This post is designed to help people navigate the world of cheap Chinese ebike products without ending up getting ripped off and saving the most money they possibly can.
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Where to buy from
The three big options for chinese goods are Ebay, Alibaba\Aliexpress and direct from a Chinese vendor's website. Each of these options have benefits and drawbacks that are not immediately obvious. Ebay is US business that has been hosting more and more chinese vendors in recent years. By contrast Alibaba & Aliexpress are Chinese businesses that cater to western customers. Alibaba is more of a 'factory storefront' where items are sold in higher volume mostly to businesses. Product costs are shown in a 'range' and your actual cost will depend on Qty and whether you want FOB (you pay) or CIF (they pay) freight. Aliexpress is a website that caters to consumers and more oriented to serving people who only want one or two of any particular item.
Shipping sticker shock
One of the biggest problems with buying stuff from China, especially Lithium batteries is shipping. It is not uncommon at all for me to buy a $200 battery and spend $150 to ship it to my door. That is the reality of shipping Lithium batteries, so get used to it. There are a few people who simply throw batteries in boxes and ship them without notifying the shipper that they are Lithium batteries. Although you are not really at risk as the recipient, it is a pretty serious slight against the shipping companies and if they find out you are shipping batteries as normal freight I'm sure your package will get confiscated. I have had several Chinese vendors ship me batteries without filling out the proper paperwork or going through the right channels. If the shipping is included and the price is way too low, expect this to be the case. You might want to make sure at least your package is insured.
Don't Leave Feedback
One thing that Alibaba, Aliexpress and ebay all have in common is that once you leave feedback you pretty much lose a lot of your negotiating power. For items that are less than $20 I leave feedback right away, for stuff over $400 I usually never leave feedback. That way if the product fails or is defective after I buy it I can contact the seller and if they don't take action I can have the option to leave negative feedback. I should also note that I have only left negative feedback once (item broke on first use due to rubber dryrot, seller gave me the runaround) although I have bought hundreds of items on ebay in the last 20 years, but why give up all your power if you don't have to?
Ridiculous overstatements of specs to the point of absurdity
I'm not sure why Chinese ebike vendors do this but it is not uncommon to see things like cycles listed for an Lifepo4 ebike battery. Use some common sense, do you really think you're going to get cycles out of that battery? Maybe at 1 Amp discharge and charge rate in a temperature controlled lab at only 80% charge. Battery manufacturers tend to overstate the charge cycles as well as the continuous amp ratings of their BMS. It is not uncommon for the battery weights to be off by several pounds as well (like this battery from BMS battery that is actually 3.38 lbs heavier than what is listed on the website). The only vendor who seems to be honest about his batteries and motors is Paul at em3ev, everyone else is guilty until proven innocent. If you need a battery that puts out 25 Amps, buy one rated at 30 Amps continuous instead. If you need a 20Ah battery for your commute consider getting a 22Ah or 24Ah battery instead. That way you won't get stranded as your battery ages and holds less charge.
Adjust your expectations
Chinese vendors are usually working with razor-thin margins. It is not uncommon at all for them to make most of their money off padding the shipping costs. I spent a month in China (crazy travel blog here) and while I was there I found almost no one that spoke English. It's just not something they really teach in the schools there unless you work for the government in a position where you need to learn English. Most Chinese vendors are using Google translate to read your messages and to compose messages back to you. When you them be clear about the problem and your expectations. Do not use big words or complex meanings. Realize that they aren't really making that much money off your sale and be reasonable with your expectations. It costs them a lot of money to ship stuff back and forth so while your BBS02 might have a warranty with it, if you bought it from the cheapest vendor on Aliexpress don't expect that they are going to ship you a new one when yours burns out.
