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Eurobike 2023 was my first chance to check out the recently unveiled second-generation FUELL Flluid electric bikes, the Flluid-2 and Flluid-3. I was able to see both models up close and personal, and take a test ride on the Flluid 3 to see how well that new Valeo gear box motor works.

First of all, a big thanks to FUELL for sponsoring Electrek’s Eurobike coverage and allowing me to get some extended saddle time with the bikes while also meeting with the team that brought the new models to life.

There at the show I was able to see firsthand just what went into the centerpiece of the new bikes: the Valeo Cyclee motor, complete with intelligent gearbox.

The motor is surprisingly powerful, claiming 750 to 1,000 peak watts (depending who you ask and where you are), but it’s the torque numbers that are the real takeaway here. With 130 Nm of torque, the Valeo Cyclee motor means serious business. Torque figures are often the better comparison when evaluating the strength of one electric bike motor compared to another, and 130 Nm puts Valeo near the top of the list when it comes to e-bike mid-drive motors.

Check out my experience testing out the bike!

Complementing that power is the nicely engineered gear box. It pairs with intelligent software that lets riders entirely forget about shifting. The motor analyzes the rider’s pedaling speed and strength, using it to automatically adjust the gear ratios to maintain a comfortable and efficient pedaling cadence. 

When you come to a stop, it downshifts for you. As you get rolling and pick up speed, it upshifts for you. The automatic shifting generally works great, though there was one aspect that I’d love to modify.

From my experience, I felt like it let me reach a bit higher pedal cadence than I would have preferred before shifting into the next higher gear, but the team explained to me that pedal cadence figures are modifiable.

And in fact, FUELL and Valeo remain working in close partnership to further dial in the motor and gearbox to the exact desires of the FUELL team.

And remember, I’m talking about just when using the predictive shifting mode. For those that think they’re smarter than the computer, you can put the bike into manual shifting mode with the press of a button and use the electronic shifting to select your own gears whenever you want, also with the press of a button. I tried both, but preferred to leave it in predictive mode to make use of the automatic shifting.

Sure, I can drive a stick. But automatic transmissions are much nicer when you’re in the city. And as I discovered, the same goes for e-bikes.

If you’re like me and often forget to downshift at a stop after spending a lot of time pedaling in high gear, you’ll enjoy the automatic downshifting of the gearbox just as much as the automatic upshifting. 

And if you’re a belt drive fan (also like me), then you’ll love that the design allows for the use of a Gates Carbon Drive belt setup, meaning you never have the hassle of a chain. Most belt drive e-bikes have to use a rear internally geared hub to allow for shifting with a belt drive, but FUELL’s partnership with Valeo means that you can have a simple single-speed rear hub, instead letting the motor and gearbox in the center of the bike do all the work. That puts more weight in the middle of the bike and also takes one more expensive component out of the more easily stealable rear wheel.

fuell flluid 3 electric bike

Whenever I test a new bike, I always try to hunt around for the negatives even in the sea of cool new features. And depending on your opinion, I may have found one in the sound of the motor. The sound level of the Cyclee motor/gearbox combo surprised me, as I’m used to much more quiet e-bikes. But a mechanical gearbox is a tricky thing to mute, unlike a simple electric motor with a serious lack of intermeshing, moving parts.

When you pedal or throttle up on the Flluid-2 or Flluid-3, you can hear the gearbox windup as you fly down the road, and the sound actually grew on me over my time testing the bike. Interestingly, you don’t really hear the automatic shifting, though you do feel it when your cadence is modified throughout the acceleration.

At first I wasn’t a fan of the sound of the motor winding up, but by the end of my test riding, it became a part of the experience. It adds to the sensation of accelerating, offering audible feedback instead of just the typical visual feedback of watching the world whizz by. If you’re a silent e-bike purist, you’re probably not going to like the extra sound. But if you enjoy more sensations with your riding, you’ll likely find it to be a positive. I’ll take an electromechanical sound over combustion engine exhaust any day, that’s for sure.

To hear it for yourself, check out my first ride video at the top of the article.

fuell flluid 3 electric bike

But this isn’t just about that new motor from Valeo. There’s a lot more to the Flluid-2 and Flluid-3 as well. Both of the new models use FUELL’s 1 kWh batteries, developed in-house by the team’s engineers. But the Flluid-2 actually features two of those batteries, offering 2 kWh of battery capacity.

