Range

I've been using the bike for about 6 days of commuting and have seen some trends. Basically the claimed 80 km range is not even close. It may just manage 60 km based on trips back and forth over the same area. I mention same area as this would mean the hills should balance themselves out - every one I go up I'll ride down on the return journey. But the key thing to this is that when I did a second 28 km trip with no recharge the top speed dramatically goes down on both flat and hills. It's ability to go up hills becomes almost dangerous as I am puttering along at 10-15 km/h which just encourages drivers to do dangerous overtaking. I am now charging the battery every day and this ensures that it will hit the 48 km/h more easily. Having said that I do notice a decrease of the top speed by 3-5 km/h on my return journey and when you're barely mustering the speed limit it's not nice.

But on a plus side Bristol has a lot of 20 mph zones and so I don't feel out of place in them at all!

I want to talk about the areas at the front of traffic light junctions that have a bicycle symbol and are often marked in red (this is UK roads). During my CBT I was told that these were not for motorcycles, which makes sense as they display a bicycle, but it is surprising how many bikers just ignore this or don't know it. My rule for lane filtering so far is to go up and stop behind the first car rather than what most other bikers seem to do. Seems to work but of course I am still learning it and doing it with caution. We are having a bit of heat wave here with temperatures at over 30 C and so keeping moving is even more important.

I managed to buy bike trousers that are too short. Bit stupid but I didn't test them sitting down. I just went with normal standing as I would with normal trousers. But I also was struggling to find ones that had the knee padding even close to my knees. If I'd bought longer ones then that might have been even worse. But the upside is that my ankles get cooled!!! Might look into getting proper boots to solve this in the winter as I currently use some sturdy walking boots I already owned - a nice tip I got from a shop assistant.