Paul from em3ev is a solid vendor who stands behind his products, he is also about 10-20% more expensive than most other cheapo Chinese vendors. That is because it massively eats into his profits to deal with all the people who buy stuff from him then do stuff like reprogram the controllers and burn them out and then expect free replacements shipped from China. I've had vendors that wouldn't lift a finger to help me or support their products and I've had vendors like imotorbattery from ebay who shipped me a brand new battery when my 7 month old 20Ah battery wouldn't give me more than 11Ah of power. I didn't threaten to leave bad feedback, I was working back and forth with him for weeks and even offered to replace the bad cell myself, but he just shipped me a whole new 22Ah battery for $80. This is not a common occurrence and I would not have expected anything that generous.
Chinese made stuff generally is crap, it's not part of the culture for people who sell things to actually support them when they fail. When I was in China many people I met lamented at this fact and they all wished they had more access to higher quality consumer products which tend to be only end up getting exported over to Western countries.
Don't get hit with foreign transaction fees
Don't ever buy stuff from China with a credit card. The credit card companies love to hit you with as much as 3% for stuff you buy in China. Don't do it, have the money in your checking account and when you paypal for your purchases have it come out of your bank account not your credit card. In order to do this you will have to confirm your bank account with Paypal ahead of time which usually takes 2-3 days.
Check over the invoice you get
Paul uses a spreadsheet for his orders so check each line item and make sure it is correct. If you are emailing back and forth with him and changing your order it might get screwed up, you should make sure it is right before you pay him. It has happened to me, it could happen to you too.
More is less when it comes to shipping batteries
Check out the Battery-Fed section of this post on em3ev. To paraphrase, if you want to buy a battery it will probably be cheaper shipping-wise if you buy and ebike motor at the same time or more batteries. If you can get your shipment over 20kg (44lbs) then the shipping price drops off dramatically. If you need to they can add ballast to make your shipment heavier. Sounds insane, but it works. I'd advise getting your friends all hooked on ebikes and then going in together to put in orders thus getting bigger discounts and cheaper shipping for everyone involved.
All Chinese vendors are not created equal
If you have questions about buying from a Chinese vendor it makes sense to do a quick search for that vendor's business name over on endless-sphere. Some people there love vendors like BMS battery and some people really hate them. I have had problems with BMS battery and several other vendors. Often it was because my expectations of the products I would be getting and the cost it would take to ship them to me were completely unrealistic. It is entirely normal to order something from a Chinese vendor and to:
Sound insane? It is. Welcome to the world of buying cheap ebike stuff from China.
DHL rocks
For the price no one else I've used comes close when it comes to getting stuff from China. Insanely fast. Insanely cheap. China post is the only one that is cheaper but they suck.
If it looks cheap and smells cheap then it probably is cheap
That $17 ebike controller you plan on putting on that fatbike that is going to plow through 6 inches of wet snow, it's probably going to burn out on its first time out. That $79 Ebike motor is going to melt when you dump watts through it. Cheap ebike stuff is not design to be abused. If you want stuff that is going to last get a 750W BBS02 and put a 32T chainring on it or buy a FatMac hub from em3ev with a decent controller and put it on a smaller sized wheel. If you want to run a lot of power through your motor (I know you want to) then you need to have an ebike motor with upgraded phase wires. If you want to go 40mph on an ebike you will need a controller that costs over $100. It's just the way these things go.
Build a relationship with one or two vendors
The more you buy from a single vendor, the more likely you are to get decent support when stuff fails. Building a relationship doesn't mean wasting their time with stupid questions and long emails, it means being a courteous consumer who is reasonable with their expectations and generous with their capital. When things go wrong instead of being pissed, just tell the vendor what went wrong, what the circumstances were and don't lie. Let the vendor decide what course of action to take to remedy the situation (if any). If you don't like what happens with a particular vendor then write a short post about your experience on endless-sphere to warn future buyers and then move on. After all, it's only money, right?
With a few simple steps, some foresight and adjusted expectations you can become a happy Chinese ebike component consumer. Expect for lots of things to break and fail, expect to waste hundreds or even thousands of dollars on shipping charges that you later regret. It's all part of the fun!
Ride On.
Some readers may recall that a few months ago I bought a cheap electric mini-truck on Alibaba. I know this because I've gotten emails almost daily ever since, asking if my Chinese electric pickup truck has arrived (with some humorously calling it my F-50). Well, now I can finally answer, 'Yes!' and share with you exactly what I received.
