Mechanical vs hydraulic disc brakes on electric bikes: The pros and cons of each
Electric bicycles are a popular means of transportation that combine the advantages of traditional bikes with the benefits of modern technology to provide a gentle (or sometimes powerful) boost to the rider. As e-bikes continue to gain traction and increase in popularity, one crucial element for new and experienced riders alike to consider is the braking system. It’s hard to imagine a more critical piece of safety equipment on a bicycle, and the need for reliable and efficient braking becomes even more important when dealing with the increased speeds and weights typical of e-bikes.
The two most common types of disc brakes on e-bikes are mechanical (also known as cable-actuated) and hydraulic. They both have a lever on the handlebars and a disc rotor on the wheel, but differ in the way they actually engage the brake pads on that disc rotor.
Both have their pros and cons, and the choice between them often boils down to personal preference, riding conditions, and budget. Let’s dive into the key differences between mechanical and hydraulic disc brakes so that we can shed some light on the debate and guide you in making an informed decision.
Mechanical disc brakes: basics and benefits
Mechanical disc brakes work on a simple principle: when you squeeze the brake lever, a cable tightens, forcing the brake pads onto the disc rotor attached to the wheel, slowing the bike down.
When it comes to disc brakes, this is as simple as it gets, which is why you’ll find mechanical disc brakes on most budget e-bikes. Until recently, it was common for e-bikes priced at below $1,500 or so to always feature mechanical disc brakes, but that is starting to change as prices continue coming down. Just recently, Lectric eBikes grabbed headlines by reintroducing the Lectric XP 3.0 with hydraulic disc brakes while keeping the price at the same $999.
Affordability
Because of their simplicity, one of the main advantages of mechanical disc brakes is their cost. They are generally cheaper to purchase and maintain compared to their hydraulic counterparts.
This can be a significant deciding factor for riders on a budget or those who don’t require the additional features that come with hydraulic systems.
Many people think that because mechanical disc brakes are cheaper, that means they aren’t as good. And while it’s true that hydraulic disc brakes have several advantages (and result in their higher cost), mechanical disc brakes can still be highly functional and effective.
Simplicity and maintenance
Mechanical brakes are relatively simple to service. Adjustments and repairs can often be performed without specialized tools, and the system is generally more forgiving to DIY enthusiasts. Most mechanical disc brakes can be serviced with a single tool: a 5mm hex wrench (though some may require a 4mm or 6mm, depending on the model or task).
If you’re a long-distance or touring rider – or you just don’t keep a pile of specialized bicycle tools in your garage – being able to fix your brakes with commonly available tools can be a big advantage.
However, maintenance is a double-edged sword when it comes to mechanical disc brakes. They are easier to maintain (no hydraulic lines to bleed, for example), but they require much more frequent maintenance. Sporadic riders might only have to fiddle with their brakes every few months, but daily commuters could end up adjusting their mechanical brakes several times a month as the cables regularly stretch from normal usage.
Modulation
While mechanical brakes might not offer the same level of modulation (the ability to vary the braking force) as hydraulic brakes, they still provide ample control for most casual and commuter riders.
If you’re not a technical rider and don’t regularly ride on mountain bike trails or in races, then you probably won’t mind the reduced modulation of mechanical disc brakes. But when it comes to more advanced riding, especially mountain biking, the increased modulation available in hydraulic brakes is an important feature.
Hydraulic disc brakes: A step up
Hydraulic disc brakes are more complicated than mechanical disc brakes because they use a sealed system filled with hydraulic fluid (also called brake fluid). When the brake lever is squeezed, it pushes the fluid through the system, forcing the brake pads onto the disc rotor.
It’s been common in cars for a century, but hydraulic brakes have only started becoming popular in electric bikes in the last 5-7 years. Before that, they were largely seen as a luxury item on only the nicest bikes. Now, though, you’ll find them on budget models and nicer e-bikes alike (though the higher end models have significantly higher quality hydraulic brakes).
Power and precision
One of the biggest advantages of hydraulic disc brakes is the superior stopping power and precision. Hydraulic brakes require less force to engage, and they deliver this force more evenly to the rotor. This means that a light pull on a hydraulic brake lever can produce a strong braking response.
Many people use just one finger to pull the brake lever on their hydraulic disc brakes, leaving more fingers on the handlebars for better control.
The extra stopping power can also be useful on heavier e-bikes or electric cargo bikes, especially when carrying passengers.
