People stop me to talk about my electric bike. The most dire problems I come across can all be traced to a misconception, an attitude. Because I don't suffer from the same deluded expectation, I still have the battery from my first electric bike, in perfect working order after near enough two decades, because I take care never to discharge it fully, and to charge it after every trip no matter how short.

They didn't get the memo that what they intend buying, or have bought and killed by ignorance and careless neglect, is not an electric motor-bike but an electrically assisted pedal bike. Consequently they repeatedly run the battery flat without pedalling and then wonder why it dies in short order and won't hold a charge any more.

Because they aren't normal cyclists, because the electric bike is their first bike, they don't have the normal cyclist's acceptance of the necessity of bicycle maintenance. They don't understand that the only way to avoid expensive wear and tear is routine maintenance.

Then there was the outraged lady who complained, 'I've recharged the battery as religiously as you advise, but I haven't lost an ounce since I started cycling. Instead I've put on eighteen pounds, more than a stone.' Yup--and nobody ever saw her turn the pedals even once, though she's probably got muscles in the thumb used to squash the thumb throttle down flat.

Some form of Maoist re-education would perhaps answer to what's in fact all the same root-problem. If people were not allowed to have electric bikes until they've ridden a year on a derailleur bike and another year on a hub gear bike, something like the pyramid of motorbike engine size licences one has to go through to be permitted to take a Hayabusa on the public roads, they would perforce learn about simple maintenance, and the correct habit of charging the battery when it is best for the battery and not most convenient for the cyclist will, we hope, become ingrained.

Quick tip: the fastest, cheapest way to bulletproof your bike electric motor is simply to replace the plastic gears inside with steel gears, which are cheap enough to install as an experiment to discover whether you can live with their additional noise. Or you can pretend you're a master artisan, a fitter and turner with an emery cloth sticking out of your rear pocket, and stone and fit the gears until they're quiet.

You can fireproof the controller against the same problem of excess heat (higher currents melting inadequate plastic sheathing) by making up a wiring harness of higher quality wires (the insulation has a heat rating, the higher the better) and fitting it.

I also am inclined to leave bad reviews for failures, but don't take the time to write a review if it is as described.

On that youtube video, some of the polls were how many motors were replaced under warranty, or were otherwise replaced.  That is a much more accurate way to do an analysis.  I can imagine a lot of people write reviews on e-bikes complaining they wanted more speed and more acceleration and more range, such reviews mean little.  But a motor replacement is only done when needed.

I usually look at the 1 or 2 star reviews first, and I take into account how prevalent those poor reviews were, e.g., were the ones and twos 5 percent of the total or 45 percent of the total.  Sometimes I was inclined to order something on line, but after reading some of the poor reviews if there were a lot of them, and if they were for the same manufacturing defect, I suddenly decide that I really don't need that item after all.

One of my neighbors is a bike mechanic at a bike shop on a large university campus.  He said most people on campus that bring in an e-bike for some reason or other has clearly just left it in the highest gear on derailleur bikes.  They get on the bike and aim for maximum motor assist with the least amount of pedaling effort. 

Interesting.... I always read the comments which provide a wider range of opinions. People understandably make a lot more noise about failures than about systems which are trouble-free (it's the same with cars).

If it only occurs in 8 to 14, that likely rules out a problem specific to the low range planetary gears.  That said, I would expect it to occur in gears 1 to 7 too.  I was specifically thinking that if it only occurred in gears 1-7, that would imply that it was specific to the low range planetary system, but your symptoms confuse me a bit.

If it only occurred once when you shifted from below 11 to above 11, or once back from above to below, that could be from the hub torque limiting components.  For example if your skewer was loose which you already confirmed was not the case. 

One of the planetary gears is only used for gears 1 through 7.  Not for gears 8 through 14.

Does it occur after any shift?  Or does it only occur immediately after shifts from gears 1-7 up to gears 8-14, or back from 8-14 down to gears 1-7?

Gear 11 is direct drive.  Gears 12-14 are overdrive.  Does it only occur when shifting from below gear 11 to above gear 11, or from above gear 11 to below gear 11?