E-bike range explained

Manufacturers test range the way they test anything they want to look good: under the friendliest conditions the bike will ever see. That usually means the lowest assist level, a flat closed course, warm weather, low speed, and a test rider who's on the lighter end of average. The resulting number isn't a lie, it's a ceiling. It tells you the most miles that specific battery can plausibly deliver, not what you'll get on your actual commute.

This matters more as range claims get used for marketing. A bike advertised at 105 miles and one at 40 miles are not necessarily built to different standards of honesty, they're built with different batteries and tested the same optimistic way. Across our catalogue the claimed range runs from 40 to 105 miles, with a median around 60. Treat the top of that range, and the top of any single bike's claim, as something you might approach on a good day going downhill with a tailwind, not something you should plan your commute around.

Assist level is the biggest lever you control. Riding on the highest assist setting can burn through a battery dramatically faster than the low setting the manufacturer tested on. If you like leaning on the motor, budget for less range than the box promises, full stop.

Weight is next. Your body weight, plus whatever you're carrying, works directly against the battery. This is a bigger deal on cargo e-bikes than on a commuter bike ridden empty, since cargo bikes are bought specifically to haul weight the test rider never carried. Hills matter for the same reason: climbing draws far more power than cruising on the flat, and a hilly commute will eat into range in a way no flat test track will reveal.

Cold weather reduces battery performance, wind resistance adds drag the test course didn't have, and tyre choice plays a role too. Wide, knobby tyres, like the ones on most off-road e-bikes bikes, create more rolling resistance than the narrow slicks common on commuter builds. None of these variables show up on a spec sheet. All of them show up on your ride.

Watt-hours (Wh) tell you how much energy a battery actually holds, and it's the one number on a spec sheet you can trust to be an honest, physical measurement rather than a best-case scenario. Across the bikes we've scored, battery size ranges from 345.6 Wh up to 2100 Wh, with a median of 720 Wh.

You can use watt-hours to sanity-check a claimed range. Take the median bike in our catalogue: 720 Wh paired with a claimed 60 miles works out to 12 Wh per mile, under test conditions. That ratio is the manufacturer's best case, so treat it as a floor for energy use, not a target. If your commute involves hills, higher assist, or hauling weight, your bike will likely use more watt-hours per mile than that, which means fewer real miles from the same battery. If you're unfamiliar with what watt-hours mean or how they relate to motor power, our e-bike glossary breaks the terms down in plain language.

Two bikes can claim the same range using very different amounts of battery, because one was tested under gentler conditions or has a more efficient motor and drivetrain. That makes claimed-mile comparisons across brands close to useless. Watt-hours, on the other hand, measure a fixed physical quantity of stored energy. A 720 Wh battery holds the same energy no matter whose name is on the frame.

This is why, when you're comparing bikes head to head, battery size in watt-hours is a more honest starting point than the range number printed next to it. It won't tell you exactly how far you'll ride, but it tells you how much fuel you're working with, which is the number that doesn't bend depending on how the test was run.

Because claimed range is a best-case figure and watt-hours are a fixed one, we don't take a manufacturer's mileage number at face value when we evaluate a bike. We weigh it alongside battery capacity, motor type, and the bike's intended use, so a cargo bike or off-road bike claiming a big range on paper doesn't get credit it hasn't earned once you account for the weight or terrain it's actually built for. The full breakdown of how that scoring works, including how range factors into the overall Genius Score, is on our how the Genius Score works page.

If you want to see how specific bikes stack up once range claims are put in that context, every e-bike we've reviewed covers every model we've tested, and our best-of shortlists rounds the strongest ones into shortlists by use case, including options built specifically around long-haul range like best e-bikes with a throttle for hauling.

If your round trip is close to a bike's claimed range, assume you'll fall short of it in normal riding, especially if you use higher assist, ride in cold weather, or carry a bag or groceries. The safer move is to look for a bike with meaningfully more claimed range than your commute requires, not one that matches it exactly on paper.

For errands and grocery runs where load matters more than distance, best e-bikes for groceries and errands is built around exactly that trade-off. If your daily distance is genuinely long and you want battery capacity toward the top end of what we've seen, look at bikes with the highest Wh figures in their class rather than chasing the biggest advertised mile number, since that Wh figure is the one that won't shrink once you're actually riding it.