You can’t just sit on the bike and have it zoom you around town — you actually have to pedal to engage the electric motor. This plants it in the territory of pedal-assisted e-bikes rather than full-on motor-assisted. The Kettle Valley is great for weekend fun rides, commuting, or quick runs around town. Fill the rack up with a day’s supplies and head out on an adventure. Take it on holiday and explore the places you can’t get a car, without breaking much of a sweat.
It’s a big step up from the Monroe 250 (which uses a 250 watt motor) but you’ll still have to pedal along when climbing steep hills. There’s also no throttle here, which makes this a Class 1 product and allowable on more trails and paths but with only one gear and a cadence sensor, it requires a bit more pedal power and time to start. Driving this bike is a very standard, highly recognized, 8Fun 350 watt internally geared hub motor. It’s compact, durable, and fairly quiet in the lower three assist levels. It blends in with the black spokes and deep dish rims visually and is not so heavy as to weigh down the back of the bike and impact riding or lifting of the frame.
It’s got 3 buttons, up down and a power/enter button in the middle. There’s a port in the side of the frame where you can charge it without removing, or you can use the keys to pull out battery and charge separately. The battery is a 288 watt-hour battery built with cells which takes about 4 hours to charge. If you’re using an e-bike to commute or run errands, or if it’s a particularly hot day, the throttle might be a better way to go. The throttle is a thumb lever on the left side of the bike, next to the LED panel. It has about an inch of travel between off and full, and you can push the throttle part way down or all the way down.
This sounds about right considering that this is meant to be a power assist, not a motorized vehicle. And the price, $1500 for the Campus, might seem pricey for those of us outside the cycling culture, but I assure you its actually quite competitive for integrated electric bikes of this category. Powering the motor and LED display console on this model is an above average capacity 36 volt 14 amp hour battery pack that mounts directly schwinn dealers to the downtube with three bolts! So many of the cheaper ebikes I test have batteries that just use two bolts and clip down from above vs. sliding in from the side… so I really feel that Schwinn made a good choice with this pack. It has a nice rubber cover to protect the charging port on the right side and an integrated LED charge level indicator to help you determin how full it is, even when stored separately from the bike itself.
Some similarly priced e-bikes like the Juiced RipCurrent S, for example, have ranges upward of 70 miles on a single charge. The Coston DX claims to have a range of up to only 45 miles, but in my experience it was actually well short of this. The Schwinn Coston DX is, for all practical purposes an around-town commuter e-bike that gives the impression that it’s supposed to be used somewhat ruggedly because of its sturdy appearance and build.