Rad Power Bikes — Ultimate Buying Guide
“What’s the catch?”
That’s the question I kept asking myself, when looking at the prices of electric cargo bikes.
After weighing the risks, and looking at the cost difference, I decided to “ride Rad.” And it turns out there are lots of catches, but their price is just so low that nothing else matters.
After buying, assembling, and riding two of them, I’ve noticed some real differences between the cheap Rad bikes and the expensive cargo ebikes that I cross-shopped like the Xtracycle, Tern, and Yuba. I’ll discuss them here for the massive wave of new people interested in electric bikes. And with months before you can probably get your hands on a new one, you’ve got plenty of time to read, so I’ll try to get into the details.
Can a Cheap Bike be Good?
The two Rad bikes we ended up getting were the full size RadWagon cargo bike and the small fat-tire RadRunner.
The Verdict (for the impatient)
For weekend use, Rad bikes are fantastic. They drive great, stop great and shift fine. They come with solid kick-stands, have plenty of factory and aftermarket accessory support, and plenty of range.
Range is a super difficult thing to quantify, since your load, how much you pedal, and the hills you traverse are all major factors. But in practice it has not been an issue at all. Our longest ride has been ~12 miles, and I don’t think we knocked a single bar off of the battery meter. That was 2 hours of fully loaded riding, which is close to the maximum that small kids can tolerate. We consistently do multiple rides between charges, and never get below half full.
With our serious investment in accessories they can hold our kids, hold our gear, and accumulate tons of thumbs-up and questions as we ride. Some of our friends have bought them too and we ride together and have a blast.
We recommend them to friends, and would buy them again.
IF you are giving up your car, and will use this bike as your only means of transportation, your economics are very different. You’ve got a row of 0’s for car payments, maintenance, registration and insurance. You’re also rare, so I’m going to ignore your situation, and you can go ahead and buy a Riese & Müller with a dual battery with all the money you’re saving. But read on, and consider just buying a Rad…and a few spares.
What’s the Catch Though?
It’s not all rainbows and butterflies. Here are my opinions on what the drawbacks are as a Rad owner. Also, I don’t think I suffer from choice-supportive bias, but isn’t that what someone who DID would say?
Hub Motor
The biggest downside of buying a Rad is that you are stuck with a hub drive (aka direct drive) electric motor mounted in the rear wheel, as opposed to a mid drive motor mounted to the crank (which the pedals are connected to).
The hub drive is clunky, and sucks compared to mid drive, which all the expensive bikes use.
There are two main disadvantages:
The first is that the motor can never benefit from having multiple different gears. So if you are going up a steep hill, you can’t use low gears to increase the help the motor can give you. This is very noticeable when starting on a hill.
The second is that the “pedal assist” mode, where the bike just sends power automatically as you pedal, feels clunky. The brain that controls the electric motor doesn’t know how hard you are pedaling, only how fast. So it doesn’t always send the right amount of power and often the bike feels jerky.
Counter-catch: Rad bikes also come with a throttle! The throttle works independently from the pedal assist, and goes from 0–100% power as you twist it more. So you can control the power of the bike smoothly using your own brain.
Assembly Required
When you buy a Rad bike, they mail you a big-ass box, and YOU put the thing together. You need hex drivers, a big open area, and a modest amount of mechanical aptitude. If you’re just getting a plain bike — this does not take long. Less than an hour. But if you’re playing the accessory game, and I’ll list the ones I bought in an appendix, you might need to do some serious assembly and disassembly. Putting fenders on the RadRunner required removing the rear wheel/motor combo and cutting all the zip-ties that held the motor cables to the frame.
The competition sells their bikes through distributors and local bike shops. Part of that deal is that the bike shop does the assembly, and you get a fully functioning bike.
Counter-catch: I actually think I did a more careful and thorough job than someone in a bike shop! I wasn’t pressured to rush, and I had more invested in the outcome, so I payed attention to every screw. And this type of stuff is fun for me.
No Test Rides
A downside of buying a Rad is that you can’t test drive it. I did my best above to summarize the disadvantages of a hub drive motor, but I can barely understand what I wrote. There is no real way to know how a Rad drives besides laying down $1500. You have to trust that it’s decent.
Counter-catch: Once you check out the price comparison I do below, you really need to ask yourself if you will be able to detect something in a test ride that outweighs the radically different cost that Rad presents. Do you think you can pick out a $50 bottle of wine from a bunch of $20 bottles in a blind taste test? The $20 bottle will be fine, just like this bike.
Warranty Work
My bike came with a bent rear derailleur. On my very first ride, when I put it into low gear, the chain jumped onto the motor. No big deal, Rad bikes come with a one year warranty!
