Is an electric bike worth it, especially a fat tire ebike? I love my Rad Power Bikes RadRover (2017) and I wanted to talk about what I like and some of the things I dont like about the bike. I also got to take the Rad Rover out in the snow for the first time, it was a blast!

If you are interested in rad power bikes, you can use my friends and family link to get $50 off of your purchase at checkout and I will get a $50 gift card too!

Pros:

Price: at around $1500 I haven’t found another fat tire bike with similar specs. When I bought my bike Biktrix had some that were close in price but I didn’t like the seating. Definitely check them out too, I cant speak to the build quality, customer service etc but on paper the bikes looked pretty good. https://www.biktrix.com/

Seating Position: The rad rover had a more upright seating position than most of the bikes I found. I tried to show an example in the comparison below with the Biktrix, you can see the biktrix handle bars are pushed fwd flat and the distance from the seat to the handle bars is longer giving a more mountain bike style leaned over position. The rover is more upright which i have found puts much less pressure on my neck than my old mountain bike did. I find that makes it much more comfortable for me and anyone else that has tried it. I have found the min comfortable height to be around 5’3″.

Battery: Now I will say I am not the biggest fan of my 2017 battery, its only 556Wh but the new bikes have 672Wh so with a 750W motor they can go for almost an hour wide open! My wife has a 2018 Step thru with the larger battery and we have gone for 30 miles with her barley peddling at all and she has never come home with less than 30% battery (keep in mind this all depends on how fast you are going, the terrain etc).

Peddle Assist / Throttle: Some of the other ebikes out there only have peddle assist, and I will say I really like having the throttle to use in a pinch or just to help get this heavy bike goin!

Cons:

Kick Stand: Mine broke after about a year so that has to be a con. It was pretty cheap to buy some new bolts and when I re-installed it I adjusted the kick stand to have the bike more vertical (I didnt know it was adjustable). That has helped to reduce the load on the kickstand and its been hanging in there.

Lack of included accessories: The bike doesn’t come with fenders or a rack so definitely take that into account when you buy one and compare the price. The seating position was enough for me to buy it even though I had to pay extra for the accessories.

Hub drive vs mid drive: If I had the choice I would rather a mid drive due better weight distribution, ease of tire change and increased torque due to gearing. But I haven’t found any mid drive bikes that are less than $1500 (at least at the time of writing this post). I have had plenty of power with the 750W hub drive but if you start off up a very very steep hill it may not be able to get going very fast without peddling to help get the speed up. My wife has now learned on her step thru to pick up a little speed early if she doesnt think she can peddle up a really steep hill. Based on my experience I wouldn’t recommend a fat tire ebike with any motor lower than 750W if its a hub drive.

Range:

This is the hardest one to answer because it just depends. The easiest way I can explain the range issue to people is to learn the watt hour rating of the battery, volts x amp hours. So for the 2019 Rad rover its 48V x 14AH or 672 Watt Hours (Wh). This basically means that you can use 672watts continuously for an hour. Soooo if you have a 750 Watt motor like the Rads do, you can have the bike running at max power for almost an hour (672/750 = 0.9 Hours). So if you dont peddle at all and use the motor at its max going ~20mph your range will be 20 miles. If you slow down to 15mph and peddle a little and maybe use just 200watts per hour (this is displayed on the screen based on your peddle assist level) then you will be able to ride for 3.3 hours or have a ~50 mile range. Hopefully this helps a little with the range issue. Let me know if you have found a better way to figure it all out!

Notice the 740 at the bottom of the screen, I was just about at full throttle here so the bike is telling me I will use 740watts in an hour.

Conclusion:

So that’s my take on the rad rover. Would I buy one again, I think the fact that I bought a step thru for my wife sells a lot. Many of my friends and family have also purchased them after I let them take mine out for a spin because they are an absolute blast. I am a big fan of any tools that you can use to help get outside more! If you made it all the way to the end of this review I hope you are able to go out and try an ebike, they are amazing! And hopefully you can get one of your own soon!

If you want to check out my youtube review of my Rad Rover you can check it out below.

Below are some links for some of the things that I added to my bike. I get a small commission from amazon if you purchase anything through those links that I will use to help grow this page and my youtube channel (and hopefully try out some more ebikes!).

Some of the stuff I use with my Rad Rover:

Saris 2 bike rack, best affordable rack I could find that worked well with fenders (7000+miles and counting!) https://amzn.to/2MnCACv

Saris fat tire wheel holder(needed for the rad rover): https://amzn.to/2W7Sfdv

Bushwaker Paniers (only ones i could find wide enough to hold take out dinner and groceries at the same time!) : https://amzn.to/2W3YRcV

Center bag that covers the battery https://amzn.to/2W3hqhs

Motorcycle 12V headlight (required modding mount..): https://amzn.to/2RXhkbP

Center bag that covers the battery https://amzn.to/2W3hqhs

Voltage regulator (needed to go from 48 to 12V for headlight): https://amzn.to/2S6idMi

Bike phone holder: https://amzn.to/2QAvKyN

I also have a gear page setup with all of the drones and cameras and editing equipment I used for the youtube video if you are interested to see what I use (ever changing lol).

If you want to see some more videos on the rad rover, electric bike review has a great review on the Rad Rover as well as many other bikes, its a great resource if you are interested in an ebike