planting trees
After spending a month or two locked up during the COVID-19 pandemic, people have turned to e-bikes en masse as a way to get out of the house and engage in social distancing fun. While many of the best electric bikes on Amazon have been sold out for weeks, one of the few remaining good options is still hanging in there: the Ecotric 500W fat tire electric bike.
Now I want to be clear from the start: This isn’t a high-end electric bike, though you probably guessed that from the $850 price tag.
But what surprised me was that it isn’t a low-quality e-bike either. While the Ecotric fat tire bike has its shortcomings, it actually offers a decent range of parts and specs that far exceed its modest price.
For anyone searching for an affordable fat tire bike that they can thrash around on without babying it or worrying about their investment, this could be a great option.
Check out my video review of the Ecotric 500W fat tire e-bike below, then keep reading for the full details.
Ecotric 500W fat tire e-bike video review
Ecotric 500W fat tire e-bike tech specs
- Motor: 500W geared rear hub motor
- Top speed: 32 km/h (20 mph)
- Range: 25-50 km (15-30 mi) depending on throttle or pedal assist
- Battery: 36V 12Ah (432Wh)
- Charge time: 6 hours
- Max load: 120 kg (265 lb)
- Frame: 6061 aluminum
- Suspension: None
- Brakes: Tektro mechanical disc brakes with 160 mm rotors
- Extras: LCD display with speedometer, battery gauge, PAS level indicator, odometer, tripmeter, half-twist throttle
What are its strengths?
The Ecotric fat tire bike’s biggest strength is that it works just fine. I know that sounds underwhelming, but stick with me here. There’s nothing fancy about the bike, but it works.
It’s not pretty, but it’s a heck of a lot better looking than some other ultra-budget e-bikes we’ve tried.
The fat tires give you plenty of grip and cushion, making up for the lack of suspension. And truth be told, sometimes I prefer a rigid fork over an el-cheapo suspension fork that looks like it will fall apart.
The pedal-assist is cadence-based and so it has that telltale delay for the first revolution or so before it kicks in, but once it does it feels plenty strong.
I did some climbing on dirt fire roads and found that between me and the pedal-assist, there was no hill I couldn’t climb. However, the same hills were much tougher on throttle alone. The Ecotric could do it, but boy did I slow down. That’s typical for a 500W system with a 36V battery – they simply have a much more powerful feel on flat ground than when climbing big hills.
The bike also feels surprisingly well designed. And sure, that may be due to the frame being ripped off of some other bike, but at least they ripped it off well. That means the geometry actually feels comfortable and not sketchy like some budget e-bikes.
The bike components aren’t amazing. We’re talking the lowest of the Shimano drivetrain parts and Tektro brakes. But at least it has brand name parts, right?!
Essentially, the bike didn’t blow me away in any one category, but it did just about everything I asked of it except for climbing big hills on throttle only. And perhaps I was asking too much there.
What are its weaknesses?
So where does the Ecotric lag behind?
Mostly in features and accessories. It doesn’t have any LED lights or fenders or a rack – all things that I love to see included on a bike. Sure, I can add all three of those myself, but I don’t want to! I want a bike to come with them – is that so much to ask?
At this price, perhaps it is too much to ask.
The other sticking point is the range. With a 432Wh battery, I wouldn’t call the range underwhelming, but it’s certainly not impressive either. Most e-bikes come with at least a 500Wh battery these days. The Ecotric can get you around 30 miles of range if you’re pedaling but expect to get around half of that on throttle only.
That means it might be good for a Sunday afternoon joy ride, but not a lengthy excursion. At least not without a spare battery.
What’s the verdict?
Despite the Ecotric’s downsides, I still give this bike a thumbs up. But not an unconditional thumbs up.
You have to go into this e-bike knowing that you’re getting moderate power and a lack of any fancy features.
But for $850, you get a full-size electric fat tire bike that will have you flying through the park and around the trails without breaking a sweat. It’s an e-bike that works and does its job – it just doesn’t give you anything extra in the way of creature comforts.
