E-Bike Battery Range Explained

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Every argument about e-bike range starts in the wrong place, because the specs are published in three different units and only one of them tells you anything. Watt-hours (Wh) is the number. Everything else is either an input to it or a distraction from it.

Here is the whole of the theory, and then we’ll spend the rest of the page on what actually goes wrong.

The one equation

Volts × amp-hours = watt-hours.That’s it. A 48V battery rated at 13Ah holds 48 × 13 = 624 watt-hours of energy. A 52V battery at the same 13Ah holds 52 × 13 = 676 watt-hours — 8% more energy from an identical amp-hour figure, which is precisely why amp-hours alone tells you nothing.

The analogy that actually works: volts is the pressure, amp-hours is the size of the tank, watt-hours is how much water is in it. Comparing two batteries on amp-hours is like comparing two fuel tanks by their diameter. It is a real measurement of a real thing, and it does not answer your question.

Watt-hours is a unit of energy, which is why it’s the only spec here that survives contact with another brand. It’s also directly convertible to money: 1,000 watt-hours is one kilowatt-hour, the unit your electricity company bills you in. That’s the whole basis of what an e-bike costs to run — the largest battery in this catalogue is 0.624 kWh, and at the EIA’s published US residential average of 18.8¢/kWh that’s about twelve cents to fill.

What the sellers actually publish

We read all twelve e-bike listings in our catalogue on 17 July 2026 and sorted them by how much work they leave you. The full table is above; the summary is:

Six publish watt-hours directly. Heybike does it consistently across all three of its bikes — 624Wh, 600Wh, 468Wh — and Vivi, TotGuard and Jasion do it too. Nothing to compute, nothing to assume. Good.

Four publish volts and amp-hours.Engwe’s “52V 13Ah”, Cyrusher’s “48V20Ah”, Hiboy’s “48V 13Ah”, isinwheel’s “48V 13AH/18AH”. You can get to watt-hours with one multiplication, and we’ve done it for you in the table. But you shouldn’t have to, and it is worth asking why the bigger, rounder-sounding numbers are the ones on the box.

One publishes a voltage and stops.The Gotrax R7 says “48V Removable Battery” with no amp-hour figure anywhere. That is not a small gap — 48V tells you the pressure and nothing about the tank. This bike cannot be costed, cannot be compared, and cannot be range-checked from its own listing.

One publishes nothing. The Schwinn Parkwood — the only household name in the catalogue — states a 350W hub motor, a 27in wheel, and no battery figure of any kind. Zero.

Two out of twelve is a sixth of the market we can link to, sold with the single most important component undocumented. We haven’t estimated them and we’re not going to. Where the table says “Unknown”, that’s the seller’s word, not our laziness.

Range is watt-hours divided by consumption — and nobody publishes consumption

Here’s the equation that would actually answer “how far will it go”: range = capacity ÷ consumption, where consumption is watt-hours per mile. Capacity we now have, for ten of twelve bikes. Consumption is the term nobody publishes, because it isn’t a property of the bike.It’s a property of the bike plus you plus the hill plus the weather plus how lazy you’re feeling.

So when a listing says “70+ miles”, it has silently chosen a consumption figure for you and not told you which. Divide the battery by the range claim and you can reverse it out: the Mars implies 8.9 Wh/mile, the Ranger 10.0, the Cityscape 9.4, the Vivi 10.0, the Jasion 9.0. Five brands, five bikes with wildly different weights, tyres and motors, and all of them claim within about a watt-hour per mile of each other. That is not what independent measurement looks like. We put that table on the cost page, because it’s the same arithmetic, and we take the claims apart properly on how far can an e-bike really go.

The four things that eat your watt-hours

We can’t give you numbers for these bikes, because we haven’t ridden them and nobody publishes measurements. What we can give you is the mechanism, which is not in dispute and will let you reason about your own riding.

Speed, more than anything else. Aerodynamic drag rises with the square of your speed, and the power needed to push through it rises with the cube. This is why the single most effective way to double your range is to stop using the top assist level. A bike held at 28 mph is doing something categorically more expensive than the same bike at 15 mph — not a bit more expensive, dramatically more.

Weight, on hills only.Lifting mass up a hill costs energy in direct proportion to the mass. On the flat, weight costs you far less than people assume — it mostly shows up in acceleration, and you get some back when you stop. If your route is flat, your weight and the bike’s matter less than the wind. If your route is a climb, they matter enormously. Which is a good moment to note again that not one listing in this catalogue publishes the bike’s weight.

Cold.Lithium cells deliver less usable energy when they’re cold. That’s chemistry, not a defect, and it means a winter commute genuinely gets less out of the same pack than a summer one. How much less for these specific batteries? Not published, by anyone, for any of them.

Your assist level, which is really the same as speed.Every one of these bikes has assist settings, and the range claim was made on one of them — the manufacturer doesn’t say which, but you can guess it wasn’t the top one. This is the lever you actually control, and it’s the reason two riders on the same bike will report ranges that differ by a factor of two and both be telling the truth.

The spec nobody publishes at all: cycle life

A lithium pack doesn’t last forever. It loses capacity with charge cycles and with age, which means the 624Wh you bought is not the 624Wh you’ll have in three years, which means your range shrinks and your cost per mile creeps up.

Not one seller in this catalogue publishes a cycle-life figure.Not a number of cycles, not a capacity-retention percentage, not a warranty term in the listing. This is the most important long-term number about the most expensive component on the bike, and across twelve listings from ten brands it appears zero times. We can’t model it, so we don’t — but you should know that every range figure on this page, ours included, is a day-one figure.