Better modulation
Hydraulic disc brakes offer better modulation compared to mechanical brakes. This superior control allows riders to brake more effectively under different conditions, a feature particularly useful for mountain biking or riding on uneven terrain.
Again though, if you’re a recreational rider that doesn’t push too hard in technical terrain, you likely won’t have to worry too much about the nuance of brake modulation.
Low maintenance
Hydraulic disc brakes require less routine maintenance than mechanical ones because they self-adjust for pad wear. For casual riders, a yearly brake pad replacement might be enough, though more frequent riders may need to replace pads a few times a year.
For most riders, especially those that perform mostly commuter-style or recreational riding, you’ll never need to bleed your hydraulic disc brakes or replace the oil. However, electric mountain bikers may need to perform these steps more frequently, especially on the more sophisticated yet also maintenance-prone hydraulic disc brakes found on expensive electric mountain bikes.
So while maintenance is much less common on hydraulic brakes than mechanical brakes, when maintenance is required, it’s typically more complex and may require professional assistance from your local bike shop.
The verdict: Weighing the pros and cons
When it comes to choosing between mechanical and hydraulic disc brakes for your e-bike, it largely depends on your specific needs, riding style, and budget.
Hydraulic brakes offer superior performance in terms of power, precision, and modulation. They are a fantastic choice if you frequently ride in hilly areas, engage in off-road adventures, or just want the best performance and are willing to pay for it.
On the other hand, mechanical disc brakes still provide sufficient stopping power for most riders and conditions, especially those using e-bikes for commuting or leisurely rides. Their lower cost, simplicity, and ease of maintenance can make them a practical choice for many situations.
In conclusion, while hydraulic disc brakes generally outshine mechanical ones in performance and control, it’s important to remember that mechanical brakes have their own set of advantages that should not be overlooked. They may lack the raw power and fine-tuned modulation of hydraulic systems, but they are still capable, dependable, and more than sufficient for many riders and riding scenarios.
In the realm of e-bikes, where speeds can exceed that of traditional bicycles, safety is paramount, and the effectiveness of your brakes plays a crucial role. If you find yourself regularly riding in challenging conditions, such as steep descents or rough terrains, the added investment in hydraulic brakes can be well worth it for the enhanced stopping power and control.
That being said, if your rides typically involve flat, paved paths or moderate inclines, and your main considerations are affordability and ease of maintenance, then mechanical disc brakes should serve you well. While they may not offer the bells and whistles of hydraulic systems, they still provide reliable performance and safety, which is the essential role of any braking system.
Above all, whichever braking system you choose, it is vital to keep it well-maintained and regularly checked for safety. After all, even the best braking system can only perform as well as it is maintained.
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Electricity prices are rising quickly for U.S. households, even as overall inflation has cooled.
Electricity prices rose 4.5% in the past year, according to the consumer price index for May 2025 — nearly double the inflation rate for all goods and services.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated in May that retail electricity prices would outpace inflation through 2026. Prices have already risen faster than the broad inflation rate since 2022, it said.
“It’s a pretty simple story: It’s a story of supply and demand,” said David Hill, executive vice president of energy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former general counsel at the U.S. Energy Department.
There are many contributing factors, economists and energy experts said.
At a high level, the growth in electricity demand and deactivation of power-generating facilities are outstripping the pace at which new electricity generation is being added to the electric grid, Hill said.
Prices are regional
U.S. consumers spent an average of about $1,760 on electricity in 2023, according to the EIA, which cited federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Of course, cost can vary widely based on where consumers live and their electricity consumption. The average U.S. household paid about 17 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity in March 2025 — but ranged from a low of about 11 cents per kWh in North Dakota to about 41 cents per kWh in Hawaii, according to EIA data.
Households in certain geographies will see their electric bills rise faster than those in others, experts said.
Residential electricity prices in the Pacific, Middle Atlantic and New England regions — areas where consumers already pay much more per kilowatt-hour for electricity — could increase more than the national average, according to the EIA.
“Electricity prices are regionally determined, not globally determined like oil prices,” said Joe Seydl, a senior markets economist at J.P. Morgan Private Bank.
The EIA expects average retail electricity prices to increase 13% from 2022 through 2025.
That means the average household’s annual electricity bill could rise about $219 in 2025 relative to 2022, to about $1,902 from $1,683, according to a CNBC analysis of federal data. That assumes their usage is unchanged.
