Connect with us

Published

on

In what is likely to the biggest shock unveiling in the e-bike industry so far this year, leading electric bike maker Lectric Ebikes has just rolled out the new Lectric ONE. Positioned as a premium commuter e-bike in the budget space, the new model marks equally new territory for the low-cost e-bike company turned premium space competitor.

To understand how industry-shaking this e-bike launch is, you have to understand the company behind it. Lectric Ebikes’ entire MO has been to find highly-demanded niches in the US e-bike market and then roll out new models at a fraction of the cost of competitors. That’s how we got crowd favorites like the $799 Lectric XP Lite and the $999 Lectric XP 3.0, known as the best-selling e-bike in the country.

Now the company is doing it again, but targeting a much… much fancier type of e-bike segment. That means that the traditional budget-level derailleurs and chains are now being replaced by top-tier European transmissions and carbon fiber-reinforced drive belts.

lectric one e-bike
That dual kickstand appears to have not made it onto the final version

Look no further than the Lectric ONE’s auto-shifting electric gearbox from Pinion, a German manufacturer whose same gearboxes routinely land on $10,000+ e-bikes such as those from Swiss manufacturer Stromer. Pinion’s highly acclaimed bike gearboxes are modeled after automotive transmissions and are widely seen as the holy grail of bicycle transmissions.

But Lectric didn’t just opt for a fancy gearbox, they chose the even higher-end version of Pinion’s 6-speed lineup with automatic electric shifting. That feature allows complete customization of the shifting parameters, letting riders dial in their performance marks such as ideal cadence, shift points, preferred gear to downshift into at stops automatically, and more, all from the bike’s dashboard display.

The weather-sealed gearbox is maintenance-free, just like the industry-leading Gates Carbon Belt drive found on the bike. As a replacement for bicycle chains, Gates’ carbon fiber-reinforced belts are quieter, smoother, longer-lasting, and more efficient than chains over their entire lifespan. And to top it all off, they don’t require maintenance such as oiling or washing.

And similarly to the move with Pinion’s gearbox, Lectric again climbed up to nearly the top shelf of the component hierarchy, opting for Gate’s premium CDC belt and CDX sprocket.

The inclusion of largely maintenance-free hydraulic disc brakes on 180 mm rotors adds one more component to the list of parts that riders won’t have to worry about keeping in tune.

And despite the 55-lb (25 kg) Lectric ONE‘s positioning as a lightweight commuter e-bike, it still packs in the extra power we’ve come to know and love from Lectric. A true 750W-rated Stealth M24 motor can be found in the rear wheel, offering speeds of up to 28 mph (45 km/h). The company explained, “As the lightest e-bike with a 750-watt motor, the Lectric ONE boasts the highest power-to-weight ratio of any e-bike ever, offering lightning-fast starts and quick acceleration.”

Two 48V battery options are available, either 10.4Ah or 14Ah. The 500Wh and 672Wh batteries offer maximum ranges of 50 miles and 75 miles, respectively. Both are UL-compliant for added safety and peace of mind.

The Lectric ONE includes a new color LCD display, a 24-amp potted motor controller helping that 750W motor put out over 1,300W of peak power, a left-side thumb throttle, a side-sweeping kickstand, 20″x2.5″ city tires, a thru-axle front hub, integrated front and rear LED lighting, a telescoping seat post and handlebars for wider range of size adjustments, and hidden cable routing.

The one area that struck me as an odd choice was the inclusion of a cadence sensor over a torque sensor. Generally, torque sensors are incorporated on nicer bikes like these to reduce sensor lag, which is often associated with cadence sensors. But Lectric Ebikes’ Co-founder and CEO Levi Conlow reassured me, explaining how “while most cadence sensors have 12 magnets, our has 96 of them, so we’ve got 8x the resolution and much snappier feedback.”

Lectric’s signature PWR pedal assist is also included, offering current-based pedal assist levels instead of speed based. While it’s not the same as a true torque sensor, it does significantly bridge the gap by removing the lurching feeling often found in speed-based pedal-assist e-bikes. And with 8x the number of cadence sensor magnets, the pedal assist lag should be significantly reduced as well.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of all on the Lectric ONE isn’t a component, but rather the price. The bike is launching at $1,999 with a standard range battery, though a longer range battery is available as a $200 upgrade. To put that into perspective, it would be difficult to walk into a bike shop today and order that Pinion automatic shifting gearbox for less than $1,999, let alone receive an entire well-designed bike for that price.

