Buying an e-bike
Planted August 22, 2025
Reading time: 10 minutes
Tags:
#cycling
Last year, I shared a post about how I got back into cycling and bought my first bike after not owning one for over 10 years. Shortly after that, I ended up buying an electric bike (e-bike, for short), and a year later, I have no regrets about my purchase!
Good-quality e-bikes are not cheap. I spent a considerable amount of time researching which e-bike I would purchase. It ended up taking me over a year to decide on the exact e-bike I wanted.
Given the extensive research behind my e-bike purchase and the fact that I’m pretty happy with the e-bike I ended up with, I’m sharing the process and the factors I considered before buying the bike.
Let’s answer one question first…
Why even get an e-bike?
The short answer is, I like cycling to work. I prefer it to taking the train. The cycle commute comes with its own set of challenges. My cycle commute is 12 miles each way, takes an hour, and has several inclines on the route I take
While I enjoy cycling to work, I realised that there were several issues I pedalled into, which led me to buy an e-bike.
Why don’t you just rent a Lime bike?
I’ve been asked this a surprising number of times, and the truth is that there are no rental e-bikes available for hire in the outer boroughs of London (think Zone 4-6+). Even if they did, I would not get any benefit from riding a rental e-bike. A 60-minute Lime pass costs £6.99. It would end up costing me £13.98 a day to cycle to work. That’s more expensive than commuting by train!
Also, from my own experience (and from what I’ve seen from others), the issue with public rental bikes is…the fact that they are public bikes. Which means bikes are often broken, and usually seem a bit grimy.
Getting over hills (literally)
London can be a great place to cycle; however, from cycling around London, I’ve found that not all areas of London are as flat as they seem.
Particularly on my route to work, there are several steep inclines which can be challenging to tackle on a regular bike (especially if you are running late for work in the morning). Although it’s still doable, I find it tiring, and I’d rather not arrive at work completely exhausted. An e-bike makes tackling these a lot easier. Pedalling is still required, but the assistance from the motor makes a massive difference on those hills.
Quick starts
One thing I’ve noticed since cycling more often is just how many traffic lights there are across the city. Since I cycle mostly on roads, I’m required to stop at traffic lights. I’ve got no issues with stopping at red lights, but I can understand the frustration some cyclists feel when they do have to stop. Getting back up to speed can be tiring, especially if you have a lot of reds on your route.
Typically, I maintain a cycling speed of 9-10 miles an hour on my pedal bike. Stopping at a red light and then getting back up to that speed can take a good minute or two. On an e-bike, however, you’ll be back up to 14-15 miles within seconds. A massive difference is that it makes dealing with traffic lights.
Maintaining higher speeds
Self-explanatory, but on a regular bike, I can usually cycle at an average speed of 9-10 miles an hour. With an e-bike, I can easily go at 15-16 miles an hour, and if I push it (with no assist from the motor), I can do 18-19 miles an hour. Handy when I’m in a rush.
Less sweat
Again, self-explanatory, but it makes a massive difference. A 12-mile commute on a pedal bike to work (which takes about an hour) would leave me drenched in sweat. Although the office had showers I could use, the ride was so physically demanding that I could only cycle to the office once a week. This was also how I found out that I had the longest cycle commute to the office compared to my peers who cycled to work.
The journey became shorter on an e-bike, and I started commuting several days a week as opposed to just one day before.
What I want in an e-bike
There are a lot of options for e-bikes in the UK, so finding the right one for myself was going to be challenging. I decided to focus on five key factors my e-bike would need:
- Minimal proprietary parts
- A removable battery
- Lightweight
- Sleek/minimalist looks
- Easy to modify
Of course, price is something I considered as well, but I decided that if I came across an e-bike that had all of these features that cost a little more than an e-bike that had most of these features, I would pay the extra for the e-bike with all the features that I’ve listed above.
Why no proprietary parts?
The first bike brand that actually came to my mind when I started looking at e-bikes was VanMoof. They had been in the news a few years prior for making a sleek, smart e-bike that would have definitely been something I considered purchasing in the past. At the time when I was considering getting my e-bike, VanMoof had gone into administration, and it wasn’t clear if they were going to continue selling e-bikes in the future (VanMoof was then shortly acquired by McLaren Applied, which ended up saving the company).
A notable aspect of this administration process was how existing owners became ‘stuck’ with their e-bikes, as VanMoof has temporarily halted all repair work and delivery of new parts.
It turned out that VanMoof bikes were made out of several proprietary parts that only VanMoof sold and which could only be fitted by either a VanMoof specialist or a partnered bike shop.
With no clear timeframe for when repairs and new part deliveries would resume, some owners were left with an e-bike that they simply were not able to use.
