In the wide-ranging world of e-bikes, portability has multiple definitions. Your e-bike can either be light enough to easily get up a flight of stairs and be mounted to most bike racks, or it can fold enough to tuck into a closet and fit in the back of a car. The folks at Heybike opt for the latter with most of their bikes, and — if it isn’t clear from the fat tires and ample frame — you won’t be happily pushing the 72-pound Ranger S up stairs anytime soon. But after 250 miles of riding, I can promise you weight isn’t something you’re likely to think about often with this cruiser-style joy machine.
Riding any bike in most cities is equal parts convenient and dangerous. For most riders, equipping a bike for a commute to work or for groceries is an exercise in tilting that balance in your favor. From front and rear GoPro rigs and every kind of flashing bright light to heavily reflective clothing, making yourself seen is a big part of city cycling. Heybike has a ton of experience in building for city life, and it shows with the Ranger S.
There are so many things happening on the handlebars of this bike, and most of them are great. From the left, you have a dedicated headlight switch, turn signals and a horn, all easily accessible with your thumb. The horn is pitched low, which you don’t often find on e-bikes, and which means you’re a lot less likely to startle someone if you’re riding past, but it’s still loud enough to be heard from inside a car. If you shift your grip slightly, it’s easy to access power output levels and the backlight for your speedometer.
The right side is a fair bit more manual, giving you a simple thumb switch up and down for shifting the seven-speed Shimano cassette and a throttle button to engage the motor without pedaling. The two hydraulic brakes sit exactly where you’d expect, with the all-important display in the middle.
As with most bike computers, you get a decent glanceable display for current speed and distance traveled, alongside which power level out of five you’re currently set to and the battery level. Almost all these work exactly like you’d expect, and then there’s the battery readout. Instead of giving you an easy-to-digest bit of information like estimated miles remaining or a percentage of the battery remaining, the readout on the Ranger S is based on voltage output. If your remaining battery is high, you’ll see output numbers above 48v and know that when you need that power to climb a hill or something, you’ll have it.
Even the segmented battery icon on the display doesn’t really tell me how much battery I have left, and I know this because on multiple occasions, I’ve been 15-20 miles into a ride, and when I’ve stopped, the battery meter has actually increased. Heybike estimates the Ranger S has a 55-mile range on a single charge, and I can confirm it had that for me, but I can’t tell you how much battery I had left when I reached that milestone. And if you’re going to be riding to and from work on an e-bike, knowing how much juice you have left in the battery is a pretty important detail, which should be much easier to understand. There is the option to use the Heybike mobile app, which provides a percentage and a ton of other things. But as you can see in the above photo, these handlebars are already pretty full, and a second large display shouldn’t be necessary.
The good news is that charging a Heybike battery is both easy and secure. The battery compartment is accessible only by key, but the charging port on the battery is accessible when docked in the frame, so you can either charge the battery while it’s docked or bring the battery with you and charge it at your desk. The battery also has a physical on-off switch, so if you aren’t going to be using the bike for a few days, you can hit that button instead of leaving it on the charger and potentially decreasing its overall life. Much like the rest of the bike, the design is thoughtful and multipurpose.
