special thanks to serial one for sponsoring this video
thank you so much paul for coming out here and bringing your harley davidson
this is the serial one what do you think huh wow i love the black
belt drive so this is kind of a harley thing right it is same belt harley's been running
belts for decades uh wouldn't have it any other way speaking of maintenance where do you change
the oil in this thing there's no oil on this thing i talked about why we should all be driving
electric vehicles quite a bit on this channel but maybe i was wrong i mean i still 100 believe
that evs are the future and better in every way but maybe we shouldn't be thinking about just
replacing every gasoline mile with an electric one for so many of us some of the time a big
four thousand pound five passenger vehicle just isn't needed bicycles aren't exactly new so why am
i bringing this up now well this is the rush city step through electric bicycle from serial one a
company born inside the legendary harley-davidson i've been running it for over a month now and
shockingly averaging over six miles a day up from almost no exercise at all so ditch the
gym membership forget the metro card leave your evie in the garage and let's go pedaling right
welcome to mount helix here in san diego from here to the top of the hill it's about
a thousand feet which is why i've never ridden a bike up here i'm not in that kind of shape
but with the serial one i have made this trip now every day for almost a week and yes it's still
tiring it's still challenging but i can actually do it and that's one of the things about this bike
this is truly a bicycle you got a pedal and right now i'm in sport mode but as you ride it just
helps you along i am not in the kind of shape to be able to make it up this hill without some help
i've seen the people on this hill the real avid bicyclist and they here i'll turn off the assist
okay so i'll go back down oh this is how you you have to go uphill and i would last for about two
minutes like this but now i'm in eco now i'm in tour now i'm in sport and all of a sudden
i'm not just making up a hill but i'm doing it at eight miles an hour so who is this bike for
if you live where there's hills like i do there might just be roads you would never ride before
that now you can but if you live let's say 15 miles or something from work and you just never
thought to ride your bike to work because well you'd be exhausted and sweaty well now
with this you just might be able to and with 50 miles of range you can make it to working back
and you'd be fine this is a serious uphill ride i don't know if you can tell in the video but
this is i am totally winded one of my friends has an e-bike with a throttle
really he can sit back not pedal pull on throttle and it does all the work
i think what he bought is a very stinky little motorcycle it's not really a bicycle in my opinion
and that's what this is this is for somebody who likes riding bicycles who just wants a little
bit of assistance whenever needed this bike comes with some various modes as i mentioned there's off
which is just a bicycle very hard then there's eco obviously it'll last the longest
then there's tour which is where i spend most of my time i think sport is the next level up
from there and then finally there's boost and in boost i'm not just going uphill i'm flying uphill
the greatest features of this bike i've had this thing for a month been riding for a month come
down to two things the first is the sensor that detects what you're trying to do as far as like
you know when you want to speed up or slow down it's in the pedal so what that means is
let's say i'm coming along and i want to speed up well i start pedaling faster and the motor kicks
in and i start moving faster most e-bikes actually have the sensor in the wheel the problem with that
is to go faster you got to put in enough power to move the wheel to go faster to then get help
to go faster that's a lot more difficult than having it in the pedal the second thing
the reason why you want this bike over another is the enviolo hub on the back of the rear wheel
which basically has a continuously variable transmission in it so what that means
is you get the smartphone app connect your hub using a little pairing system and then you set up
the cadence you want to keep so for me it's about 70 rpm and at 70 rpm you look at my feet right now
i'll slow down but no matter what happens my feet don't change so here's just crawling along
i'll i'll go even slower so here's like one mile an hour okay but look at my feet
the pace and then i'm gonna start speeding up and try to fly but look what happens the
hub is constantly shifting and keeping my cadence exactly where i set it in the app
the one thing to remember here is in the app there is a calibration mode so when you first get
it and you adjust it run the calibration right around for a while and then you're good to go
so let's switch gears and talk about range as i mentioned i'm riding mainly up this hill which is
really really tough obviously on motors and batteries so i'll say i'm getting about 15
miles 10 to 15 miles of range purely up this hill and then on more conventional roads i was
getting about 50 miles the last time i charged i had 50 miles and i still had some battery left
so really it'll depend wildly on your conditions but range is awesome so on this downhill section i
should talk about the one feature i wish the bike did have and doesn't which is regenerative braking
downhill so i could charge my battery instead of having to use my brakes but it doesn't have
that the good news is the brakes are incredible they're four piston disc brakes on front and back
and here's what happens when i slam on them look at that yeah i stopped pretty much