Pre-orders for the new e-bike are now open, with shipping expected to begin in May. Color choices are limited to black or… well, just black. Fortunately, the company has a wide range of accessories to choose from, helping riders make the bike unique and customized to various types of riding. Just don’t worry about a rear rack or fender set, those are included free for anyone who puts down a pre-order now.

lectric one e-bike

Electrek’s Take

This is kind of crazy, folks.

At this point, it seems like Lectric is just playing God with the entire e-bike market. I’m not exaggerating when I say this gearbox is extremely expensive. You literally couldn’t buy just gearbox for the price of this bike. It’s only through Lectric’s massive size and extreme purchasing power that they could even put it on a bike in this price class. The next cheapest e-bike I can find that has this same Pinion C1.6i auto-shifting gearbox is the Stromer ST7, which is a $13,000 electric bike.

Why they even went this direction, that’s a whole other question. Belt drive e-bikes can’t use a derailleur like a chain drive can, so if you don’t want to be stuck with a single speed on a belt drive, you need to either use an internally geared rear hub, which forces you to use a mid-drive motor (the standard solution) or use a gearbox at the pedals. And if you want to include a throttle, then your mid-drive options are limited and problematic (mid-drive motors with throttles love to chew up transmissions), giving more weight to the idea of replacing a mid-drive motor with a central gearbox. I never thought I’d actually see Lectric do it though, as it’s truly several classes above anything the company has produced before.

When trying to think about which bikes the Lectric ONE will compete against, I’m largely coming up empty. Instead, I think it’s creating a new class of bikes – premium value commuters. It sounds like an oxymoron, a premium-value bike. But that’s what they’ve built here. It almost fills the void left by bikes like the VanMoof A5, creating a fairly lightweight and small-wheeled, automatic shifting commuter e-bike with a sleek design. Except that it does so at half the price, and without the same level of in-house proprietary technology that doomed VanMoof into bankruptcy.

I feel like I’m still processing all that went into this bike, and the craziness of launching it at this price. Sure, it’s not for everyone. If you want fat tires or suspension, they’ve got a great $999 e-bike for you. But for folks who want a lighter, more efficient commuter e-bike, and suddenly want an insanely fancy automatic shifting gearbox paired with a Gates carbon belt drive, this is a weirdly affordable way to make it happen at just $1,999.

It’s a brave new world.

lectric one e-bike

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Continue Reading

Environment

Honda’s super low-cost electric motorcycle revealed in new patent images

Published

on

By

Honda's super low-cost electric motorcycle revealed in new patent images

Honda’s patent filings offer a clear glimpse into the company’s plans for an ultra-affordable electric motorcycle, integrating a proven chassis with a simple electric powertrain. It’s a clear glimpse into how the world’s most prolific motorcycle maker plans to challenge the nascent electric motorcycle market.

The filings in Honda’s new patent show a bike built around the familiar platform of the Honda Shine 100, a best-selling commuter in India, reimagined in electric form for a cost-effective future of urban mobility.

According to Cycle World’s Ben Purvis, Honda’s patent sketches outline a design that repurposes the Shine’s sturdy frame and chassis mounting points to house an electric motor and compact battery setup. Positioned where the engine once sat, a mid-motor drives the rear wheel via a single-speed reduction gear and chain – mirroring the essentials of the original gasoline-powered commuter bike.

Instead of a traditional fuel tank, the design features two lithium-ion battery packs, angled forward on either side of the spine frame and fitting neatly into the existing geometry.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

What makes the bike revealed in this patent even more interesting isn’t just its clever packaging, but rather the platform. By leveraging the proven Shine chassis, Honda can significantly cut development costs, manufacturing complexity, and market price. That’s a big statement given that surviving in price-sensitive markets like India demands simplicity and reliability. And by piggybacking off a proven platform, Honda can dramatically reduce the time to market from the time the boardroom bigwigs give the project the final green light.

Honda’s patent images show an electric motorcycle built on the same platform as the Honda Shine 100

The design still seems to feature styling that would be fairly consistent with the Shine 100, even down to a gas cap-like circular protrusion likely on top of a faux-tank. Some electric motorcycles in the past have used this location to hide a charging port, keeping similar form and function to outdated fuel tanks and fill ports, though it’s not clear if that is Honda’s intention.

It’s not clear what power level Honda could be targeting, but the Shine bike from which Honda’s creation draws its design inspiration could provide some clues. The Honda Shine 100 features a 99cc engine that provides around 7.3 horsepower (around 5.5 kW) and has a top speed of 85 km/h (53 mph), solidly planting it in the commuter segment of motorcycles.

The electric motorcycle in Honda’s design would be unlikely to target much higher performance as it would drastically increase the required battery capacity, and thus similar speeds of around 80-85 km/h (50-53 mph) would seem likely.

