No one who buys these electric bikes is planning to pedal very much

Not far from where I used to live in London, there was an e-bike shop. It shut a while ago after a bus crashed into it, which I suspect was an attempt to cut the supply of cyclists off at the source. The bikes in the window of this shop, before they were hit by a Number 19, very rarely looked like bicycles. Usually they were pretty substantial looking, fat-tyred, with a motorcycle style saddle. I dropped in one day to ask what one of them weighed, and was told it was about 50kg but that, “It can carry two people at 40mph”.

Not only is it very heavy, the chainset is oddly far ahead of the non-adjustable saddle; the saddle itself is suspiciously wide, and the gear ratios don’t really make sense… put it this way: it seems to me that no one who buys one of these is planning to pedal very much. You can easily switch off the UK performance restrictions (15mph/25kph) and then what you have is an electric motorbike with wobbly footpegs. You should, of course, be insured, licensed, ride it only on the road and so on. But you probably won’t.