instantly when it comes to charging up your serial one there's a couple of choices first you can just
leave the battery in place and plug into the wall charger which is what i normally do in the garage
or if you're like in an office environment you get the battery pack out of the bike and charge
it with the wall adapter with a little adapter that allows you to charge the battery outside
the bike another feature i love about this bike something that paul noted on the harley davidson
that he arrives is this bike doesn't have a chain instead it has a belt so this is a carbon fiber
reinforced belt drive and the beauty of that is that it doesn't stretch out like a normal chain
the metal links in the chain stretch out over time and get droopy and you have to grease them because
well it's metal on metal contact everywhere all those problems are gone with a belt like this
so it's way less maintenance oh the motor let's talk about the motor well the motor
is housed right here where the pedal axis comes out of very low and central to the bike
now most d-bikes have a hub motor that lives in the back wheel the problem with that is that the
the motor is probably the heaviest part about the entire assembly and if you put
it way far back behind the center of mass of the bike you lose that bike characteristic
so here's what i mean by that i'm going to turn the the power off so i'm just in manual mode
but as i move around at low speed with no help the bike feels like it should
it feels like a bike the weight is right when you ride other e-bikes you'll notice that
it has a little bit of a weight bias for the back maybe the battery pack isn't quite right
so as a result of the location of that motor it doesn't affect the dynamics of the bike in any
negative way it still feels like a bicycle in fact turn the assist motor off entirely and sure it's a
hefty bike it weighs about 50 pounds or something but other than that it feels about as normal
as any other bicycle well except for that hub with the cvt that you don't have to shift gears and
all that kind of stuff you want to race all right i'm gonna go to boost uphill
uh you might have an advantage of it let's go one two three go
i'm going 15 uphill
18.
i just beat my cameraman on his one wheel so i have the the city rush
step over which has a top speed of 20 miles an hour which means i almost hit it right
there but when you hit 20 miles an hour the motor turns off and it becomes a normal bike
and so that is what i'm thinking about if you want that extra speed
the top end model is the speed and it goes up 28 miles an hour so not gonna lie i kind of
kind of wish i had that just for fun but for most for most cases i think 20 miles an hour is more
than sufficient another feature we can talk about is how easy it is to get started uphill
on a normal bike you better have shifted down to your lowest gear because it's really hard to shift
once the wheels are stopped here the hub automatic i'll put it in sport mode and because the sensor
for input is on the pedal not the wheel all i have to do is just stick on it and here we go
it's also a really gorgeous bike first of all it's this kind of combination of matte black
on the forks and kind of a piano like a glossy black everywhere else but it's also the welds
and how beautifully the bike is put together you don't have any exposed wires all the wires for
the brakes and the motor and everything else is all integrated which is so nice also because of
this really well-designed structure the bicycle they could get rid of the bar that goes up here
normally and it still has all the rigidity of a typical bicycle you can tell from how
heavily my and labored my breathing is that i'm getting getting a workout it's just i could
make it up this hill that's just something i wouldn't have been able to do before and
that gets to one thing i wanted to finish off with which is i've had this bike for about a month and
during the lockdowns that happened about 18 months ago most of my friends went one of two ways one
they started working out more than ever they they were home more they started doing more walking
and exercising or two some of my friends you know they couldn't go to the gym and they're exercising
just plummeted sadly i was in group two i really haven't had any sort of real exercise in probably
18 months but when i got this bike that all changed because now i get to enjoy this where i
live my beautiful backyard and i can do it riding up my hill with this bike i still get a workout my
apple watch loves me i'm closing my rings and i'm enjoying the scenic nature of where we live i'm
starting to ride my bike to the store down to meet my friends for happy hour or for a coffee
really whenever i can just go without the kids this has become my favorite way of getting there
so all in this is about a four and a half mile ride half of it all obviously
is really challenging uphill the other half is largely downhill so you know let's call
it like a two mile ride but i've been doing it every day and this is coming from a person who
is not really that good about working out you know i've been running my youtube channel for
about five years now and when i first started i was doing it after work after my day job
and so i was working super hard and working two jobs and invariably something's gotta give
and for me that was exercise and taking care of myself and i wish i could say that when i
went full time about three months ago i suddenly started working out again but i didn't
it was a hard habit to break you know i didn't really look forward to walking or i didn't
really have a bike i could ride up this hill but then when i got this i could get used to this
you