Recharge Rate

If you're planning on using your vehicle for long distance touring, recharge rate is critically important. For instance, if your bike has a range of 50 miles, but takes 6 hours to recharge, you're essentially done for the day after those first 50 miles. However, as your recharge rate increases, the distance you can cover for a given amount of charge time increases.

The reason we put more emphasis on recharge rate than overall charge time is because charge time is somewhat arbitrary. For instance, you may be considering Bike A that takes 2 hours to recharge a small 200 watt-hour battery. Then you may be considering Bike B that takes 3 hours to recharge a large 2100 watt-hour battery. At a glance, the Bike A looks more appealing, because the recharge time is less.

But what is important here is not the overall charge time, but how quickly energy is refilling the battery. In one hour, Bike A would have put 100 watt hours of energy into the battery, while Bike B would have put 700 watt hours into the battery. This means that in just that one hour of charging, Bike B has regained enough energy to travel seven times further than Bike A. Another important note is that a lithium battery doesn't have to be recharged fully before riding, so if you only have 30 minutes to charge, you can charge for those 30 minutes and then be on your way.

To understand this within the industry, let's look at this from a level playing field. Let's assume that an Outrider, an Optibike and a Stromer are all consuming about 12 watt hours of energy per mile of travel. The Outrider takes 1 minute of charging to regain one mile of range. The Optibike takes about 2.4 minutes per mile, and the Stromer 6.7 minutes per mile.