I thought it was to power of the battery not the size which was important .
Quite. A 14.5Ah battery, ceteris paribus, will have more coulombs and carry you further and offer a longer lifetime than one of 8.5Ah. Thus my remark that the battery on the R+M is visibly small. Once you know that all these lipo battery assemblies use cells of the same size, and that the Amp-hour rating is increased simply by adding more cells in parallel groups to make 36V (that R+M bike runs on 36V, doesn't it, not 24V, horrid thought), it is legitimate to eyeball a battery and judge its usefulness and longevity by its size. Of course, the dealer will tell you that the smaller battery is fitted to save weight; if he does, ask him politely why then he doesn't offer you half a dozen Bosch 36V drill batteries and a simple wiring rig (crocodile clips will do) so that you can carry only as many of the Bosch batteries as the length of the journey requires and leave the rest of the dead weight at home.
As far as carrying capacity is concerned I'm looking to cut down what I take on tour.
That R+M bike's peculiar structure makes me wonder whether it will survive as a touring bike, even if you stay well within its load limits, never mind Danneau-style Spartan expeditions. The weight of the bike, to which Dan drew attention, may indicate that the tubes were made thicker than normal to allow for the novel frame's lower stiffness when compared to a proper diamond frame, or it may be simple incompetence. (I had a Peugeot once, the most expensive bike they made, on which the tubes were so incompetently specified that bike had zero compliance and wrecked my back.) The fact that I could find only expensively written, meaningless, marketing gush about it, rather than a spec sheet with hard details like battery capacity or torsional resistance of the frame (a perfectly reasonable request for any bike that isn't a proven diamond shape), in addition makes me wonder whether it was even designed as a tourer outside the unstressed limits of Sunday afternoon cafe tours and Dutch vakansiefietse (holiday bikes for the Dutch managerial classes -- basically flatland commuters too expensive for the station run dollied up to look like luxurious tourers but usually followed by a sag wagon: these are not likely to survive outside Holland or Northern Germany; the front suspension fork on my very beautiful but in the end unsatisfactory Gazelle Toulouse vakansiefiets chucked in the towel under a thousand miles, and I hardly ever go off the tarmac, though it is true my tarmac is a bit, shall we say, rough). Nothing wrong with cafe tours or holidays on the Dutch flatlands, of course, -- hell, I'm a confirmed credit card tourer because my painting gear, which must always be instantly to hand, crowds out even a clean shirt -- but you, Bob, may have grander touring aspirations.
If you decide to buy the R+M, Bob, you should ascertain that the suspension fork has a standard 1-1/8in threadless headset steerer tube. If the steerer is threaded, regardless of diameter, or any of the odd "low profile" stupidities, the fork is a special, custom-order item, and ties you to the manufacturer of the bike, and then only for as long as he keeps spares, after which you junk the bike because you can't get spares. I mention this in particular because Dutch and German bike-makers, even those much bigger than R+M, have an irresponsible affection for 1in threaded suspension forks which they order direct from Taiwanese factories; check whether anybody you shop with still sells one of those at retail...
Lest anyone gets the idea that I have a special down on R+M, not so. I just have quite a bit of experience of special German, Dutch and generally Benelux bikes, and have fallen into their traps already -- and discovered that only Trek Benelux was interested in helping me reengineer the bike to meet their promises, and Trek isn't really a European firm but an American one with good old American customer-is-king attitudes. My Utopia is full of in-house custom-designed bits, but Utopia did something incredible smart: they let the manufacturers they chose make the parts royalty-free for sale to anyone, so that today these otherwise potentially unobtainable parts are actually common; one example is the Sapim "Strong" spoke, which a sensible spoke maker would never have designed so ugly, but which my bike's maker with its Bauhaus logic merely designed functionally; it comes with special Rohloff-angled heads too (Utopia was the first manufacturer to specify Rohloff hubs); the Big Apple tyre was developed specifically to act as the sole suspension element of my bike. Where Utopia gets too special for my taste, as in the fragile Country chaincase, before I ordered the bike I knew precisely where I could find a one-to-one replacement, in the case of the Country the sturdy Hebie Chainglider; I literally had a written list of replacement parts and dealers, down to the smallest component. And that on a bike with which, as a result of knowing precisely what I bought and what I would do with it, I have been very happy for ten years... You don't have to be that careful with a Thorn bike, because every component is conservatively chosen as a known good-value, reliably long-lasting part available off any discounter's shelf, and guaranteed to be available for a good long while.