But prices for Pacific area households will rise 26% over that period, to more than 21 cents per kilowatt-hour, EIA estimates. Meanwhile, households in the West North Central region will see prices increase 8% in that period, to almost 11 cents per kWh.
However, certain electricity trends are happening nationwide, not just regionally, experts said.
Data centers are ‘energy hungry’
The QTS data center complex under development in Fayetteville, Georgia, on Oct. 17, 2024.
Elijah Nouvelage | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Electricity demand growth was “minimal” in recent decades due to increases in energy efficiency, according to Jennifer Curran, senior vice president of planning and operations at Midcontinent Independent System Operator, who testified at a House energy hearing in March. (MISO, a regional electric-grid operator, serves 45 million people across 15 states.)
Meanwhile, U.S. “electrification” swelled via use of electronic devices, smart-home products and electric vehicles, Curran said.
Now, demand is poised to surge in coming years, and data centers are a major contributor, experts said.
Data centers are vast warehouses of computer servers and other IT equipment that power cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other tech applications.
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Data center electricity use tripled to 176 Terawatt-hours in the decade through 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Use is projected to double or triple by 2028, the agency said.
Data centers are expected to consume up to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023, the Energy Department said.
They’re “energy hungry,” Curran said. Demand growth has been “unexpected” and largely due to support for artificial intelligence, she said.
The U.S. economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement and chemicals, according to the International Energy Agency.
Continued electrification among businesses and households is expected to raise electricity demand, too, experts said.
The U.S. has moved away from fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas to reduce planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions.
For example, more households may use electric vehicles rather than gasoline-powered cars or electric heat pumps versus a gas furnace — which are more efficient technologies but raise overall demand on the electric grid, experts said.
Population growth and cryptocurrency mining, another power-intensive activity, are also contributors, said BPC’s Hill.
‘All about infrastructure’
Thianchai Sitthikongsak | Moment | Getty Images
As electricity demand is rising, the U.S. is also having problems relative to transmission and distribution of power, said Seydl of J.P. Morgan.
Rising electricity prices are “all about infrastructure at this point,” he said. “The grid is aged.”
For example, transmission line growth is “stuck in a rut” and “way below” Energy Department targets for 2030 and 2035, Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, wrote in a March energy report.
Shortages of transformer equipment — which step voltages up and down across the U.S. grid — pose another obstacle, Cembalest wrote. Delivery times are about two to three years, up from about four to six weeks in 2019, he wrote.
“Half of all US transformers are near the end of their useful lives and will need replacing, along with replacements in areas affected by hurricanes, floods and wildfires,” Cembalest wrote.
Transformers and other transmission equipment have experienced the second highest inflation rate among all wholesale goods in the US since 2018, he wrote.
Meanwhile, certain facilities like old fossil-fuel powered plants have been decommissioned and new energy capacity to replace it has been relatively slow to come online, said BPC’s Hill. There has also been inflation in prices for equipment and labor, so it costs more to build facilities, he said.
In a high-tech move that we can all get behind and isn’t dystopian at all, the City of Barcelona is feeding camera data from its city buses into an advanced AI, but they swear they’re not using the footage to to issue tickets to bad drivers. Yet.
Barcelona and its Ring Roads Low Emission Zone have earned lots of fans by limiting ICE traffic in the city’s core. The city’s latest idea to promote mass transit is the deployment of an artificial intelligence system developed by Hayden AI for automatic enforcement of reserved lanes and stops to improve bus circulation – but while it seems to be working as intended, it’s raising entirely different questions.
“Bus lanes are designed to help deliver reliable, fast, and convenient public transport service. But private vehicles illegally using bus lanes make this impossible,” explains Laia Bonet, First Deputy Mayor, Area for Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing at the Ajuntament de Barcelona. “We are excited to partner with Hayden AI to learn where these problems occur and how they are impacting our public transport service.”
Currently operating as a pilot program on the city’s H12 and D20 bus lines, the system uses cameras installed on the city’s electric buses to detect vehicles that commit static violations in the bus lanes and stops (read: stopping or parking where you shouldn’t). The Hayden AI system then analyses that data and provides statistical information on what it captures while the bus is driving along on its daily route.
Hayden AI says that, while it photographs and records video sequences and collects contextual information of the violation, its cameras do not record license plates or people and no penalties are being issued to drivers or owners of the vehicles.