There also appears to be no active cooling, which would also limit the amount of power that Honda would be likely to draw continuously. The patent describes a channel formed by the two battery packs, leading to the speed controller and creating ducted cooling that pulls heat out of the batteries and electronics without drawing extra power.

Honda hasn’t released a final design, but I ask AI to create one based on the patent images. I’d ride that!

This emerging design is just one piece of Honda’s broader electric two-wheeler strategy. Their entry-level EM1 e: and Activa e: scooters launched with mobile battery packs and budget-friendly pricing. Meanwhile, high-tech concepts continually push the envelope. But this Shine-based bike aims squarely at the heart of mainstream affordability – a move likely to resonate with millions of new electric riders in developing regions like India where traditionally-styled small-dsiplacement motorcycles reign supreme.

Honda hasn’t revealed a timeline or pricing yet, but Honda’s patents offer real hope to fans of the brand’s electric efforts. If scaled effectively, this could be the first truly mass-market electric motorcycle from a major OEM, with a sticker price likely far below the $5,000 mark usually seen as a floor for commuter electric motorcycles from major manufacturers. That would also dramatically undercut models from brands like Zero or Harley-Davidson’s LiveWire, even as those brands rush to bring their own lower-cost models to market.

Electrek’s Take

Honda’s patent reveals a clever, no-frills EV designed to democratize electric two-wheeling, especially in developing markets that are even more price-sensitive than Western electric motorcycle customers.

Using a trusted frame, simple electric drive, and passive cooling, I’d say it definitely prioritizes cost over complexity, which is exactly what urban commuters need. If Honda can bring this to market, it would not just add another electric bike to the mix… it could create a new baseline for affordability in affordable electric mobility. Now we’re just waiting for the rubber to hit the road!

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Continue Reading

Environment

Musk will ask Tesla shareholders to vote on bailout for twitter/xAI

Published

on

By

Musk will ask Tesla shareholders to vote on bailout for twitter/xAI

Tesla shareholders will vote on whether to invest into xAI, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s private company, according to a post by Musk on twitter today.

Elon Musk is not just the CEO of Tesla, the electric car company that you may have heard about from time to time in Electrek’s coverage, but several other companies as well. And, famously, Musk companies often share resources – there has been much talk of incorporating SpaceX technology into Tesla vehicles, and putting xAI/twitter’s “MechaHitler”…. er, I mean, “Grok”…. feature into Tesla cars, among other collaborations that have happened over his various companies’ histories.

And today, Musk made it official that he will seek greater collaboration between three of his companies: Tesla, xAI, and twitter, in the form of an investment into xAI by Tesla.

The situation is a little more complicated than that, though.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

Tesla is a public company, owned by shareholders. Musk is the largest shareholder, but only owns around 12% of the company himself.

This is a different situation than xAI, which is a private company, owned by Musk. While there are other investors, he can exercise much more direct control over the company, and doesn’t have to put big decisions up to a vote.

One of the recent decisions he made with xAI was to purchase twitter in March. You may say, “wait, I thought he bought twitter back in 2022?,” and you’d be correct. Musk purchased twitter for $44 billion in 2022, which was widely agreed to be far too high a price, and then rapidly saw the company’s valuation drop to under $10 billion.

Then, in March 2025, Musk had xAI purchase twitter in an all-stock deal, valuing twitter company at $45 billion – again, far too high of a valuation, but considering he purchased the company from himself, he could set the price at whatever he wanted.

The move was widely considered to be a bailout of twitter, and the numbers involved considered arbitrary, perhaps partially to help save face for Musk after he made one of the worst business deals of all time.

Now the two are the same entity, and it seems clear that he would like to bring Tesla into the fold, in some way or another.

Musk has already improperly used resources from Tesla, a public company, to boost xAI and twitter, his private companies. Last year, he gave up Tesla’s priority position for highly sought-after NVIDIA H100 GPUs, instead shipping those GPUs to xAI and twitter. Tesla could have used these GPUs for training its FSD/Robotaxi systems, which Musk has claimed is the most important thing to Tesla’s future, but instead graciously sent them to his other company that used them to, uh, train a bot to say Nazi stuff apparently.

xAI has also poached talent from Tesla, multiple times, showing how Musk is using Tesla as a farm team for his private company.

So it hasn’t been a secret that Musk would like to use public money to bail out his private companies, as he’s been setting the stage for for a while now.

Musk has previously “discussed” getting Tesla to invest in xAI in the past, but the idea was never made official until today, when Musk said that he will put the idea to a shareholder vote.

