of the motor. So, this is a directional microphone that's pointed towards the motor, this is a wind muff just to reduce wind noise, it's also mounted on a shock absorbing mount, and this microphone is connected to this recorder that will record the sound of the motor as we go. Now, for position, speed, and altitude I’ll be using this Garmin GPS that uses both GPS signal and GLONASS to calculate position, and it also calculates altitude based on differential of pressure. So, this is basically the most precise we can get without using some very crazy technical equipment. All right so now let's head off and I will talk to you in a minute. All right, as we are heading off on this bike ride let me explain how the structure of this video is gonna work. First, this voice you're hearing right now is being recorded after the fact and I’ll be pointing out some of the important stuff, some of the interesting parts of this bike ride that you should pay attention to if you want to learn more about the Brompton Electric, I will also give you my first impressions about this bike as we go along. Now, to make this video a bit more interesting, let's have some jazz tunes playing on the background. This song is by Brian Claxton, and it's called “Running Late”, which is a pretty good reason to use an electric bike, as that will make your commute faster. Now, let me explain a few things just so we get started. On the center panel of your screen you have the speedometer, that’s in kilometers per hour, to the left of that there's the time of day, to the right there's a total distance of this first portion of the bike ride, on the upper right corner there is an elevation plot that shows us, for example, that we're going up that first climb right now, and under the elevation block there is a guy pedaling at a very high frequency, a very high cadence, and that's the grade indicator. It's positive right now because we're going uphill and that number goes up the steeper the hill becomes. Now, I rode exactly the same route on both the Brompton Electric that you're seeing right now and on the standard Brompton. That way we can swap the video from the electric Brompton to the standard Brompton and see on the same segment how both bikes compare, and that will be mostly comparing the speed between the two bikes. So, as you can see, on the standard Brompton I usually go up this hill at about 8 or 9 kilometers an hour. I usually use the sidewalk because, as you can see, I get some pretty close passes going up this slow. And on the Brompton Electric my speed is about 18 to 19 kilometers an hour on this segment, and that makes it a little bit safer to ride this stretch of road. Notice how the assistance from the motor will cut off right now. That is because we reached 25 kilometers an hour. The motor will only help you up to that speed, and then after that you can continue to accelerate under your own power, or if you're going downhill, you can continue to accelerate, the bike will not stop you, but the motor will not be assisting you anymore. Now, this is a relatively flat portion of the road, a very slight uphill at two to three percent grade. While on the Brompton Electric we are at about 23 to 24 kilometers an hour, on the standard Brompton my speed on this segment is about 14 kilometers an hour. Now, don't get me wrong. I’m not saying that the standard Brompton doesn't go faster than that.
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