Schiedam is an old people town. I love the place; it’s quiet, less noise and built for people, but due to it’s size, public transport has been very challenging to get by when you are far off the edges of the city.

Busses are always late or don’t even show up in the first place. This unfortunate fact led to a simple decision when I was scouting the neighbourhood out for a place to buy. I need a bike .

Like every other city in the Netherlands, it’s built for bikers. In my opinion, the country wants you to bike more than drive around and there are very good bike lanes everywhere.

Finding a general purpose bike that’s lightweight, electric and cheap hasn’t been easy. Yep, you read that right cheap and electric in one sentence. But hear me out, I’m not crazy guy looking for some fancy electric bike for less than €1,000. I would really love that but if you know e-bikes, you know that’s a pipe dream. And you may ask, why an e-bike. Why not settle for regular bike if it’s still going to get me from point a -> point b.

Well e-bikes are cooler, faster and just easier to bike around and looking at my situation, I’m doing to do alot of biking around. e-bikes also usually come with some kind of integrated chip and an app that’s all those cool and fancy things like gps-tracking, navigation, social features and the likes. It’s basically a gloried mini-car with no protection and the extra stuff. This also means I can hack around it and build something unique for myself. My bike will be mainly used for daily commutes to the gym, grocery shopping and the occasional wandering around.

The search for such as bike has been hard, don’t worry I won’t bore you with all the boring google search, youtube videos and reddit posts. I settled on the Tenways CGO600-Pro. I landed on this bike for a few reasons.

• It’s beautiful with a minimal branding.

• It’s pretty lightweight at 16k with batterry included.

• It has a range of 100km, given you are using the lower ends of the motor assist.

• It has a gates carbon belt drive; idk what this is but reddit/chatgpt says it’s the new thing in town.

• It has a mobile app companion to go with it and it looked looked less impressive, at least the photos on the website are. Tenways please change that photo.

The 5th point really helped with the decision. I figured if the app doesn’t look that good and doesn’t support the biking features I want, I would be forced to build something better. But I was shocked when I downloaded the app after ordering the e-bike to find out they’ve launched v2.0 with a way better design and more features. Well that sucks. This still works because I’m still going to going to tinker around because it doesn’t have all the features I want and this also present an intresting problem. Dealing with bluetooth and it’s related data. The price and christmas discount also helped with the decision.

Personal favorites if they weren’t too expensive are Cowboy Cruiser, Veloretti Ace Two and the Lemmo One L. All these have superb features and design with all three bikes winning the prestigious Red Dot award. The cowboy comes with the Connect app, probably the best and well design e-bike app out there in my opinion, something I’m trying to emulate with my own bike app, GPS tracking, watch app and an all round premium build. The Ace two also follows in the same suit and comes with a really nice in-built display that includes navigation. The Lemmo One L has a manual mode that allows you convert the bike into an regular bike for those who want to do fitness sports. The external battery pack also doubles as a power hub for those long rides. It also has a nice inbuilt display with basic info and a nice companion mobile app.

Regardless, the Tenways is what I have and would be living with, the goal is to build something that works for me. Automatic ride recording, real-time recording, map utilities, navigation, ride statistics and daily riding routes. I always want to add some security features like the GPS tracking, some kind of auto locking mechanism and probably an alarm. You never know what’s possible. The findings and progress will be documented.