EBIKE Battery had Full Bars, Then Suddenly Died! What Happened?!? Electric Bike Battery Explained

My e-bike display showed bars for the batteries, but then it died. What happened? Stick around to find out.

Hey everyone, I'm Dustin. I have nearly 20 years of experience in the bike and e-bike industry, and today we're going to talk about why my display shows that I have battery life but then my battery dies. Before we get into it though, hit subscribe below, stay in touch with us here at sixthreezero, and be the first to know about all the new content we're putting out, giveaways we do, and of course, new product releases. All right, so right here in front of me, I have three different e-bikes, e-trikes, and I've got three different displays. If you want to come in we'll show you quickly. And we get this comment a lot, right? You can see on the display here, that this one shows, this has four battery slivers. We've only got two left. This one up here has a lot of energy bars. That shows you the different life of the battery. And this one has, I believe this is five slices of battery. We're missing two right now. We have three left.

So, you're out riding and you had two slices left, or on this one, you had five, and all of a sudden it goes down to zero and the battery dies and turns off, right? Well, what happened? So these e-bikes and the displays and the algorithm that is dictating how it's displaying here in the energy in the battery is a very finicky thing that, honestly, can change at any given moment. Now, as an example, I was just in a Tesla driving, actually, from California to Las Vegas, and we started the drive out with 244 miles on the charge and we were going to a destination to stop to charge 170 miles away. Halfway through, the Tesla is now telling me that we wouldn't have enough charge to get there. So that was about 70, 60 miles short of where my expected range was going to get me.

Now, what caused that? Well, lots of different things, right? Tesla's algorithm is learning how you drive, and where you're driving, doing the best to calculate that into a display of how much battery life you have. But suddenly when I was driving, it was going down at basically a three-to-one ratio, right? Says I would have 244 miles but for every mile driving it was decreasing by three miles. What played into that? Well, one, I was driving through very hot conditions, very hard work. Two, a lot of inclines on the car. Three, in some situations I was passing people, accelerating, and also going above 75 miles an hour. Now, ultimately, I drained the battery a lot quicker than the estimation of the display of Tesla.

I bring this up for two reasons. One is to explain that this even happens on a Tesla, which is the most well-funded electric car company in the world with the best engineers in the world. They still can't produce an exact algorithm for how many miles you will get exactly based on your driving habits, right? It's just learning and producing that mileage estimation based on how it thinks the car will be driven. So e-bikes are very much the same type of thing, right? This display and these batteries that it's showing you up here, this is an estimation of what it thinks. Now, if you're out for a ride and all of a sudden you hit the throttle and you gas the throttle for four miles, these two batteries may disappear quickly like that, right? Because it thought you were going to ride the e-bike one way, now all of a sudden you're cranking the throttle at full speed. Boom, the battery dies.

So the other thing I will say is that the sophistication level and technology on an e-bike, doesn't matter what brand or what company you're buying from, it's not nearly at the level of an electric car. And so to have the expectation that this is going to be an exact science, it's just not going to be the case. So you may one minute have a bar, and then one minute it may die. Or you may have a bar and it may last you for five to 10 miles. Kind of true in a gas car as well. In a gas car, you may be on zero, but you can get 20 more miles. Again, all estimations. So the best thing you can do is to start to understand your riding habits and how much battery life you get out of your e-bike when you do a particular route or when you do hills.

As an example, when I tend to do large hills that are very intense but very short, I may drain two bars off of a battery, right? That's happened to me on numerous occasions because you're working that motor extra hard, the battery's got to output a lot of power, going to drain the battery much quicker. That's why also when you talk about range and advertised ranges of e-bikes, it's so hard to pinpoint exactly the range because we don't know the weight of the rider, we don't know the conditions you're riding in.

We also don't know how you're going to use pedal-assist or throttle or any combination of those two things. So to be able to say, "Oh, you're going to get 40 miles," it would just be a complete lie. And the range we give on a lot of our e-bikes where we say up to 50 miles could far be undershooting the reality of the range you could get. Depending on what level of pedal assist you use, and what level of throttle you use, you could get even way more than that. So it's something to consider. Now, not to say you should be out riding and have three bars on your battery and it goes to zero, but it could happen if you, like I said, all of a sudden were riding one way in a pedal assist one. Now boom, you're in five and you're sprinting.

The display was showing you the range it thought you would get under those conditions. Now you've sort of changed your riding habit, or if you did a lot of flat ground and now you're on hills, again, that battery could be completely different. I've seen this happen across all e-bikes. I've seen this happen across electric cars as well. Nine times out of 10, it's not a quality issue. Charge your battery up again, go for a ride, see if you get better range the next time, or measure the distance. So if you can track an app on your phone, or if you have some other way when you start a ride, start to test and see. And, again, we can give you what we believe it will be, but the real-world experience of how your bike performs to your body in the bike paths or the terrain that you ride in is going to give you the most accurate way of figuring it out.

So before you jump into a 60-mile ride expecting your e-bike to get you through the entire ride, maybe start with shorter rides. Start to gauge what kind of battery you have left, and how your e-bike responds, so you're not stranded somewhere thinking that the battery should have lasted you longer than it did. So I hope that helps explain the battery display on e-bikes. If you have any other questions at all, please comment below email us at theteam@sixthreezero.com, or call us at (310) 982-2877. In addition to that, visit our website, sixthreezero.com. All these e-bikes are linked there. We'll also link them in the description. If you don't know what e-bike you're looking for, take our proprietary body fit quiz, and answer a few questions about your body and your life. We'll recommend the perfect e-bike for you.

In addition to that one-year warranty on all e-bikes, take care of everything in the first year. Lastly, join our Facebook pedalers group. We have thousands of riders there. If you want to talk to other riders about their e-bike experience or ask them questions, see how long their battery lasts, go ahead and pop in there and leave a comment, post a question, and people will get back to you. It's a lot of fun. Then once you have your e-bike, you can post photos, and make new friends. A lot of fun. So thanks for sticking around and don't forget, it's your journey and experience, enjoy the ride.