If you’re using lower-power pedal assist, you might see nearly 200 miles (320 km) of range. If you’re cranking hard in high-power pedal assist, that range will drop to somewhere still north of 100 miles (160 km). If you’re riding on purely throttle (which is only available in North America), you’ll still get around 60 miles (100 km) of range per charge in a worst-case scenario.

That’s frankly quite amazing, as the worst-case scenario for range on most other e-bikes tends to drop into the 10-20 mile range. On the FUELL, the worst range you’ll get is comparable to the “perfect world” range on many other e-bikes.

The rest of the bike follows a similar tune to the battery specs: overbuilt. Solid rear rack, attractive fenders with tight tolerances, bright LED lighting, high-end hydraulic disc brakes, etc. Plus there are several other convenience upgrades, like a battery balancer that charges and discharges both batteries on the Flluid-2 simultaneously instead of one at a time.

As FUELL’s cofounder and CEO Francois-Xavier Terny explained to me, a big part of the choice for these types of components and the huge battery capacity came back to Erik Buell’s design focus. It’s apparent that these bikes were built by someone who comes from a more vehicle-oriented background. As a legendary motorcycle designer, Buell didn’t set out to build a Sunday cruise bike for recreational riding. You could use it that way, but the bike is overbuilt for that.

Frankly, it’s even overbuilt for commuters, but that too was part of the design. As a bike that is intended to be used for heavy duty car-replacement type of riding, where this must be a dependable daily rider, reliability was an overarching theme of the design.

That means components like belt drive and hydraulic disc brakes that simply keep working with very little maintenance. That means more battery capacity than most people need, giving riders confidence that they’ll never run dry (and also opening the possibility of infrequent charging). And that means having to design much of the bike in-house to get exactly what they wanted.

The result isn’t cheap, but it did achieve their goal: building a unique and highly reliable e-bike that is both rugged and comfortable at the same time. It’s pricey, starting at $5,495, and that’s going to cut out a large swath of the market that will be better served by more budget-friendly bikes. But for those that are seeking a car-replacement bike, the kind that you can depend on the way many people do for a daily driver car, the price makes sense. The bike is largely bulletproof and rated for more than most people will need. And that’s exactly why I can see it being so successful.

valeo cyclee e-bike motor gearbox

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I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

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I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.

Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!

I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!

Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.

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To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.

Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!

Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.

The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.

The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!

I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.

That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.

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OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

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OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

The OPEC logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying OPEC icons in Ankara, Turkey, on June 25, 2024.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Eight oil-producing nations of the OPEC+ alliance agreed on Saturday to increase their collective crude production by 548,000 barrels per day, as they continue to unwind a set of voluntary supply cuts.

This subset of the alliance — comprising heavyweight producers Russia and Saudi Arabia, alongside Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — met digitally earlier in the day. They had been expected to increase their output by a smaller 411,000 barrels per day.

In a statement, the OPEC Secretariat attributed the countries’ decision to raise August daily output by 548,000 barrels to “a steady global economic outlook and current healthy market fundamentals, as reflected in the low oil inventories.”

The eight producers have been implementing two sets of voluntary production cuts outside of the broader OPEC+ coalition’s formal policy.

One, totaling 1.66 million barrels per day, stays in effect until the end of next year.

Under the second strategy, the countries reduced their production by an additional 2.2 million barrels per day until the end of the first quarter.

They initially set out to boost their production by 137,000 barrels per day every month until September 2026, but only sustained that pace in April. The group then tripled the hike to 411,000 barrels per day in each of May, June, and July — and is further accelerating the pace of their increases in August.

Oil prices were briefly boosted in recent weeks by the seasonal summer spike in demand and the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which threatened both Tehran’s supplies and raised concerns over potential disruptions of supplies transported through the key Strait of Hormuz.

At the end of the Friday session, oil futures settled at $68.30 per barrel for the September-expiration Ice Brent contract and at $66.50 per barrel for front month-August Nymex U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude.

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Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

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Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Trump’s Big Beautiful bill becoming law and going after EVs and solar, Tesla, Ford, and GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

Today’s episode is brought to you by Bosch Mobility Aftermarket—A global leader and trusted provider of automotive aftermarket parts. To celebrate Amazon Prime Day July 8th through 11th, Bosch Mobility is offering exclusive savings on must-have auto parts and tools. Learn more here.

The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel.

As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.

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After the show ends at around 5 p.m. ET, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:

We now have a Patreon if you want to help us avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.

Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the podcast:

Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at 4:00 p.m. ET (or the video after 5 p.m. ET:

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