In response to one of his superfans asking for the the opportunity to waste money on an overvalued social media app (which would mark the third time it has been overpaid for in as many years), and the backend fueling “MechaHitler,” Musk said this:

Tesla traditionally holds its annual shareholder meeting around the middle of the year, so if it were a normal year, this shareholder vote might be imminent.

But it’s not a normal year, as just last week Tesla announced an exceptionally late shareholder meeting, pushing it back to November, the latest it has ever held the meeting.

This means that Musk will have around four months to campaign for this idea – something that he’ll perhaps have more time to do, now that he’s no longer cosplaying as a government official.

We don’t know what the structure of the deal might look like yet, but Musk has been clear in the past that he wants more shares in Tesla. After selling many of his shares in order to buy twitter, he later complained that he doesn’t feel comfortable having less than 25% of Tesla. Given that his recent xAI/twitter deal was an all-stock deal, Musk could attempt to fund any investment of Tesla into xAI via shares, giving himself more Tesla shares in exchange for the company gaining a portion of xAI. Though to get him to 25% voting shares in Tesla, that would require either an enormous valuation for xAI, a small valuation for Tesla, or purchasing a large percentage of xAI (or, perhaps, all three, given how much higher TSLA’s valuation is than xAI’s).

We may however have a hint as to how that vote will go, because the last time Musk campaigned for a clearly terrible idea, Tesla shareholders ate it up.

In mid-2024, Musk ended his yearslong absenteeism at Tesla in a flurry of activity, hoping to persuade enough shareholders to vote for his illegal $55B pay package.

That flurry involved firing 10% of the company (supposedly in order to save money – though Tesla’s earnings have dropped drastically since), including important leadership and successful teams, which caused chaos with Tesla’s projects. He also pushed back an all-important affordable car project (which we’ve still heard nothing about) and held Tesla’s AI projects hostage while shifting both resources and staff from Tesla to his private AI company, even as he claims that AI is the future of Tesla.

In the end, these bad decisions worked, and shareholders voted to give their bad CEO his $55B pay package, even though it was later ruled to still be illegal.

So it looks like we’ve got another campaign coming up, and if last time was any indication, expect some really bad decisions along the way. It worked last time, didn’t it?


Republicans recently killed a number of home energy efficiency credits, including the rooftop solar credit. That means you only have until the end of this year to upgrade your home before republicans raise the cost of doing so by an average of ~$10,000. So if you want to go solar, get started TODAY, because these things take time and the system needs to be active before you file for the credit.

To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.

Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here. – ad*

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Continue Reading

Environment

E-quipment highlight: Perkins TracStar battery electric power unit

Published

on

By

E-quipment highlight: Perkins TracStar battery electric power unit

The off-highway equipment experts at Perkins and McElroy have teamed up to develop a plug-and-play battery electric power unit designed to help equipment OEMs and upfitters to seamlessly transition from diesel to battery electric power.

Designed to occupy the same space as the companies’ diesel-engined power units, Perkins dropped its new battery power unit into the similarly new McElroy TracStar 900i pipe fusion machine (specialized equipment used to join thermoplastic pipes like HDPE or polypropylene by heat-welding them end-to-end to form a continuous length pf pipe).

Perkins’ battery electric power unit replaces the company’s proprietary 134 hp, 3.6 liter 904 Series Tier V diesel engine, enabling units that are already deployed to be quickly upgraded to electric power – and helping trade allies and development partners to easily retrofit existing equipment in order to add zero-emission options to their operational fleet.

“We’re actively helping customers navigate the shift in power system requirements, with a range of advanced power systems including electric, diesel-electric and alternative fuel compatible engines,” says Jaz Gill, vice president, global sales, marketing at Perkins. “When it comes to the innovative fully integrated battery electric power unit, it can be ‘dropped in’ to a machine to replace a diesel engine. The system consists of a Perkins battery along with inverters, motors and on-board chargers – all packaged up into a compact drop-in system to support seamless transition from diesel to electric for our customers looking to make that move.”

Advertisement – scroll for more content

McElroy believes that an electric, emissions-free power unit like this one will open new opportunities and applications for its customers.

“Their team has done a phenomenal job of integrating their battery electric system into our TracStar 900i,” explains McElroy President and CEO Chip McElroy. “We’re really excited to see what the market thinks about this concept.”

Development of the battery electric powered pipe fusion machine was completed in about nine months. Future Perkins-powered electric equipment running the 904 diesel (small excavators, telehandlers, pumps, and gensets) could be developed even more quickly. You can find out more in the company’s promo video, below.

Perkins electric power unit


SOURCE | IMAGES: McElroy, Perkins.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Continue Reading

Trending