How Far Can an Electric Bike Go? Range, Explained Honestly

Ask how far an electric bike goes and you will get a number. The honest answer is a range of numbers, and understanding why they spread so widely is the difference between a bike that always gets you home and one that leaves you pedaling a heavy machine the last three miles. This catalogue publishes bands as wide as 20–60 km for a single model, and at the extremes they run from 10–30 km (a small-battery fat bike) to 80–100 km (a carbon trail bike with the biggest pack in the range). This article explains the five things that produce those numbers.

1. Battery energy: watt-hours are the fuel tank

Range starts with stored energy, measured in watt-hours (Wh): volts multiplied by amp-hours. The biggest pack in this catalogue, on the E23 trail bike, is 48V and 20Ah — 960 watt-hours. A typical mid-range pack, 48V 13Ah, stores 624Wh. The smallest, on the folding fat B13, is 36V 10Ah — 360Wh. Everything else being equal, range scales with watt-hours, which is why battery capacity is the first number to check and the last number to save money on.

A useful planning figure is consumption: a rider on a mid-assist setting on mixed terrain typically uses somewhere around 8–15 watt-hours per kilometre, with heavy riders, hills, headwinds, fat tires and top assist pushing well beyond that. Divide the pack by the consumption and the published bands make sense: 960Wh at roughly 10–12 Wh/km is how the E23 reaches its 80–100 km band; 360Wh at fat-tire consumption is how the B13 lands at 10–30 km.

2. The rider and the load

The motor moves mass, and mass is mostly rider. A 60 kg rider and a 100 kg rider on the same bike are different vehicles as far as the battery is concerned; add cargo and the effect compounds, especially on hills where energy goes into altitude as well as distance. This is why fleet operators size batteries by their heaviest rider and worst route, not by the brochure run. Rated payloads matter here too: running near a model's payload ceiling costs range on every climb.

3. Terrain and tires

Climbing is the range killer nothing else matches: lifting 100 kg of bike and rider up 500 vertical metres consumes roughly 140 watt-hours of potential energy alone, before drivetrain losses. Rolling resistance is the quieter tax: a 4.0 or 4.8-inch fat tire at soft-terrain pressure rolls far harder on tarmac than a 700C city tire, which is why fat bikes publish shorter bands than city bikes on similar packs. Surface matters as well — gravel and sand are effectively permanent headwinds.

4. Assist level and sensor behaviour

Every doubling of motor contribution shortens the ride. Torque-sensor bikes tend to sip because the motor output follows your effort rather than running at a fixed level; cadence-sensor bikes at a high assist setting can hold near-maximum output on the flat. The practical technique for a long day: ride one assist level lower than feels natural, spin a lower gear rather than grinding a high one (especially on a mid-drive, where gear choice sets motor efficiency), and save the top level for the climb that actually needs it.

5. Temperature and age

Lithium cells lose usable capacity in the cold — a winter commute at near-freezing can cost a fifth to a third of a pack's summer range — and every pack fades gradually with charge cycles and calendar age. Plan a purchase so the bike still covers the route at 80% of its new range, and the machine will serve for years instead of disappointing in its second winter.

Reading this catalogue's numbers

The bands published on this site come from the manufacturer's model data. Note one instructive example: the fat cargo model B17 appears in the manufacturer's materials with two range figures depending on the source document; this site publishes the conservative specification-table figure of 31–60 km, because that is the number a fleet plan should be built on. The rule generalizes: take the low end of any published band for planning, treat the high end as the best case on a mild day with a light rider, and the truth of your own riding will land somewhere inside.

Worked examples from the range

The long rider: E23, 960Wh, published 80–100 km — the catalogue's ceiling, achieved with the biggest pack, an efficient mid-drive in the right gears, and trail tires rather than fat rubber. The commuter: EC2, 624Wh on a belt-drive city bike, published 50–80 km — several days of commuting per charge. The hauler: C18 cargo, 720Wh — the largest pack fitted to any 250W model here — publishing a 31–60 km band; under working loads fleets plan toward the low end and answer range with swappable packs and mid-shift charging, covered in our cargo fleet article. The folder: F7 and F11-class bikes publish 30–40 km — plenty for the last-mile role they are built for.

Worked example: sizing a battery for a real commute

Take a concrete brief: a 22 km round-trip commute, five days a week, one long hill, a rider who wants to charge twice a week at most. The route needs roughly 11 km of range per charge-day times two days — call it 25 km of real range with margin, in winter, on a pack that has aged a year. Working backwards through this article's factors: winter costs a fifth, age will cost a tenth, the hill is a daily tax — so the buyer should shop for a published band whose low end sits near 40 km, on a pack of at least 500 watt-hours. In this catalogue that brief lands exactly on the city line's 48V-class models and the EC2, and it eliminates the small-pack folders and the B13 despite their lower prices — not because they are bad bikes, but because their bands answer a different brief. This is the practical use of range literacy: not predicting a number, but eliminating the wrong bikes before a sample is ever ordered, and knowing precisely which published figure you relied on when you chose.

A note on how published bands are produced

Manufacturers measure range under their own test conditions — a rider of a stated weight, a set assist level, a defined route profile — and those conditions are rarely published in full, which is why two bikes with identical batteries can carry different bands and why the band for one bike can span a factor of two. The width of the band is itself information: it is the manufacturer acknowledging the variables in sections 2 to 5 above. The fair way to compare two models is watt-hours first, then the low end of each band, then the drive layout — a mid-drive ridden in the right gears will usually land closer to its ceiling than a hub bike ridden carelessly. And the fair way to treat your own bike is to log three real rides in your real conditions and plan from the worst of them; that number, not the brochure, is your range.

The bottom line: range is not a property of a bike; it is a property of a bike, a rider, a route and a day. Buy watt-hours, ride one level down, and plan on the low number.