Customers for this motor include Currie Technologies and EV Global Motors. Unique Mobility of the USA has an outboard motor, reminiscent of the Currie system that is described in the new edition of Frank Jamerson's book Electric Bicycles World Wide. G. of Germany, the world's leaders in objective testing of electric bikes and components. Heinzmann, the most consistently successful hub motor maker so far, has a new 36 Volt hub motor with a digital controller. Its attention grabbing power and performance are impressive.
All products have a life cycle.
And many people say it takes 5 years or more from the time that a new product is introduced to the time it becomes popular with the masses. The almost forgotten Newton was the predecessor of the Palm Pilot ancestor of today's hot selling Palm computers. The first commercial electric bike to be sold in large quantities was the Yamaha PAS, introduced in Japan in 1994. If we use that as a start date, we are in year 6. But the author of this column believes that the first acceptable electric bikes were offered to the USA in 1999.