My dad’s a keen cyclist and fancies one of those e-bike mountain bikes. Budget 2k tops, which brand is best? Motor/battery wise Bosch or Yamaha? How heavy are these things?
Does anybody on here have one to give us some first hand experience?
Cheers all

Haibike are good. Use bosch motors which are the best. Yamaha also meant to be good. Around 5kg for the motor and another 3kg for the battery. Only an issue when lifting the bike tbh.

Great idea, and fun. Sure he’ll love it.

Plenty of other non mtb brands about too.

One of the guys from our Tuesday night squad has been rocking a Mondraker Crafty e-bike, and it gets plenty of admiring looks every week. It’s a serious looking bit of kit…

Brose are also a pretty decent motor maker too, was impressed with the one I demoed (and subsequently bought) on a specialized levo, which is a bit out of budget, but a hardtail is in the offing, so worth waiting to see what that’s like if he isn’t in a huge rush

We’ve sold e-MTBs for a good few years now. Haibike were our first brand and they’re decent quality. Specs have come down over the last couple of years to maintain pricing but still not bad. KTM is also worth a look, and Mondraker too.

Bosch system is the market leader and better than Yamaha, but Yamaha is cheaper and at £2k you might get more in terms of the rest of the spec if you did go Yamaha. I’d probably still recommend a Bosch system though as it’s the only part you’re not going to be able to upgrade later.

A new brand for us this year, and the one we’re using for our hire bikes, is Moustache. They’re a small French company and the bikes are built in the Voges with frames manufactured to their spec in the far east. Quality is head and shoulders above anything else I’ve seen. Really pleased. Start at just a smidge over £2k, but possibly worth considering.

http://www.moustachebikes.com/uk/

If you’d like a run-down on the range, give us a shout!

Just noticed you also asked how heavy they are: from about 19kg upwards for a hardtail, usually 20-23kg in most cases. As with any bike, they get lighter the more you spend, but the motor, batteries and controller weigh about 6-8kg.

Cheers Drover, those moustache bikes look good, where abouts are you?