   #[1]Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer

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Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life

Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership


   My electric bike sings, emits a nearly imperceptible hum from its tiny
   motor. I love its song. A song of peace and magic. Has money ever
   bought as much delight as the delight of an electric bike?

   The first time I rode one was nearly a decade ago, in Kyoto. The
   electric bike I rented was huge and unwieldy, but that tug of its motor
   never left my mind. I went to climb a hill and it felt as if a giant
   had gently placed his hand on my back and pushed me forward. That
   stupid smile has been on my face ever since.

   Two years ago I rented another one. This one smaller, lighter, the
   motor more powerful. I was convinced. This is the way. Eighteen months
   ago, in the heart of the pandemic, I committed and bought my first
   electric bike and have never looked back.
     __________________________________________________________________

   Indulge me — a summer afternoon: Soaring down the coast, the ocean to
   one side and a strand of old pines to the other. The afternoon sun
   beats down but it feels cool and there’s something irrationally
   stirring — downright emotional — about the efficiency of this dumb
   machine beneath my body. The motor looks too small — just a black
   cylinder on the hub of the wheel. And yet it moves. It sings that song.
   A subtle hum. A beautiful hum. It makes me want to ride and ride,
   ridiculous distances, nonsensical distances. I don’t want to get to
   where I’m going because I want the ride to last longer. I want to
   linger in this space as long as possible, this space of smooth and
   efficient movement through the world, gliding in near total mechanical
   silence, just the sound of rubber on the pavement, wind in my ears,
   breaking waves, salt, the smell of pine. This is what electric bikes
   do: They drive you insane with the poetry of the world.
     __________________________________________________________________

   A strange trio A few of my old bikes: A mamachari, carbon fiber road
   bike, and Kalavinka

[13]#So Many Bikes

   All my standing life, I’ve biked. As a kid I rode a K-Mart Huffy to a
   rusted nub and then managed to nab a Haro Group 1. As an adult, bikes
   have been one of my few material indulgences (unwittingly,
   organically). In the past twenty years alone I’ve owned some fifteen
   bikes. I’ve had aluminum and carbon Bianchi road bikes. I’ve had steel
   Kalavinka keirin bikes with gorgeous head badges. I’ve had folding
   Dahon and Birdy BD-1s. I’ve had a handful of beloved brandless
   throwaway mamacharis — shopping bikes — that have proven hearty and fun
   in their own ways, and have each died uniquely. I’ve gone out of my way
   to get a handmade Arrow cruiser from a builder in Ogikubo. I still have
   a custom orange Moulton that I’ve modified into a single-speed city
   bomber that goes remarkably fast while floating atop its simple
   suspension.

   And on and on — bikes. Why? Because as any bike lover will tell you, to
   be ensorcelled by the bike is to crave one and only one thing: More
   bike. Each new bike is like riding once again for the first time.
   Exploring a city on a mamachari is different than a BD-1 is different
   than a Moulton. All thrilling. The bikes change, and so, too does your
   relationship to the pavement. My love for bikes has no categorical
   allegiances; if it has two wheels, and pedals, I’m interested. I want
   to ride them all.
   A Moulton Tiny, but fast, nearly flawless as a city machine — a Moulton
   with converted stem, Sugino cranks, coaster brake
     __________________________________________________________________

   Summers in most of Japan have never been easy. The temperatures England
   flirted with in 2022 are temperatures Tokyoites have contended with for
   centuries (and now contend with ones even higher). Crushing heat
   coupled with suffocating humidity. A three-shower-a-day kinda summer.
   Watch an Ozu film and observe the languid and supine impulse of its
   inhabitants during summertime scenes — that’s not affect, it’s
   survival. In Japan’s August, you simply can’t walk a block without
   losing most of your moisture.

   Bikes have always helped. A bicycle generates a microclimate with
   minimal effort. Standing on a street corner you may be soaked, but on a
   bike, the wind whooshing past, you are crisp(er) and dry(er). An
   electric bike only amplifies the effect.

   When I was a child I dreamt of having a personal helicopter. Powered by
   my feet and a bit of magic (certainly not gasoline, oddly, thinking
   back on it now). I imagined quietly gliding over the city in this tiny
   contraption, floating from home to video rental shop to diner, stopping
   by a friend’s house along the way. An electric bike gets me most of the
   way to this feeling.

   In the past eighteen months I’ve put several thousand kilometers on my
   electric bikes. It feels like cheating in every best possible way. I
   live in a seaside town south of Tokyo and traffic can get ridiculous,
   its ancient roads sized for horses, not cars. The electric bike swoops
   between and alongside these stale processions of heat and burning fuel.
   Drifting behind a gas-powered scooter or moped feels like observing
   some Victorian contraption — inefficient and loud and clunky and
   burdensome and pollutant. And not much faster (often much slower) or
   more useful than an electric bike.
     __________________________________________________________________

   A Vanmoof and a BESV My friend's S3 and my BESV (the X3 looks like a
   slightly smaller version of the S3)

[14]#Electrics

   I own two electric bikes. My first purchase was the strangely named
   BESV PSA1 — which is a smaller wheeled (20"), rear-wheel drive machine,
   with mostly off-the-shelf components allowing you to customize it to
   your liking. ^[15]1 And then, because I was so enamored by the BESV —
   so seduced by its small motor of umph, so wanting more and different
   electric bike experiences — I went and picked up a front-wheel drive
   Vanmoof X3 — the smaller-wheeled brother (24") to Vanmoof’s (quite
   frankly) giant S3 — just a few months later.