So far so good, right? But it’s what happens once the six mont pilot is over that seems like it should be setting off alarm bells.
Big Brother Bus is watching
The footage is manually reviewed by a Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) officer, who reportedly reviewed some 2,500 violations identified by AI in May alone. But, while the system isn’t being used to issue violations during the pilot program, it easily could.
And, in fact, it already has … and the AI f@#ked up royally.
AI writes thousands of bad tickets
When AI was given the ability to issue citations in New York City earlier this year, it wrote more than 290,000 tickets (that’s right: two-hundred and ninety thousand) in just three months, generating nearly $21 million in revenue for the city. The was just one problem: thousands of those drivers weren’t doing anything wrong.
What’s more, the photos generated by the AI powered cameras were supposed to be approved only after being verified by a human, but either that didn’t happen, or it did happen and the human operator in question wasn’t paying attention, or (maybe the worst possibility) the violations were mistakes or hallucinations, and the human checker couldn’t tell the difference.
In OpenAI’s tests of its newest o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, the company found the o3 model hallucinated 33% of the time during its PersonQA tests, in which the bot is asked questions about public figures. When asked short fact-based questions in the company’s SimpleQA tests, OpenAI said o3 hallucinated 51% of the time. The o4-mini model fared even worse: It hallucinated 41% of the time during the PersonQA test and 79% of the time in the SimpleQA test, though OpenAI said its worse performance was expected as it is a smaller model designed to be faster. OpenAI’s latest update to ChatGPT, GPT-4.5, hallucinates less than its o3 and o4-mini models. The company said when GPT-4.5 was released in February the model has a hallucination rate of 37.1% for its SimpleQA test.
I don’t know about you guys, but if we had a local traffic cop that got it wrong 33% of the time (at best), I’d be surprised if they kept their job for very long. But AI? AI has a multibillion dollar hype train and armies of undereducated believers talking about singularities and building themselves blonde robots with boobs. And once the AI starts issuing tickets to the AI that’s driving your robotaxi, it can just call its buddy AI the bank to send over your money. No human necessary, at any point, and the economy keeps on humming.
But, like – I’m sure that’s fine. Embrace the future and all that … right?
SOURCES: Hayden AI, via Forbes, Motorpasión.
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A new report from global energy think tank Ember says batteries have officially hit the price point that lets solar power deliver affordable electricity almost every hour of the year in the sunniest parts of the world.
The study looked at hourly solar data from 12 cities and found that in sun-soaked places like Las Vegas, you could pair 6 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels with 17 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of batteries and get a steady 1 GW of power nearly 24/7. The cost? Just $104 per megawatt-hour (MWh) based on average global prices for solar and batteries in 2024. That’s a 22% drop in a year and cheaper than new coal ($118/MWh) and nuclear ($182/MWh) in many regions.
Ember calls it “24/365 solar generation,” and it’s not just a theoretical model. Cities like Muscat, Oman, and Las Vegas can hit that steady power mark for up to 99% of the hours in a year. Hyderabad, Madrid, and Buenos Aires can reach 80–95% of the way there using that same solar-plus-storage setup with some cloud cover. And even cloudier cities like Birmingham in the UK can cover about 62% of hours annually.
“This is a turning point in the clean energy transition,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global electricity analyst at Ember. “Around-the-clock solar is no longer a distant dream; it’s an economic reality of the world. It unlocks game-changing opportunities for energy-hungry industries like data centres and manufacturing.”
This is an enormous opportunity for sunny regions in Africa and Latin America. Manufacturers and data centers could also tap into solar-plus-storage and skip long waits (and big bills) for new grid connections.
It’s not a silver bullet for grid-wide reliability, but it lets solar carry much more of the load, especially where sunshine is abundant. Batteries also help avoid costly grid expansions by allowing up to five times more solar to plug into existing connections.
In 2024 alone, global battery prices dropped 40%, which helped drive down solar-plus-storage costs by 22%. Record-low tenders from countries like Saudi Arabia point to even cheaper options coming soon.
Real-world projects are already online: The UAE built the world’s first gigawatt-scale 24-hour solar facility. Arizona is already home to solar-powered data centers. And as battery tech keeps improving, round-the-clock solar could become the backbone of clean energy systems in the world’s sunniest places.
Read more: This solar canopy cools wastewater and powers a city utility
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