E-Bike Range on the Shoreham Century

 If you've got an e-bike, one of the first things that any cyclist asks you is 'what's the range?'  The true answer to that question is 'it all depends', but that doesn't satisfy most people.  What it depends on is how powerful the motor is, how big the battery is, how much work the rider is prepared to do, how hilly the route is, how much wind is blowing and a few other things, too.  Range is far from absolute, as any cyclist, electrically assisted or otherwise, will tell you.

So here are a couple of examples, based on the Shoreham Century, which give some idea of what current road e-bikes can do.

Last year I did the Shoreham Century.  I rode by myself, as the regulations then required, and I used an Orbea Gain, a lightweight road e-bike with an Ebikemotion X35 motor system.  I used a range extender, an extra battery that you can see in the bottle cage, and the range estimator said that I had enough capacity for 171 miles.  I'd say that this was a credible figure, and this video by Dave Atkinson shows a very similar Cannondale bike doing 180 miles.  I rode a hillier route than we normally do, 96 miles door to door, and I had plenty of battery left.

This year I rode a Giant Road E+, a very different fellow.  The motor is a bit of a brute, a Yamaha PW X2, which comes from the mountain bike world.  I bought it a year ago as a 'lockdown special', and it's extremely good at going very fast up steep hills.  It's also a very nice bike to ride, but I think it has more power than you need for the road.  No harm in that, but you are carrying a bigger motor and a bigger battery to feed it.  There is more power than most people would regularly use.  As you'll see from the picture, I put a range extender on this one, too.

The estimated range for this one was 127 miles.  I find this to be a bit conservative, the assumption obviously being that if you've got a powerful motor you're going to blast up hills, which I generally don't.  Arriving at 'Spoons in Leatherhead the meter showed 49% remaining, so in round numbers you could have done the ride again, more or less, without charging the battery.  As I think that the other members of my group would agree, we didn't hang about, so that's a decent performance.

Based on these and other experiences, I'd say that most current road e-bikes, properly set up for a long ride and sensibly ridden, will do 120 miles with little difficulty.  This is an important number, as 120 miles, 200 kms, is the standard French and thus Audax 'randonnée' distance for a day's ride.  All of the long Continental Raids are based on the 200 km building block, and yes, you can use an e-bike.  The ride is recorded on a different scale, so you're not competing with non-electric riders.  But if you want to, you can do it, and my experience is that there is now a good choice of bikes for the job.

Good time to be an old cyclist, really.

Mark