Electric Mountain Drive™ for Mountain, Road, Touring, and Long Bikes.
Our Electric Mountain Drive™ (EMtnD) is our mid-drive re-designed to fit almost any bike, including road bikes, hybrids, mountain bikes with or without suspension, long cargo bikes, touring, and hybrid bicycles.
The EMtnD attaches to your bottom bracket -- the part of the frame that the pedal cranks attach to -- and uses a motor driven freewheeling crankset that we make that replaces your current one. This allows the motor to propel the bike without forcing you to pedal along. When you decide to pedal, the freewheel engages and blends your leg power with the motor power. If you shut the motor off while pedaling, a second freewheel disengages the motor completely so there's no added drag.
This mid-drive design powers your bike through the chain and gear system. The advantage of this is that as you shift gears to match your pedaling speed to the bike speed, the motor speed shifts as well so that you always have maximum motor power at any bike speed. The result is the greatest possible hill climbing ability and the fastest possible top speed for the amount of power that the motor can supply.
Attach one to your bike and climb the steepest hills, even on singletrack trails, and carry heavy cargo up hills without effort. It's a whole new way to bike and the greenest form of powered transport there is.
For the first six years of EcoSpeed's existence we didn't make our mid drive systems to fit standard road and mountain bikes. After all, we reasoned, plenty of manufacturers make electric bikes and kits, so what could we offer? After six years of customers asking us for upright bike mid drives and after experience riding and repairing lots of electric upright bikes, we decided we had a lot to offer.
There are two ways to go if you want an electric road or mountain bike: you can buy one built as an e-bike, or you can buy a conversion kit. The former are well made and cleanly styled. Unfortunately, with a few very expensive exceptions, they are also terrible bikes once the battery runs down or you decide you just want to pedal. Kits give you the option of putting electric assist on a good bike, or just saving a bit of money by using a bike you already own.
Most of the kits available are hub motors. Hub motors are a great choice for moderate performance. But, if you need to power a heavily loaded bike up steep hills, like to ride off-road, or just don't want the added rotating weight and drag of a hub motor to detract from ease of pedaling, a hub motor is not the right choice.
There are a few mid-drive kits from other manufacturers. The challenge with making a mid-drive kit is not in the motor or battery as with conventional assists, but in simply attaching it to the bicycle. Others use flat aluminum plates and bolts, or U-bolts, or some similar generic means of attaching the unit to your bike. The problem with that is that the forces involved are simply too high. With several hundred pounds or kilograms of force pulling on your bike frame it is easy to bend or crush frame tubes or pull the drive out of alignment. A partial solution to that problem is simply to use a very small motor, which is what most mid-drive manufacturers do.
For our Electric Mountain Drive, we've developed our patent pending EcoSpeed Attach System™ (EAS) based on our years of experience in designing mid-drive electric assists for a wide variety of bikes and trikes. The EAS is a precision machined set of parts that attach the Electric Mountain Drive to both sides of your bottom bracket. This is the strongest point on your bike -- it's where the weight of your body and pedal forces pass into the frame. By carrying all the loads from the electric drive there, the only other thing needed is a simple band clamp that goes around your down tube and that carries almost no load. That's important because you want to minimize stress on the thin walls of quality bike frames.
This system is strong enough that we can use 1000 Watt or larger motors. The result is performance never before seen from an electric bike conversion kit, or indeed from any electric bike costing under $10000. Efficiently cruise at 20+ mph with burst speeds of 30 mph possible. On a mountain bike, you have enough power to climb steep singletrack grades where you can barely keep your front wheel on the ground. Cargo bikes can haul hundreds of pounds up moderately steep grades. Touring riders can haul a trailer with all of their gear over the Rockies.
