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.