Well, if I had bought an expensive bike, the local bike shop would have caught that before I got it. And even it they missed it, I could return and get it fixed in an afternoon.
Rad has responsive customer service (even if they are slammed right now due to COVID-19) but it still took 26 days to get my derailleur fixed. The largest leg (16 days) was waiting for an opening at Velofix, the mobile van partner Rad uses.
Counter-catch: What did I do for those 26 days? Well, I gorilla-grabbed the bent part and did my best to unbend the darn thing! 1st gear still didn’t work, but I rode around in gears 2–7 until it got fixed. It didn’t end up costing me anything, and the mobile bike shop conveniently came to me to make the fix.
Specifically Designed to be Cheap
I think a big RV that can drive eight people across the country costs $150,000. A jet that can do the same costs $15,000,000.
Why a 100-fold difference in cost?
Weight! It’s easy to build something strong. It’s very hard to engineer something strong AND light. So the first thing I noticed about my cheap and strong looking RadWagon was that it was HEAVY. It weighs 73 lbs before accessories. But even more surprising is Erin’s mini-bike, which looks like it’s half the size of mine, and comes in at 63 lbs! When you buy a Rad, you are 100% not buying the engineering nor the materials to make it light.
You’re also not getting top notch components. Comparing it to the Yuba Spicy Curry, as I love doing, the Rad drivetrain is lower down on cheapness scale on the Shimano chart.
The Rad motor and controller are made in China. Higher end bikes have Bosch motors and controllers made in Germany where it’s generally more expensive to live and manufacture goods.
And of course since they sell direct over the internet, they give no money to bike stores or sales people, which I think we can call cheap.
Counter-catches: Yes they’re heavy, but Rad puts in big motors to offset the weight, and I’m still getting great range. The drivetrain components work just fine, and the lineup might be artificial marketing fluff from Shimano. China makes great things now (iPhones have good fit and finish right?) and that dealer margin goes into your pocket.
No Options
Options are the bane of assembly. The more options you have, the more expensive it is to design your manufacturing process, and train the people/robots doing the assembly. Rad gives you ONE option: paint color.
Take a look at Xtracycle though. I almost feel bad for them!
Two models, the Sport and the Utility, each with four sets of three options! (3)⁴ * 2 = 162 different possible models, just for the “RFA”. With a Rad you are stuck with what they give you, but with an Xtracycle you can design it exactly how you need it.
Counter-catch: The more choices you have, the harder it is for you to actually make one, and even if you overcome it, you will be miserable as your monkey-brain second-guesses your pick, knowing you turned down 161 other models. There’s a super video (and book) on this by Barry Schwartz if you have the time.
High variance in final assembly
I was initially impressed with the fasteners that came on my Rad bike and with the Rad supplied accessories. They were a combination of button head and socket head hex drive, and they all came with flat washers and lock washers, and some sort of blue loctite or anti-corrosion compound (not sure which) on the threads. This is an upgrade from chrome-plastic and Phillips-head screws you find on a Wal-Mart bike.
But as soon as I needed to take some fasteners out, I noticed the carnage. It could be the softness of the metal fasteners themselves, it could be worn out hex-drives at their Chinese factory, who knows, but some of the fasteners were clearly chewed up. Including this one needed to install fenders on my wife’s RadRunner:
Was this JUST on my bike? Did I get an uncommon mistake?
No.
See below YouTube comments on their “How-To” install videos…
Do jets have stripped out fasteners coming from the factory? No! They use torque sensing DC electric tools, which screw fasteners in the exact right way every time. But those cost money!
Counter-catch: I have a quality set of hex keys and I got the above damaged fastener out, after hammering the hex key into the damaged hole. The fender kit came with extra screws, so I replaced the damaged one with a new one and now I’m all good.
Which Rad Model should I get?
OK, so I’ve gone through the catches and the counter-catches, and you’re still here. If you’re like most people, you’d rather complain than spend extra money, so now you’ve got to pick which Rad bike to buy!
They just updated their website to address this exact dilemma, but I still think it’s confusing.
The Rad names are similar and the bikes are described with marketing-speak, so it took me forever to tell them apart. Here’s my humble attempt all in one page:
Have Kids? A RadWagon that can hold up to three of them is a must. We bought a RadRunner to compliment it mostly because it’s small and my wife can put her feet on the ground while still on the seat. The RadRunner also holds a Yepp Maxi seat without needing anything extra, and once the offspring grow out of kids seats, it can fit two adults on it, so we’ll have the option to take it to dinner sitting tandem.
The RadRover Step-Thru was our next choice, because massive tires are so freaking cool, and the rack holds a Yepp Maxi seat. It looked too big for us though.
