> My first e-bike, a pretty crappy one but enough to get my appetite whetted had a 500 Wh battery, enough for a 55 km trip one-way, and it would be dead on arrival, range anxiety to the max.
What? 55km with a 500Wh battery? Was he not pedaling at all? Why does he even have range anxiety on an ebike? You can just pedal if the battery is low.
Yes, I'm pedaling just fine, thank you for asking.
The range on this thing is not that large even when you are pedaling strongly, it just uses a lot of power. As you probably know the power consumption of a bike goes up considerably as the speed increases, this is NL and while we don't have hills we do have wind, and plenty of it. Add in a 40 to 45 kph top speed and you can see the battery dwindle in real time.
As for pedaling if the battery is low: I have a bad leg, which is why I ride these to begin with, they help me to get started at traffic lights, which we have a lot of. Once at speed I can ride just fine but getting up to speed really hurts.
E-bikes suck pedal if the motor is not helping. Also, someone going that far is almost certainly doing it at the maximum speed of the bike, and power use goes up quadratically with speed. You could probably do that trip with plenty of power to spare at 15kph or arrive with no charge remaining at 30kph.