Gear Ratio, Gear Range and Gear Steps on Electric Bikes and E-Bikes

Hey everyone. It's Peter Kaltreider at Sixthreezero bicycles. Today we're going to talk about Gear Ratio, Gear Range, and Gear Steps, stay tuned.

All right, so let's talk about Gear Ratios on E-Bike. I just want to say before I start this video, that this is for mostly E-Bike riders and Recreational riders. If you're a more serious road or mountain bike cyclist, you're going to have your own idea about what is the best gear ratio for yourself. In fact, you probably don't even think about it because you just know what gears to put on your bike for the type of riding that you do. I did almost a hundred races myself and never once thought about it. I just knew what gear I wanted and that's the gear I use. Sometimes I'd change out my front chainring, depending on if there was a steeper race or flatter one. But anyway, we get this question a lot. So let's go ahead and dive in and answer it.

So the first thing is, what is the gear ratio? It's super simple. The gear ratio is the relationship between the front chainring (there's the chainring) to any one of the rear gears, technically Sprockets. The terms Sprocket Gear and Cog are kind of used interchangeably in the bicycle world, even though they are not the same thing, we won't get into that, but we'll just go ahead and call it a gear, all right.

So on our E-Bikes, we have a 44 tooth chainring, so there's 44 teeth on the chainring here. And then here on the rear of the freewheel, we have seven gears ranging between 18 teeth and 28 teeth. So for instance, if we take the 44 teeth and divide it by the 14 teeth on the fastest or high-speed gear, we're actually going to get a ratio of 3.14. Okay, so that's all a Gear Ratio is.

Now, if you want to find the Range, we want to find how much distance we have between the easiest gear and the highest gear. And this is usually presented as a percentage. So really all we do is, we take the ratio of the smallest gear and divide it by the ratio of the large, sorry, it's the other way, you want to take the largest gear, the ratio of the largest gear, which is the fastest one, meaning the fastest one and divide it by the easiest gear, and then find that as a percentage. In this case, it's exactly two or 200%, because when I divide the 44 by 28, I get 1.57, which is exactly half of 3.14. So the range for these E-Bikes is 200%, meaning that the fast gear is twice as fast as the easy gear. You could put it in a different way and say, the easy gear is twice as easy as the fast gear.

On E-Bike it really doesn't matter that much. The range on these are pretty much what everyone's going to want. If you're a more technical rider, if you're riding an E Mountain Bike, you're going to have a totally different set of gears. Or if you have a road bike, you may also have different preferences, or you may not even have, you just may have a regular bike for that case. All right, so we've covered Gear Ratio and Rear Range. Now let's talk about Gear Steps.

So the steps are, how close are the gears stepping up from each other, how far away are they? And this can vary from bike to bike, and according to how many gears you have, especially in the back. Given that we have a 200% range and seven gears, it comes out to about between 25 to 28% step up. Really, this isn't something I can describe to you, what this feels like until you actually try it yourself. So you usually need to get on one and ride. We haven't really had any feedback about, negative feedback about the gear range. It seems to be like a really good one for just about everybody on E-Bike. But if you do need an easier gear, you can always make your chainring smaller, that's the easiest way to do it. You could get a different set, you could get a different freewheel back here, you can also do it that way. So the best thing to do would probably be to consult your local bike shop. I hope that clears up the gear ratio mystery.

All right. Thanks for watching. I really hope that was helpful. If you need any more help, please don't hesitate to contact us at 3-010-982-2877 or the team at sixthreezero.com, 6 3 0 is spelled out S I X, T H R E E, Z E R O. Also subscribe to our channel. And remember, it's your journey, your experience. Enjoy The Ride.