My experience with the Jasion Retrovolt was not good. Amazon description states 2000/3000 watts and 70/90 MILES range. Description and specifications also showed in photos and specified in print includes front cargo basket and rear passenger seat and rear passenger foot rests. It specified it can climb a 45 degree incline. Following is what you truly need to know, keeping in mind I am an athletic male weighing 170 lbs and the bike tires were inflated to the maximum air pressure of 30 psi to minimize the rolling resistance.
1) The bike absolutely could NOT even begin to climb a 10 degree incline, whether strictly electric or with pedal assist. Impossible. Battery was 100% fully charged.
2) At no time did the bike ever show more than 1274 watts of output. Battery was 100% fully charged.
3) The Jasion Retrovolt is impossible for a non-athlete to pedal without battery assist more than a few feet. The rolling resistance is so great, before you buy it, go to any gym and pay them $50 to set their pedal machine to the highest resistance. Now pedal. I challenge you to pedal at that resistance for 20 minutes. That is literally the effort you will need to expend to pedal exactly one mile without battery assist. I know, I go to the gum to work out. Schwarzenegger could not have pedaled this bike 5 miles on level pavement, the easiest place to pedal, back when he was Mr. Universe. If you are not super athletic, and you think you will pedal this bike, you literally have a high possibility of inducing a heart attack. This is not exaggeration. I am a health coach, I know this fact.
4) A fully charged battery gave me 8-1/2 miles maximum range on #3 Eco mode battery power only not exceeding 17.8 mph.
5) A fully charged battery gave me 11-3/4 miles maximum range on #3 Eco mode Pedal Assist plus battery power not exceeding 16.2 mph.
6) To my SURPRISE, battery power maximum output diminished proportionally to battery charge remaining. A 100% fully charged battery produced 1274 watts maximum output. A 20% depleted battery charge produced a maximum output of only 1018 watts. A 40% depleted battery charge produced a maximum output of only 762 watts of power. A 60% depleted battery (40% charge remaining) produced only 509 watts maximum battery output power. This continued to 0 % and 0 watts.
It is important to be aware, the maximum bike speed also reduced proportionally to the battery charge remaining. So at 40% battery charge remaining, it was very disappointing to not be able to achieve a top speed of greater than 7 mph and the top speed decreased more every second, down to 0 mph.
7) Front suspension worked very well, my hands did not feel road irregularities impact.
8) Rear suspension was absolutely awful, and could not be adjusted out. The spring intended to smooth out the ride you feel in your butt, spine, back, and shoulders, is manufactured at the wrong angle and cannot be changed. I do NOT have skeletal or muscular issues of any type. But riding this bike, every little crack in the pavement is jarring on the tail bone, and all the way up the spine and into all connected muscle. I would expect anyone except a top condition athlete, to experience skeletal and muscular distress after riding this bike. You could compensate only very slightly by reducing tire air pressures, but that would greatly reduce the maximum range you can travel with the bike. It would also GREATLY increase the rolling resistance, so pedalling would be even more difficult.
9) The 7 speed gears on this bike are absolutely awful. The lowest gear, 1, is still way way way too difficult to pedal on this bike because the rolling resistance on this bike is enormous. Unless you are a top condition athlete wanting a very deep burn in your calves, legs, butt, back, shoulders, pecs, neck, arms, hands, fingers, and feet, you won’t be pedalling this bike without battery power. Those are the muscles that were in extreme pain when I tried the bike just prior to returning it, to document the operational analysis of the bike, and ran out of battery power 1-1/2 miles from home, on the level highway. So I tried to pedal it home. I would never attempt that again. 4 days later my calves were still in extreme pain and again that is not exaggeration.
At the top of the gearing, gear 7, you cannot possibly pedal fast enough to exceed about 16 mph in Pedal Assist mode. And without electric, all gears are totally useless because the bike is just so extremely difficult to pedal.
10) Top achievable speed is 24.6 mph in perfect conditions with me leaning forward and crouching low to reduce drag. Unless you are an athlete, you will have difficulty getting into that position and especially maintaining that position.
11) Only after trying the bike immediately prior to packaging it for return, while reading about settings, did I realize the bike has no warranty from the seller. Zero. None. Nada. Zilch. And in the owner’s online manual which is very difficult to understand if you speak and read English, it states from Jasion that you have a 14 day guarantee beginning the date you receive it and providing you basically almost do not use it, otherwise the guarantee ends immediately.
12) The seller’s return policy states if the bike has more than 10 miles or kilometers use, you forfeit 20% to 50% of the refundable purchase price of the bike, plus you lose $250 as return shipping charges etcetera. You cannot possibly test the life of the battery in only 10, so how could there ever be any accountability for an advertised maximum range??? In my case, I received a bike that had been previously used, it did not have a front cargo basket, it did not have a rear passenger seat, it did have passenger foot rests installed, the front wheel bearings were absolutely resistant to rolling despite appearing to being brand new, the bearings in front and rear wheels were extremely rough to turn and the bike greatly resisted rolling, the right pedal had a right hand twist thread and went on properly and easily, but the left hand pedal was manufactured improperly at the factory and the pedal stud bolt was left hand twist threaded, but in manufacturing the left pedal threaded stud, rather than cutting threads into the stud, it appeared the stud had on face of the stud’s threads pressed in, then the pedal was rotated 180 degrees, then the other face of the threads were pressed in, but without offsetting the position of the stud by one half of one thread along its center axis. So at most the pedal could engage the threads in the pedal arm one half of a turn, then the stud threads were trying to cut new threads into the pedal arm. It was impossible to install the left pedal onto the bike. I have never seen the manufacturing process of pressing threads into a stud before, but these were. Also, on the bike I received, the power cable from the battery to the throttle was unplugged when I received it, and the cable was way too short to connect without constant significant tension pulling on the connector. I cannot believe this left the factory quality inspection so much shorter than all the other cables. It was doomed to strip out eventually, leaving the bike immediately unable to receive battery power. Given these issues, Amazon helped me to get a full refund which the seller did issue.
Conclusion: this is a very expensive bike for the minimal realistic performance it provides, which is not even reasonably close to the advertised specifications.
The unit I received had many other issues as well, but those are likely due to the particular unit I received, so I won’t likely mention them here. I was not going to mention the battery power output and range capacity being so low until I read another review where the ridiculously lower than advertised maximum range was mentioned.
If I had read a review detailing these shortcomings, which I would have found extremely useful to know prior to purchasing, I would not have purchased the bike.
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