Nearly a year ago, I emailed Wave Electric Bikes about their Wave Beach
Cruiser, which claimed to be the world's most affordable ebike ever at 599 USD
for early backers available through Indiegogo. It seemed too good to be
true, and it was. The Wave 1.0 was a
terrible bike with a shady crowdfunding campaign, but more on that later. So,
they've sent us the follow-up, the Wave 2.0. Is it the improvement they need to
reearn consumer trust? Or is it just a slightly less terrible bike with a
slightly less terrible marketing strategy?
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description. The Wave 2.0 to is a non-crowdfunded bike that is currently
listed on Wave Electric Bikes website for $1,000. The box comes with a big red
warning stating that professional assembly is required if you don't opt
for the $95 charge in the checkout to have someone come and do it for you.
Though, the included instructions seemed pretty clear to me. So, I apparently
took my life into my own hands by putting it together myself. I guess I
won't be able to make any warranty claims. Now that it's assembled, let's
see what we've got. The Wave 2.0 features a 750 W brushless hub motor,
six speeds, and a reported 25 mph top
speed with 23 mi of range using the throttle only and 40 m with pedal
assist. These numbers are likely thanks to the 500Wh battery with Samsung cells
and the aluminum frame, both of which are big upgrades over the Wave 1.0's to
generic cells and steel frame. And my
real world numbers actually get reasonably close to those. I've got to
give them credit for that considering that Wave Electric Bikes obtained these
numbers with a 165-lb rider on perfectly
flat terrain with no stopping. But electrical components aside, as a bike,
the Wave 2.0 just feels kind of cheaply
made. The handlebars have a lot of play no matter how much you tighten
everything. It doesn't come with fenders or a quick release on the front wheel.
The pedals are plastic. The brakes squeak horribly when wet. The motor
shutters as it starts up. The luxury stitching on the handlebar grips is
already coming undone. The kickstand has already broken. My battery case arrived
with a crack in it. And the rack is useless to hold any pany bags because
the battery is completely in the way unless you raise it slightly with
washers like I did. That would have cost them what 25. Furthermore, there's no
deceleration curve for the motor controller, so it abruptly cuts in and
out as you go below and above 20 mph.
The only way to avoid this is by switching the bike to off-road mode,
which instantly removes the speed limitation and allows the bike to put
out full power regardless of speed, making it very explicitly not street
legal in parts of the United States and Canada. Make of that what you will. Not
everyone is concerned that their vehicle isn't street legal. One thing I do like
about it is the fact that the front and rear lights are both powered by the main
battery and can be turned on and off with the press of a button. Though, I
wish they were significantly brighter. And the complaints don't end there. The
LED display has no odometer, watt meter,
speedometer, or estimated remaining range. It just has readouts for battery
and pedal assist levels. And if you want no pedal assist, you have to turn the
entire thing off for some reason. Also, it can be difficult to distinguish the
buttons or the LEDs from one another,
especially if you're wearing gloves. So, overall, the Wave 2.0 is just a
cheaplymade bike. I wouldn't pay $1,000
for it, and neither should you. So, what
happened here? Why is it so lame? Well,
ladies and gentlemen, I did promise to look into the history of Wave electric
bikes, and wow, did I dig up some dirt.
The Indiegogo campaign for the Wave 1.0 ebike ultimately raised 1.1 million, and
once they had the money, their promises began slipping away. Delivery dates were
pushed back multiple times. The Samsung
batteries were changed to generic cells.
The one-year warranty vanished. The promised top speed and total range were
decreased. When the bikes finally started shipping, customers received
parts that were damaged, incorrect, non-functional, or just missing. In all
fairness, some customers are happy with their purchase. But many are not, and
these folks are still posting angry comments on the Indiegogo page demanding
refunds and decrying the lack of communication from Wave Electric Bikes.
I spoke to my contact about all of this and he said that we definitely had some
issues, but we were able to resolve these issues and produce the wave 2.0
without any of these issues. Really, what brand of alternative facts are
these because more than one and a half years later, some of the original
backers have still not received their Wave 1.0 bicycles. And it gets a lot
worse. While the campaign was still active, someone posted this image
comparing the Wave 1.0 ebike to a seemingly identical bike from
Alibaba.com available for $400. But upon closer
examination, it's Yeah, it's exactly the
same bike. Turns out there's a company that's literally called OEM Bicycle that
sells these bikes in lots of 100. and they told me they've been doing so since
2014 before the Wave Indiegogo campaign even
launched. And they're currently doing the exact same thing with the Lady Wave,
or should I say the OEM EN15194.
That would be pretty disturbing since reselling a product is against
Indiegogo's terms of service. Digging deeper, I found this forum post which
points out similarities between Waves branding and music taken from Rad Power
Bikes. And I also discovered that Waves logo is almost identical to Wave
Broadband's logo. Is there anything they
didn't rip off? My contact at Wave Electric Bikes denies that any of these
things are ongoing problems and even says that it's the Alibaba vendors who
are copying Wave and not the other way around and that Wave 1.0 customers and
Wave 2.0 0 customers are completely
unrelated, whatever that means. Because I don't agree. It looks like the Wave
2.0 has the same frame design, brakes, LED display, battery case, motor, and
motor controller as the Wave 1.0. I
wouldn't be surprised if OEM bicycle or some other Chinese vendor is still
supplying Wave electric bikes with parts or even entire bicycles. But because the
Wave 2.0 is not crowdfunded, there's nothing inherently wrong with this. And
lots of Chinese products are marked up and resold for much higher margins than
what I believe Wave is taking. But none of that changes that the Wave 2.0 is a
cheap bike sold by a sketchy company with a track record of disappointing and
misleading its customers. They say they've moved on to a different business
model. But some of the Wave 1.0 to backers and all of the Lady Wave backers
have still not received their bikes despite the fact that you can currently
buy them straight from wavelectricbikes.com
which is making the backers very upset which leads us to a pretty clear
conclusion. There are some significant and unavoidable costs associated with
building a good ebike. So, you're probably not going to find one for less
than $1,000. If that's too expensive for you, my completely unbiased advice is to
just get yourself a regular bike from a wellestablished brand like Specialized
Giant or Trek. Or you could get a moped or even a fixerupper motorcycle if
you're mechanically inclined. Just don't buy anything from Wave Electric Bikes,
at least until they've made things right with their current outstanding Indiegogo
supporters. And always remember kids, if a crowdfunding campaign looks too good
to be true, it probably is.
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