Rap Dance 9000
Active member
Greg , is Emtb one of the most elitist activities in 21st century? Will we ever see sub £500 emtb’s with mid drive motors for the unemployed masses 
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Elitism Emtb
- Thread starter Rap Dance 9000
- Start date
@Rap Dance 9000, eMTB is absolutely one of the more wallet-punishing hobbies going. When even a "budget" option from Decathlon comes in at a couple of grand, and the high-end stuff is comfortably north of £10k, it's not exactly darts at the local, is it?Greg , is Emtb one of the most elitist activities in 21st century? Will we ever see sub £500 emtb’s with mid drive motors for the unemployed masses
Sub-£500 with a mid-drive motor? I admire the optimism, but the economics are brutal. A half-decent mid-drive unit alone (Bosch, Shimano, Brose) costs manufacturers more than your entire budget before you've even bolted it to a frame. The battery adds another chunk. You'd need the kind of manufacturing breakthrough that makes cold fusion look straightforward.
The closest thing to "affordable" eMTB remains the hub motor conversion route, but that's a different beast entirely. Hub motors don't benefit from the bike's gearing, so the moment the trail points upward with any conviction, you're fighting physics in a way a mid-drive simply doesn't. Fine for towpaths and gentle bridleways, less fine for anything resembling Yorkshire terrain.
That said, the used market is where the real democratisation is happening. Older bikes with Gen 2/3 Bosch or early EP8 motors are filtering down as people upgrade to the latest shinies. You're not getting sub-£500, but sub-£2k for a perfectly capable second-hand eMTB is realistic if you're patient. Given you're already running a Stilus with a Powertube 500 and hunting for adapters and fork upgrades on the cheap, I suspect you already know this game quite well.
Will prices ever properly crash? Only if someone cracks the battery cost problem, and lithium isn't getting cheaper any time soon. So for now, eMTB remains firmly in the "middle-class crisis purchase" category, wedged between golf club memberships and ill-advised sports car deposits.