But first, a tiny bit of background.
I originally found the truck while perusing Alibaba in search of a weekly nugget of gold for my Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column.
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I found a $2,000 electric truck that looked perfect, except that it was about 2:3 scale. And it only went 25 mph. And only had a 3 kW motor. And you had to pay extra for batteries, shipping, etc.
But glossing over all those hiccups, the truck looked as silly as it did awesome. It was a bit small, but had a lot of charm. So I started talking with the trading company (a little outfit known as ChangLi that also supplies a few importers in the US).
I was able to spec the truck with a hydraulic dumping bed, air conditioning, and a giant (for this small truck) 6 kWh lithium-ion battery.
Those upgrades cost me around $1,500 on top of the base price, plus I had to pay an outrageous $2,200 sea shipping rate, but at least my truck was on its way to me now.
The shipping process seemed to take forever. At first all went well, and a couple weeks after paying, my truck was headed to the port. It sat around for another couple weeks until it made it into a container and onto a boat, then six weeks later, the boat arrived in Miami. The only problem was that my truck was no longer on it. No one knew where it went and I spent several days calling the forwarding company, the logistics company, my customs broker, and the Chinese trading company. No one could explain it.
Finally, the Chinese trading company heard back from the shipper on their end that my container had been offloaded in South Korea and put on a second container ship ' something about the water in port not being deep enough.
Long story short, the truck finally arrived in Miami, but then got held up in customs for a few more weeks. Once it finally popped out the other end of customs, I paid an additional $500 to some dude I found on Craigslist and he hauled the crated-up truck on a bigger flatbed truck to my parents' property in Florida that would become the truck's new home.
The cage it was shipped in was beaten to hell and back, but the truck was miraculously fine. There I unboxed the truck, a process for which I was glad to have charged up my angle grinder in advance. Ultimately the un-crating went decently well with only a few hiccups that I caught on video along with my first test rides (of course my dad and wife who were both on hand to watch the show unfold were quick to volunteer to test it out).
I was actually surprised by the fact that the truck was in such good condition after the long journey around the world. I guess preparing myself for a banged up truck helped keep my expectations low, and so I was shocked when the truck arrived nearly dent-free.
Believe it or not, the truck is actually even better than I had hoped.
It's not particularly powerful, though the 3 kW motor and 5.4 kW peak controller give it plenty of low-speed oomph for hauling around on my parents' property. The top speed is just 25 mph (40 km/h) but I rarely hit that speed on uneven ground around the fields anyways ' more on that shortly.
The dump bed is awesome and I've already put it to good use collecting yard waste around the land and hauling it back to the dump pile.
The truck itself is surprisingly well-made in some regards. It features full metal body panels, electric windows and doors with key fob for locking, and a full light package with blinkers, head lights, spot lights, tail lights, reverse lights, etc. There's a backup camera, steel cargo rack and bed rack, high power charger, windshield wiper with washer fluid, and the air conditioning is even quite powerful (as tested in hot, humid Florida).
I can even connect my to the Bluetooth and play music or movies on the infotainment system.
The whole thing could use some better rustproofing as in a couple spots I can already notice a bit of rust after the months-long sea voyage.
This definitely isn't a golf cart ' it's a fully enclosed vehicle, albeit a slow one. I was mostly driving off-road where I rarely got close to the top speed of 25 mph (40 km/h) due to the rough suspension, though I did a small amount of on-road driving to verify the speed, which was nearly exactly the promised 25 mph.
I didn't do much road riding, though, mostly due to the next issue.
Unfortunately, these ChangLi cars and trucks are not street legal, nor are pretty much any Chinese-made neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs) or low speed vehicles (LSVs).
The issue is that these 25 mph EVs are in a federally approved class of motor vehicle (LSV) and there are actual Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards that apply, believe it or not.
I used to think that NEVs and LSVs could be street legal as long as they went 25 mph and had equipment like blinkers, seat belts, etc. Unfortunately, that's not correct. It's waaaay more complicated than that.