This raised some concern for me. Purchasing a good-quality e-bike is already an expensive and time-consuming task. I wanted to avoid ending up with an expensive paperweight if the bike company closed down and I needed specific proprietary parts to repair my e-bike.
Some parts of an e-bike are always going to be proprietary parts, such as the battery unit, the motor and the frame of the e-bike. There are, however, several parts that do not need to be proprietary. Things as small as break pads, screws or even the handlebars shouldn’t be proprietary parts. I should be able to repair and replace regular parts of the e-bike with similar or better parts as I see fit.
Despite being a massive fan of the VanMoof bikes, I decided not to consider any VanMoof model. Apparently, the S3 and X3 models both had hundreds of custom parts!
Is a removable battery important?
Another reason I didn’t consider any of the VanMoof models was that none of them had a removable battery. While this may not seem like a massive issue, I believe it needs to be considered when purchasing an e-bike.
In a similar fashion to smartphones, e-bikes use lithium batteries, which degrade in capacity over time. If you’ve ever had to replace the battery on a smartphone, you’ll know it’s usually a lot of hassle since many modern smartphones are now glued together.
Electric bikes with non-removable batteries are quite tricky to replace. The battery is usually encased within the frame of the bike, making it nearly impossible to replace. A removable battery makes replacing and charging it a lot easier.
If you really wanted to, you could also carry a second battery with you on a trip, although I wouldn’t recommend it for short journeys as the batteries are still quite hefty.
Does weight on an e-bike matter?
With the first two factors in mind, I came across many bikes that featured these; some even had other nice additions, such as dual suspension. There was one issue I noticed with most of these models…
They were all cumbersome!
My regular bike weighed around 15KG (a bit on the heavier side, but it also had front suspension), and some of these more feature-packed e-bikes were averaging around 30KG and sometimes even more! If you run out of power during a ride, these bikes would be challenging to cycle without the power assist.
I’ve also been in situations where I’ve needed to carry my bike down some stairs, and let’s say that’s not going to work with a heavy e-bike.
If you ditch the suspension, I found that there were still many e-bikes that weigh less than 20kg and have all the other features I wanted.
Minimalist designs
This wasn’t my strongest factor, but it would be nice to have an e-bike that was sleek and minimal looking. Some of the e-bikes I’ve seen scream ‘Look, I’m an e-bike!’, something I’d like to avoid in a large city where bike theft is common. The bike’s design itself wouldn’t be a good deterrent, but combined with adequate security measures, the chances of having the bike stolen should be mitigated (at least somewhat).
Sometimes, having an incognito e-bike has its perks.
Ease of modifying
This goes hand in hand with not having priority parts. The more standard bike parts make up the bike, the easier it is to buy replacements or, in this case, better parts that improve the bike. I’ll have to dive into this a bit more in another post in the future once I’ve made some significant changes to my bike…
Bike shortlist
With all these factors in mind, I ended up with a short list of bikes that met either all of these criteria or at least most of them.
There were, of course, a lot more bikes, but these were the three I ended up with. From this short list, it was clear which bike met all the requirements. The clear winner was…
The Tenways CGO 600 Pro
A lightweight minimalist bike, with a low number of priorities and a removable high-capacity battery.
I wasn’t originally aware of this brand, but I found it after researching the Cowboy Cruiser model extensively. It also ended up being the cheapest out of the three bikes.
With the bike selected, I needed to figure out the best way to purchase it. Thankfully, my workplace offered a…
Cycle2Work Scheme
A quick recap for folks who might not be familiar with this particular scheme: The Cycle2Work scheme is a way of financing the purchase of bicycles via pre-tax earnings to use the bike to commute to work.
What benefits does the scheme offer over buying the bike outright?
There are a few different cycle schemes in the UK. My employer specifically made use of one called Cyclescheme.
The TL;DR answer is that it’s a cheaper way of buying the bike due to tax savings, and I would definitely purchase a bike via a cycle to work scheme again.
The bike, a year later
As mentioned before, I’ve owned this bike for over a year now, and it’s honestly been great! My e-bike purchase has led to me cycling more often, replacing trips I would have taken via either public transport or car, discovering more in the surrounding neighbourhoods and of course, still getting a (small) workout in the process.
Some people say that getting an e-bike is like ‘cheating’ because you’re not cycling as hard, but I’ve found myself cycling more frequently and farther with my e-bike. I haven’t abandoned my regular pedal bike either! I still ride it occasionally for short trips.
Tenways still sell the CGO 600 Pro and now also offers a Plus model that comes with a regular chain (I still prefer the Pro’s Gates belt drive over a chain), and there’s also a model that offers some more tech features (the CGO009) that you’d see more commonly with a Cowboy or VanMoof bike.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for future e-bike models and e-bike tech, but for now, I’m pretty happy with my Tenways CGO 600 Pro.
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