Gadgetory

nearly a year ago I emailed wave electric bikes about their way beach cruiser which claims to be the world's most affordable a bike ever at 599 USD for early backers available through IndieGoGo it seemed too good to be true and it was the wave 1.0 was a terrible bike with a shady crowdfunding campaign but more on that later so they've sent us to follow up the wave 2.0 is it the improvement they need to relearn consumer trust or is it just a slightly less terrible bike with a slightly less terrible marketing strategy Tunnel bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet Tritonal therefore free at the link in the video description the wave 2.0 is a non crowdfunded bike that is currently listed on wave electric bikes website for $1000 the box comes with a big red warning stating that professional assembly is required if you don't opt for the $95 charge in the checkout to have someone come and do it for you though the included instructions seemed pretty clear to me so I apparently took my life into my own hands by putting it together myself I guess I won't be able to make any warranty claims now that it's assembled let's see what we've got the wave 2.0 features a 750 watt brushless hub motor 6 speeds and a reported 25 mile per hour top speed with 23 miles of range using the throttle only and 40 miles with pedal assist these numbers are likely thanks to the 500 watt hour battery with Samsung's cells and the aluminum frame both of which are big upgrades over the wave 1.0 s generic cells and steel frame and my real-world numbers actually get reasonably close to those I've got to give them credit for that considering that wave electric bikes obtained these numbers with a 165-pound rider on perfectly flat terrain with no stopping but electrical components aside as a bike the wave 2.0 just feels kind of cheaply made the handlebars have a lot of play no matter how much you tighten everything it doesn't come with fenders or a quick-release on the front wheel the pedals are plastic the brakes squeak horribly when wet the motor shudders that it starts up the luxury stitching on the handlebar grips is already coming undone the pic stand has already broken my battery case arrived with a crack in it and the rack is useless to hold any panier bags because the battery is completely in the way unless you raise it slightly with washers like I did that would have cost them what 25 cents furthermore there's no decelerate curve for the motor controller so it abruptly cuts in and out as you go below and above 20 miles per hour the only way to avoid this is by switching the bikes to off-road mode which instantly removes the speed limitation and allows the bike to put up full power regardless of speed making it very explicitly not street-legal in parts of the United States and Canada make of that what you will not everyone is concerned that their vehicle isn't street-legal one thing I do like about it is the fact that the front and rear lights are both powered by the main battery and can be turned on and off with the press of a button though I wish they were significantly brighter and the complaints don't end there the LED display has no odometer wattmeter speedometer or estimated remaining range it just has readouts for battery and pedal assist levels and if you want no pedal assist you have to turn the entire thing off for some reason also it can be difficult to distinguish the buttons or the LEDs from one another especially if you're wearing gloves so overall the wave 2.0 is just a cheaply made bike I wouldn't pay a thousand dollars for it and neither should you so what happened here why is it so lame well ladies and gentlemen I did promise to look into the history of wave electric bikes and Wow did I dig up some dirt the IndieGoGo campaign for the wave 1.0 e bike ultimately raised 1.1 million dollars and once they had the money their promises began slipping away delivery dates were pushed back multiple times the Samsung batteries were changed to generic cells the one-year warranty vanished the promise top speed and total range were decreased when the bikes finally started shipping customers received parts that were damaged incorrect non-functional or just missing in all fairness some customers are happy with their purchase but many are not and these folks are still posting angry comments on the IndieGoGo page demanding refunds and decrying the lack of communication from wave electric bike I spoke to my contact about all of this and he said that we definitely had some issues but we were able to resolve these issues and produce the wave 2.0 without any of these issues really what brand of alternative facts are these because more than one and a half years later some of the original backers have still not received their wave 1.0 bicycles and it gets a lot worse while the campaign was still active someone posted this image comparing the wave 1.0 e bike to a seemingly identical bike from alibaba.com available for $400 but upon closer examination it's yeah it's exactly the same bike turns out there's a company that's literally called om bicycle that sells these bikes in lots of 100 and they told me they've been doing so since 2014 before the wave indiegogo campaign even launched and they're currently doing the exact same thing with the lady wave or should I say the OEM en1 five one nine four that would be pretty disturbing since reselling a product is against IndieGoGo Terms of Service digging deeper I found this forum post which points out similarities between waves branding and music taken from rad powered bikes and I also discovered that waves logo is almost identical to wave broad bands logo is there anything they didn't rip off my contact at Wave electric bikes denies that any of these things are ongoing problems and even says that it's the Alibaba vendors who are copying wave and not the other way around and that wave 1.0 customers and wave 2.0 customers are completely unrelated whatever that means because I don't agree it looks like the wave 2.0 has the same frame design brake LED display battery case motor and motor controller as the wave 1.0 I wouldn't be surprised if om bicycle or some other Chinese vendor is still supplying wave electric bikes with parts or even entire bicycles but because the wave 2.0 is not crowdfunded there's not wrong with this and lots of Chinese products are marked up and resold for much higher margins than what I believe wave is taking but none of that changes that the wave 2.0 is a cheap bike sold by a sketchy company with a track record of disappointing and misleading its customers they say they've moved on to a different business model but some of the wave 1.0 backers and all of the lady wave backers have still not received their bikes despite the fact that you can currently buy them straight from wave electric bikes calm which is making the backers very upset which leads us to a pretty clear conclusion there are some significant and unavoidable costs associated with building a good ebike so you're probably not going to find one for less than $1000 if that's too expensive for you my completely unbiased advice is to just get yourself a regular bike from a well-established brand like specialized giant or Trek or you could get a moped or even a fixer-upper motorcycle if you're mechanically inclined just don't buy anything from wave electric bikes at least until they've made things right with their current outstanding IndieGoGo supporters and always remember kids if a crowdfunding campaign looks too good to be true it probably is freshbooks cloud accounting software has been redesigned from the ground up it's custom-built for how you want to work and it's a simple way to be more productive and organized create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds and see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to those guessing games for your unrestricted 30-day free trial head over to FreshBooks comm forward slash tech tips and enter Linus tech tips envy where you heard about us section thanks for watching guys leave a comment below about your favorite bike or electric bike don't forget to hit the like button or the dislike button or both now that doesn't work get subscribe because we've got a lot more electric vehicle reviews on the horizon and click up here for the last crowdfunding a vehicle that I hated the FlyFly smart pad