   I love them both like damaged brothers, because both of these bikes are
   flawed in frustrating ways.

   The electronic brain on the BESV is as dumb as they come.^[16]2 The
   settings reset each time you turn the bike on. The acceleration curves
   feel unrefined — herky-jerky, you might say. Its app is the worst app I
   have on my phone — badly designed, nearly functionally useless, clearly
   engineered without love. And yet. Despite these flaws I put hundreds of
   kilometers on this thing in the first month. The front and rear
   suspension turn every road to glass, and are even fine for dirt trails;
   I find myself hunting down paths through parks I’d never otherwise
   think about. Suddenly every hilly road is a thing demanding to be
   explored. Up up up the little machine yells, and you follow its
   command.

   Guests who stay at my studio are given the BESV to ride. We take it
   down the coast. It never fails to amaze. One friend felt compelled to
   pet it upon dismount, saying, Good job, buddy, so quick and deep was
   the affection for the thing.

   The Vanmoof is much smarter — the brain and software within it are
   refined, the app good, the acceleration curves smooth — but the bike is
   all custom components, and they aren’t the highest quality at that. The
   automatic shifting mechanism on mine failed twice in the first two
   months, requiring shipping the bike to the Vanmoof store.^[17]3 The
   seat post bolt broke off in the post. The original plastic pedals felt
   cheap and flimsy (pedals are one of the few things you can swap for
   your own). The aluminum frame is too stiff for the speed the bike
   generates — it can feel like you’ve been rattled to death after a bumpy
   road. (And stiffness mitigation by lowering tire pressure seems to only
   increase possibility of puncture.) But, more than all that, the design
   of the bike has a dangerous fundamental flaw: The bottom bracket is
   simply too low.

   Of all my many, many bikes, I’ve never had a pedal bottom out. On this
   Vanmoof X3? Dozens of times. Most critically during a turn at speed —
   the pedal hit the pavement, jumped the bike sideways, and sent me
   flying. It’s the only bad crash I’ve had in decades. So I’ve had to
   modify the way I ride — no pedaling into or out of turns, hyper
   awareness of deviations in lateral road slope — because, despite all
   this, I can’t stop riding this stupid thing. It sings — that hum. It is
   joy. I reach for it daily and it takes me around the peninsula and
   makes me happy to be alive.
     __________________________________________________________________

   BESV @ Lee's Bread, Oiso I've written about three electric bike rides
   for Papersky Magazine: Misaki, Oiso, and Yokosuka.

   Allow me to share a dirty secret: More often than not, at midnight I
   can’t repress the impulse — I have to take a bike out. Out the bike
   comes and together we head into the empty streets of my town and hum
   our way all over, visiting temples in total silence. There are no cars.
   Often no people. It feels illicit — this slipping around town, this
   sliding into temple parking lots in the shroud of the night, looking at
   their old beams, feeling ten years old and grateful for both the
   ability and awareness to be doing just this very thing at this very
   moment.
     __________________________________________________________________

   I’ve long since posited world peace could be achieved if you bought
   everyone in the world a bike, but now I want those bikes to be
   electric. I want everyone to feel this silliness, this punch-drunk
   stupidity of pure love, this sense of cheating the rules, the norms,
   this sense of ever-present delight. At our worst, humans mindlessly
   consume, sear the earth and each other, fill our bodies with poisons.
   At our best we invent electric bikes. Batteries have gotten more
   efficient, motors smaller and more powerful. The last decade has
   brought great efficiency to these machines, and the next ten years will
   only double down on these gains. Electric bike numbers are up, year
   over year over year. Tremendously so. Those who know, proselytize. We
   can’t help it. The charm is too great. The game non- zero sum. The more
   people who know, the better the world. It’s a wild notion, this sense
   of goodness to be had if you just reach out for it. Goodness with no
   real downside. Like solar panels or wind turbines, electric bikes are
   machines that buoy the spirit and the earth.
     __________________________________________________________________

   Buy the best electric bike you can within your budget. Stretch if
   possible. Usually, the more you spend the lighter the machine, the more
   powerful the motor, the longer-lasting the battery. Depending on which
   country you live in top speeds will differ. In Japan the bike’s are
   capped at 24km/h. In America, 32km/h. Some places only allow for
   pedal-assist — meaning the motor only works when pedaling. Others allow
   throttles, blurring the line between bike and scooter. Laws will change
   in the coming years as more people adopt the machines and cities
   themselves adapt. This is just the start. Ten years ago it was fairly
   rare to see an electric bike around Tokyo. Today, it seems as if every
   parent hauling their kids is doing so electrically.