Kidless? I would get a RadRover for the impressive tires and the general presence the bike has. The RadMission + their front basket looks like the best bike to commute with, and the size will make it easy to bring inside your office or put in a locker.
In general I would skip the RadCity, since it’s the last model with the old hub motor (that my 2019 RadWagon 3 has). Every other bike has a smaller, geared motor that spins faster…and generates twice the torque. The new geared motor is louder, but much better on hills. In my mind Rad agrees with me here since they decided the RadCity belongs at the bottom of their “all eBikes page”.
I would also skip the RadMini. Why would you want a folding bike that weighs 67 lbs? Buy a Segway Ninebot MAX G30LP scooter instead. It goes the same speed, is way smaller and easier to carry, has rear wheel drive and big (for a scooter) 10 inch tires. And it’s ~1/3 the price.
Overall Recommendation
Buy one. The positives far outweigh the negatives. This was my price comparison for the RadWagon 3 and the Yuba Spicy Curry, back when both were in stock. The difference is THREE GRAND.
I drove the Spicy Curry and it was better. But it was way more expensive, so I bought the cheap one on the internet.
Money is the great equalizer. If you can make something good for less, the market will reward you. Hyundai, Southwest Airlines, and Costco have all navigated the brutal tension between quality and cost — and won.
Rad gets the balance right between quality and cost, as I detail above. But they also come to this market economy with more modern weapons. They advertise to their customers using online tools and stay top-of-mind by heavily re-targeting people who visit their website. They probably fund influencers, they definitely find a way to get their bikes in front of all major YouTube eBike reviewers, and they actively promote their TheFacebook.com community, where social networkers trade their hours here on earth to answer support questions and promote their bikes.
They are executing competently on a well established wave. How many people are going to buy this $3,000 couch from a showroom at DWR— that looks the same as this $300 one from Wayfair? Does anyone really put on pants to go see an insurance agent in a strip mall anymore? Rad is just following along with this obvious reduction in sales and distribution costs.
I’m not trying to argue that gutting local businesses via e-commerce is a good thing, nor that you can’t do anything about it. I like my shoes and blue jeans to fit too! But when the existing bicycle infrastructure produces a great bike like the Spicy Curry — yet an alternative can come along and offer TWO bikes that are almost as good for less than the SAME PRICE…I wouldn’t bet against that wave.
I paid full price for my first Rad bike, and used the discount code Time4AnotherRad for $100 off the second one. If I bought both at the same time, I could have saved $200 with 2xEbikeCombo.
If you can’t find anything better, you can get $50 off if you use my referral link. It’s kind of a pain, you have to give them your email, and they’ll also be giving me $50, but hey, at least you don’t have to put on pants ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
APPENDIX
What accessories do you recommend?
If you are getting a RadWagon, and have kids, definitely get the Caboose ($199). It fits 1–3 kids, it can cradle a carseat, and you can hang stuff from it. Immensely useful.
Also get a front rack ($69)+ large basket ($79) regardless of what Rad bike you buy. Increases the usability of the bike 100X, we end up putting something in it every single time we ride.
I think the killer cage combo for Rad bikes is a mri-denver front bottle cage bracket ($35), mounted between the bike and the front rack, paired with some Arundel Looney Bins ($25).
The bracket gives you two bottle cage mounts on either side of your head tube which are easily accessible, unlike the randomly placed factory cage mounts. (The RadWagon mount is on the bottom of the down tube.) You can mount anything you want to the bracket, but I really like the adjustable Looney Bins. They can carry anything from sunglasses to wine bottles, and have a grippy pad that you can lock down on whatever you’re carrying that even holds wet slick bottles. Just a fantastic utility cage.
Lastly, no practical bike is complete without STRAPS. And you can always use more.
My old faithful have been Rivendell’s Irish Straps. They are long, they are strong, and they cinch down tight. They are great for bulky soft objects, like backpacks and blankets.
You also need some Voile Nano straps. They are faster and easier to use than the buckle on the Irish straps, and the loose ends stay put. But they are not as long.
I use them for lashing hard things to the bike, like scooters, locks, and folding chairs.
Longer List of Accessories
Those were the ones I felt passionate about. If you noticed something on the bikes that you like, it’s probably here. (Links are clean.) They’ve all been researched, and I settled on them for some reason or another.
Abus Granit X-Plus 540 shackle lock with USH holder (I ordered two with the same key)
JOE Ride coffee cup holder
RAM X-Grip phone mount, with U-bolt to bolt to your handlebar
Universal Bar-end side mirror (on RadRunner)
High-mount bike side mirror (on RadWagon)
Thule Yepp Maxi child seat
Hollywood Racks hitch rack for Electric Bikes (two normal Rad bikes) (two fat-tire Rad bikes) (if you have one of each call them)
