Review: Ride1Up Cafe Cruiser

If someone tells me that they’re scared of electric bikes, but have ridden bikes before, I assume that the type of bike they’ve tried looks something like Ride1Up’s Cafe Cruiser. Every direct-to-consumer electric bike company has a model with similar components, frame style, and price point that is positioned as an affordable, entry-level bike.

I'm always surprised that this is considered an entry-level electric bike. A laidback beach cruiser with a plush seat and big fat wheels makes sense on paper, but in practice, it weighs 65 pounds and has an electric motor bolted onto it! That once light, comfy ride is now big and heavy. With a less sophisticated computer, calibrating the right level of assistance is difficult. There’s no way to brace yourself properly. Jolting yourself around on what is basically an e-motorcycle is a little scary. 

That said, Ride1Up’s version isn’t bad, for the type. It has a powerful 750W rear hub motor that will get you up steep hills, integrated lights and kickstand, a rear rack with a 150-pound cargo capacity, and a battery that seemingly lasts forever. But—and this is hard to write—especially in light of the death of Molly Steinsapir on a similar RadRunner 2, this is not the bike that I would recommend for a new bike rider, or a smaller one.

Photograph: Ride1Up

The Cafe Cruiser is a biggish bike, with an alloy frame that hides the electronics internally. It comes in two separate styles, a step-through and a step-over—I’m on the step-through, which is still juuuuust a bit too tall for me at 5’2” (Ride1Up notes that the minimum height for a rider is 5’, but I do have short legs). Both versions weigh 65 pounds and have curved cruiser handlebars that allow you to sit upright, with your elbows relaxed and your butt firmly planted on a giant, squishy seat.

For such an affordable bike, it’s pretty powerful. It has a 750W rear hub motor with five levels of assistance. It’s a Class 3 bike, which means that it can travel up to 28 miles per hour. I got it up over 20 mph pretty easily by pedaling, but it also has a left-side thumb throttle that can provide up to 20 mph assist. (This will really give you quite the jolt if you’re wheeling it somewhere and accidentally tag the throttle.)

To counter this, the Cafe Cruiser also has hydraulic disc brakes with an electric cut-off sensor, meaning that if you press the brake lever, it cuts off power from the motor. The battery is a 48V battery with Samsung cells that has a stated range of 30 to 50 miles, depending on the rider weight and terrain. I weigh about 115 pounds and rode it for two weeks on 1 to 2 mile journeys around my neighborhood, and barely saw the battery level go down at all.

The Cafe Cruiser has eight gears with a simple Shimano shifting system on a chain. The computer uses a cadence sensor rather than a torque sensor to trigger the motor—that is, when the computer senses that you’ve started pedaling, it triggers assistance. The faster you pedal, the less assistance it puts out. It’s more of an on-and-off switch than a torque sensor, which outputs more power the harder that you’re pedaling.

It does have essential commuter features, which I used to consider extras, but now become downright offended if they’re not part of the package: Fenders, a kickstand, a rear rack with optional accessories, and integrated lights are all standard. At 50 lumens, the lights are more for others to see you than for you to see anything in particular—I barely even noticed when the front headlight was on. (For a basic city commuter, you probably want a light that's between 100 to 200 lumens). 

The LCD display is big and bright and shows you the necessary information—speed, level of assistance, and power output—and the buttons are easy to press, even with gloves on. The accessories, like the passenger kit, are also comfortable and secure.

Photograph: Ride1Up

When I tried the Aventon Level ($1,499) several years ago, I wondered why anyone would need front wheel suspension and enormous fat tires on an easygoing cruiser. However, that was before I tried to test the upper speed limits on a cruiser that can go almost 30 miles per hour. 

It’s crazy! Imagine having the speed and power of LeBron James but the coordination of a kindergartener. You would run, start to wobble, and crash into something. If you hit a pothole with these curved handlebars at 25 mph without big tires and suspension, you’re dunzo. Even Vespas have straight handlebars. 

The Shimano shifting system is very familiar to anyone who has ridden a geared bike in the past 15 years. It clicks pretty smoothly to and fro. However, my daily bike has a Bosch motor with an integrated Enviolo hub that I can gear pretty precisely. On the Cafe Cruiser, trying to calibrate the correct gearing with the right level of motor assistance felt much less intuitive (the Cafe Cruiser's Bafang motor is also louder). I ended up just using the throttle most of the time. 

That's fine! 20 miles per hour is plenty fast enough for running errands around my neighborhood, where pretty much everything I need is within a mile of my house. The display showed that when using the throttle, my power output exceeds what it would be if I were pedaling. It's a much less efficient form of travel if I had a lot farther to go. But as I said earlier, I rode for more than a week without making a noticeable dent in the battery, and that included going up some pretty steep 15 percent grade hills by my house. The Cafe Cruiser always made it all the way to the top, even if the speed dropped to 7 mph on the way there.

It’s worth noting here that if you’re a much bigger person, this bike will feel a lot different. Physics, and a bit of personal taste, is at work here. Plopping yourself down and gunning a powerful 65-pound bike with a throttle feels a lot different when you weigh 165 pounds instead of 115 pounds, or if you have some experience with dirt bikes instead of just pedaling your $150 Craigslist Marin to the coffee shop. My own 5'11", 165-pound husband, among others, prefers big bikes with a throttle like this one.

So I can appreciate the Cafe Cruiser’s many convenient features. However, given that there are so many lighter and more natural-feeling bikes dropping to comparable price points, I would not recommend this type of bike to someone smaller or lighter, and I would also not let my child ride it, especially if they were under 5’5” or 120 pounds.