The cars would actually need to fulfill a long list of requirements including having DOT parts throughout in order to be street legal. The glass has to come from DOT-registered glass factories, the backup camera has to come from DOT-registered backup camera factories, etc. It's not enough to simply go 25 mph and have seat belts and blinkers.
Even if the cars had all the necessary DOT parts, the factory that produces them in China also has to be registered with the NHTSA to allow the cars to be street legal in the US. So while there are already a few US companies importing these into the US, some of which erroneously claim that the cars are street legal because they go 25 mph, the sad fact is that no we can't actually register these cars or take them on the road. It would take a massive undertaking to either produce these in the US or build a factory in China that was DOT-compliant and could be registered with the NHTSA. Perhaps that explains why a 25 mph 4-seater Polaris GEM costs a head-scratching $15,000 with lead acid batteries and no doors or windows!
You often see these things listed at $2,000 or so on Alibaba and other Chinese shopping sites. The true cost is actually much higher. As I mentioned, right off the bat I had to add $1,000 for the big battery, $500 for the upgrades I chose, and $2,200 for sea shipping.
On the US side, I had to add in another $1,000 or so in duties and broker fees, plus some arrival charges. Ultimately I wound up north of $7,000 for the whole kit and caboodle. That's definitely more than I was anticipating spending. Back when I made the order I had hoped to get away with $6,000 in damage.
While some people might call the final price a rip-off, consider the alternative. A crappy golf cart with flooded lead acid batteries starts at around $6,000 today. A halfway decent one is $8k. The really nice ones land in the $10-12k range. And even then, all you have is a golf cart. It's not enclosed, meaning you get rained on. There's no air conditioning. No wipers. No locking doors. No windows (electric or otherwise). No adjustable bucket seats. No infotainment system. No sun roof. No truck bed with hydraulic dump, etc.
So while some people might consider this a glorified golf cart (and I must concede that they have something of a point), it is both cheaper than a golf cart and also much more capable with utility that you don't get with a golf cart.
Even though the truck isn't street legal, that's fine with me. I didn't get it for that purpose, and it certainly doesn't have the safety equipment that would make me comfortable using it in traffic anyway.
Instead, it's a work truck. I'll use it (or more likely my parents will use it more than me) as a farm truck on their property. It's already proven great for that task in the first couple of days I've had it. We've used it around the land for collecting fallen limbs and debris, for lugging moving boxes and gear around the property, and just for having fun riding around to visit the neighbors!
It sure beats a gas-powered UTV since I never have to fill it up or choke on exhaust. And the same goes for just getting some old beater gas truck ' I prefer my fun little EV that can do everything I need around this place.
At this point I'm excited to start modifying the truck. It's already a great base, though it could use some work. The suspension isn't great and I'm not sure how much I'll be able to do there. Some softer springs could be a decent start.
But I'll also be working on some other additions. The truck could use some good rustproofing, so that's another area to start.
I'm also thinking of putting a small solar panel on the top of the cab. Even a relatively low-power one, such as a 50W panel, could be fairly effective. Assuming 100 wh/mi efficiency for the truck, even just a few miles of use around the property per day could be completely offset by passive solar charging.
I did a test with a Jackery solar electric generator and found that I could get a solid charge from the sun with 400W of solar panels, though it would require lugging around the unit and panels, or creating a semi-permanent installation somewhere around here.
I also want to add some mounts on the hydraulic lifting bed so my parents can pickup their trash cans and drive them down their country road-like driveway all the way to the public road for trash pickup.
I guess I should probably paint a racing stripe on it, too, so I can squeeze an extra few mphs out of it.
There are some other fun mods on my list as well. A bike ramp, a ham radio, maybe an AC inverter so I can charge devices like power tools directly from the truck's 6 kWh battery. I'm open to suggestions too, if you have any ideas. Meet me in the comments section!
And I'll be sure to update further down the road to let you know how my mini-truck is holding up over time. Until then, catch you on the (dirt) road!
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