If you’re prepared to make that sacrifice to get on an affordable e-bike, then this could be the right bike for you. If you have just a bit more to spend, I might recommend the Lectric XP fat tire e-bike that offers more power for just $899. But if you want to stick to a full-size and ultra-low priced electric fat tire bike, the Ecotric has the right stuff.
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- Is planting trees enough to slow climate change? No. Here’s why.
- World health leaders wrote to G20 leaders asking them to address the climate crisis in recovery plans (and they did).
- Indigenous leaders in Peru and Ecuador are calling for a halt to oil drilling in the Amazon.
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Trees are amazing. They’re beautiful, they shelter animals, they absorb carbon dioxide. (The only time they’re not amazing is when they fall on your house during a tornado or hurricane, but that’s not the trees’ fault.)
But are they enough to offset climate change? Pakistan’s government has created more than 60,000 tree-planting jobs as a green stimulus plan. That’s great — jobs, trees, better air quality. Donald Trump’s Trillion Trees Act would plant trees to capture carbon. More trees: Great.
But is that enough to reduce emissions and stave off climate change? Nope. Not by a long shot.
NASA cuts right to the point: “Planting trees will never be a substitute for decreasing fossil fuel emissions.”
As Inside Climate News writes (and we at Electrek are in complete agreement), it’s vital to preserve and support existing forests — um, hello Amazon rain forest — but cutting fossil-fuel emissions is the most important thing we can do to curb climate change. If we don’t do that, then 100 trillion young trees aren’t going to stop global warming.
A brand-new study published in Science reinforces this. Nate McDowell, a scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and an author of the report, says:
Older forests often host much higher biodiversity than young forests and they store more carbon than young forests.
Scott Denning, a Colorado State University atmospheric scientist, said [via Inside Climate News]:
No doubt, if you replaced every area of non-forest with forest, you could sequester a lot of carbon. But very little of the world is available for planting a trillion trees. Most of the land that might be suitable is in use for farms and cities. Most of the places that can support forests, like the Amazon, Congo, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia, already have forests.
You have to fix global warming by stopping burning oil and gas. To think you can just plant trees and keep burning oil and gas doesn’t make sense. We have to to get away from magical thinking.
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In a healthy economy and civil society the most vulnerable among us are looked after. Workers have access to well-paying jobs that do not exacerbate pollution or nature degradation; cities prioritise pedestrians, cyclists and public transport, and our rivers and skies are protected and clean. Nature is thriving, our bodies are more resilient to infectious diseases, and nobody is pushed into poverty because of healthcare costs.
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Here is a full list of all the signatories.
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Indigenous leaders in Peru and Ecuador want support to stop oil drilling in the Amazon. They warn that it would worsen the climate crisis.
Domingo Peas, a leader from Ecuador’s Achuar nation, told Reuters Television:
We have taken care of the rainforest all our lives and now we invite everyone to share in our vision. We need to find a new route, post-oil, for economic development, for the well-being of all humanity, not just indigenous people.
Existing and proposed oil and gas blocks cover an area larger than Texas. Oil is currently being extracted from 7% of these blocks. Ecuador and Peru want to bump it up an additional 40%. Have a watch below:
David Roberts of Vox published an article on Wednesday about a “climate policy platform that can unite the left.” Roberts says that “factions of the Democratic coalition have come into alignment on climate change.” You can read the entire article here, but what’s the bottom line? Basically, Roberts says it’s this:
That goal — net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 — has become table stakes, the new baseline for US climate policy. Virtually every candidate and climate platform… endorses it. Democrats in both houses of Congress endorse it. Even the American Conservation Coalition, a politically conservative group of young people concerned about climate change, endorses it. Now net zero by 2050 is what it means to ‘address climate change.’
That is an enormous change in climate politics, inconceivable even a few years ago.
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Here’s what happened yesterday in the #FridaysForFuture virtual protests calling for climate-change action. Here’s Elijah McKenzie-Jackson in London:
And Tenshin, a Japanese high school student:
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Check out our past editions of Climate Crisis Weekly.
Photo: B NW/Unsplash
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