You may be wondering why you should build your own bike when you can buy a standard electric bike or scooter at your local Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire for a reasonable price. The main reason is that these bikes just suck. They are underpowered with small motors, low amp controllers, and weak batteries. These are fine if you just want to cruise slowly at 18mph (30kph) on a flat road to the local corner store and back and don’t mind pedaling up any hill, but I don’t see them as a replacement for a car. You see them pedaling like crazy to go up a small hill or sometimes pushing them because they ran out of battery. Traffic is stuck behind them on narrow roads because they are moving so slowly that cars cannot pass them.

There are a few companies that make very good quality electric bikes, but only if you are willing to spend up to $10000 and most of them are still not as fast as a bike you can build yourself for a fraction of the cost. If you really want to replace your car and cut the umbilical cord with the oil companies, you need to build the bike yourself, choose good quality components, and modify some parts to increase performance and reliability. In this way, you can build a bike that is perfectly suited to your specific needs and will last for many years.

You might be thinking why not build an electric motorcycle instead of using a bike as a platform. Well, the bicycle has several advantages. In most places, you don’t have to license or insure an electric bike, which can save you thousands of dollars a year. You can also ride your electric bike on designated bike routes and trails. On a motorcycle, you are bound to obey the same rules as on a car, so you have to wait in traffic with all other vehicles. A bicycle weighs much less than a motorcycle chassis, which means it will require less energy to move it. This translates to a more efficient vehicle that can use a smaller (and therefore cheaper) battery to go the same distance. One final advantage of a bike is that it can be locked into a bike rack instead of parked in a stall, saving you even more money by not buying a parking pass.