   A good strategy: Find a local bike shop that will let you try out
   several electric bikes. Some have front-hub motors, others rear-hub
   motors. Others, the motor sits in the center, between the cranks. Each
   has a subtly different feel. Going up a hill, a front-motor’d machine
   may skip or slip as you pull back on the handlebars, but on flat land
   will feel more like being tugged through the world.

   Sure, electric bikes aren’t cheap. But I believe they’re a rare object
   to be well worth the cost. This in spite of their annoying flaws, their
   often bad software, their defective geometries. Because they open the
   world. Whatever world may have been nearby, an electric bike brings it
   nearer. This is worth more than you might estimate. These bikes sing
   their little songs and the smile on your face makes you look like a
   village idiot, but what a wonderful idiot to be.
     __________________________________________________________________

   A summer night: Biking home alongside a river. The air is thick with
   humidity and cicadas vibrate wildly in the distance. The moon is out.
   My choices: straight home along the shimmering moonlit river, or take a
   detour, up into the dark mountains, doubling the distance. To my
   surprise, I choose the mountains almost every time. More! That tiny
   child who fantasized about helicopters yells. More of this, whatever
   this is. More more more. And so I feed that impulse, an impulse
   generated and nurtured by the electric bike. Into the shadow mountains
   we go, up, pushed by the hand of that giant, always present, always
   ready to help. It is a ridiculous thing. A thing of peace and magic. An
   owl hoots. The smile has never left my face.
     __________________________________________________________________

[18]#Noted:
     __________________________________________________________________

    1. I upgraded my BESV to an SRAM drivetrain and Paul brake levers and
       Klamper disc calipers, some MKS pedals, and a set of Brooks grips
       and saddle and it feels wonderful through and through. These Paul
       Klampers are mechanical. The Vanmoof uses (generic?) hydraulic
       brakes. After thousands of kilometers, my conclusion is: hydraulics
       feel nice, but they are fussy (and perhaps Vanmoof’s chosen
       components are sub-optimal) and difficult (?) to tune on your own.
       In the end, I just don’t think they’re worth it. Too “delicate.”
       The Pauls feel as fresh today as the day I put them on, whereas the
       hydraulics have required much bikeshop tuning over the course of
       the last eighteen months. Were the Vanmoof more flexible, I’d
       happily swap out for mechanicals. This lack of flexibility is a
       bummer because, unlike an Apple iPhone, for example, where the
       components tend to be best of class (think: modem, CPU, camera
       unit, etc), the physical components on a Vanmoof most definitely
       aren’t — nor do they offer the option to pay more to get better
       components. [19]↩︎
    2. Oh, how I wish this thing was open source, hackable — because it’s
       so close to great. Sadly — and I don’t know how else to frame this
       — it feels like the engineers behind the software don’t ride bikes.
       At least not this one. The software flaws are so fundamentally
       obvious, that anyone who had a) access to the code, and b) rode the
       bike, couldn’t NOT fix these obvious issues. What I really wish,
       though, is that I could slap the Vanmoof brain onto the BESV body
       and, well, then we’d be in Electric Bike Elysium. [20]↩︎
    3. I’ve since learned — the drive train of the Vanmoof is not to be
       “ridden” like a “bike” but rather, “feathered” like a delicate sand
       castle — assume the gears could explode at any moment and apply the
       least amount of pressure you can; the motor is strong enough to
       take care of most of the rest. In this way, the Vanmoof feels more
       like a moped that uses “pedal assist” as a suggestion than a pure
       electric-assist bike — a smart way to get around motorcycle laws in
       most countries, which I assume is the main point. Not to say you
       don’t get a workout on the Vanmoof, you do, but not nearly as much
       as the more classically committed BESV — which really does require
       you to pedal.
       Maybe this is a good place to bring up the question: Why not just
       get an electric scooter? I think it mainly comes down to
       flexibility and philosophy. With a pedal assist bike (even if the
       pedaling required is minimal) you simply have more flexibility in
       parking, in riding, in “lightness” of transportation, than with an
       electric scooter. Also: Insurance costs, maintenance, and higher
       base cost. And philosophically, being able to still use the bike as
       a “bike” without power feels like an aspect of these machines we
       shouldn’t be so quick to toss aside. [21]↩︎

   This essay, published September 2022. Thoughts? Email
   [22]me@craigmod.com.
   [23]Craig Mod, his head, floating at the bottom of the article

   [24]Craig Mod is a writer and photographer based in Japan. He's the
   author of [25]Kissa by Kissa and a MacDowell, Ragdale, and VCCA writing
   fellow. His essays and articles have appeared in Eater, The Atlantic,
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   Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Morning News,
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