Schoof & Jensen Doubledekker Cargo Bike Overview 

Thanks Celo, glad you enjoyed it!

Emotional damage 😥😥🥙

Thanks Ron, glad you enjoyed the video! 🙌

@tconnolly9820 Thanks, glad you enjoyed the video! The price is certainly a bit difficult to look past, especially when you compare it to similar setups from other brands, but it is cool and distinctive and that's enough justification for some folk. But I agree that pricing is wild in general and I think it's the main thing holding cargo bikes back from being more widely adopted. I've seen top spec Riese & Müller and Ca Go models advertised for sale for over €11k!

@@RobRidesCargoBikes Thanks for the reply and I really didn't know about the €11k R&M. Ouch! I just bought a Cube Kathmandu One as a commuter and as a "lite" cargo bike and to use with my existing pretty large trailers I have been doing all the same with for several years using an ordinary hybrid bike. I'm in Ireland and a mostly rural area so infrastructure is not what you are used to but I persist. Just on e-bike pricing and affordability. Compared to car manufacturers, companies like R&M, Cube, Urban Arrow are literally garage startups in scale. We need a major manufacturer/s to literally build by the millions, just like Toyota, Ford or Volkswagen a variety of well made e-bike models at more affordable prices that will be reliable and endurable over the long term. That means also repairable and upgradeable with easily obtained parts and components for the future. Replacing individual battery cells or the BMS controller instead of buying a whole new battery pack. Individual components any bike motor mechanic can obtain. Making their motors more water resistant for a start. Water ingress is one of the biggest killers of e-bike motors currently. That is just not good enough for something so expensive. Currently it's still small scale and companies like Bosch (and others) are very protective and anticompetitive about their spare parts and repairs. They want to sell you a whole new €900+ battery pack instead of a replacement component for a BMS. This is definitely an area where Brussels needs to make legislation guaranteeing right to repair AND guaranteed availability of parts and components. Sustainable micro mobility is supposed to be one of the EU's major ambitions, isn't it? The Chinese brands are selling cheaper products but in 5 years time, will you be able to get any replacement parts for any of these bikes? Assuming the EU doesn't put tariffs on them to protect the overpriced European manufacturers? Just like they are doing with the Chinese cars which are undercutting overly expensive European e-car manufacturers right now. Currently the buyer is getting very little for too much cost especially for cargo bikes. Sorry for the rant but I'm not working today and this is one of my biking bug bears that really annoys me. Bike security and preventing theft is another one but that's for another day. Easily solved but no one gives a damn. Great video and keep up the good work 👏👏👏

I just looked again, it’s been reduced to €9500 now, bargain😅: max-cargobike.de/collections/unser-sortiment/products/riese-muller-packster-70-automatic Nice, hope you’re enjoying your Cube! I used to live in a village in North Wales so am very familiar with rural infrastructure 😂😂 The bike industry is crazy for proprietary parts and designs. I’ve been riding all my life, mostly mountain bikes, and it’s insane how many incompatibility issues there are or manufacturers not selling service kits for parts and deeming them replaceable if you blow a seal or tweak something in a motor. I’ve recently had to replace a whole Shimano Saint brake caliper due to a cracked piston because Shimano won’t sell brake pistons or seal kits separately, how is that sustainable? I’ve also lost count of the amount of stories I’ve heard of folks having to replace 3-4 motors in a warranty period on an ebike. I wonder how many of those could have just been repaired if the brands would allow it. I’d welcome some regulation on ebike motor mount standardisation and would also like to see a right to repair on ebike motors and batteries as you mentioned. I don’t know enough about the import tariffs and laws around Chinese manufacturing to comment with any authority, but I’m currently working on a video with a brand that makes no bones about the fact their frames are made in China and they are doing very well. I also spoke to several brands at Eurobike this year about the established Chinese motor companies (Bafang etc) gaining popularity and the brands I spoke to were certainly open to using them. It seems one of the big problems is getting consumers to see the quality and to quash the stereotype of bad Chinese quality. Some brands even mentioned that they could reduce the cost of their cargo bikes by over €1000 if they specced a Bafang motor system instead of a Bosch, but that they wouldn’t be able to sell them very well because of the Chinese quality stereotype. Ha ha, no need to apologise for commenting, I love that this little channel sparks debate! 🙌

@@RobRidesCargoBikes The very best quality and the very worst quality both come from China. Bafang and Engwe and others are as good as you will get. It's the long term availability of parts and components I would be more concerned about. A few years ago neighbours bought a pair of matching generic e-bikes for occasional leisure riding. Less than two years later they were both posh recycling. But that example of one consumer having to replace the motor several times within the two year warranty period is diabolical. Not because the manufacturer honoured the warranty and replaced the whole unit each time possibly for just a repairable fault. But because this seems to be a persistent fault within that particular motor and when this fault happens again outside of the warranty, the poor customer is probably going to have to face the choice of replacing the entire motor themselves at their own expense or scrapping the entire bike and buying something else to cut their losses. Quality control leaves an awful lot to be desired. E-bikes with all of their faults and reduced longevity AND lack of independent repairers and availability of components makes them much more expensive in the long term than their positive self promotion likes to make us all believe. But when everything works the way it should, they really are a middle ground for the average cyclist between an ordinary bike and a car. And despite my cynicism, I've just got my first one a few weeks ago. Which actually came with a few faults I'm having to get sorted out with the battery cover and the derailleur through the local shop I bought it from. There's a lot to be said for buying from an actual bricks and mortar local seller. And Cube lack of quality control? 🤷‍♂️ That's me done. I'll leave you in peace.

@@tconnolly9820 It’s not just the one consumer I’ve heard of having to replace that many motors, it’s quite a few! Admittedly it’s in the mountain biking world where arguably the motors take a bit more of a beating than a cargo or city bike, but still ridiculous. I think that regardless of personal opinion (and there are MANY passionate folks out there on this topic!), that e-bikes are the future of cycling and they open up cycling to so many who otherwise wouldn’t be interested. I think it’s a net gain for all cyclists as it’ll increase infrastructure spending and prices of bikes will eventually fall. However, the growing pains we’re seeing now with a lack of standardisation, brands being very protective over repairing and servicing motors and the increasing pressure from legitimate Chinese manufacturers bringing good products to market but being shunned by many established Western brands isn’t really helping progress. I often think about what happens to older ebikes that have become uneconomical to repair or that have been rendered obsolete because of a lack of serviceable/replaceable parts. In the case of a mid-motor bike, I’ve seen homemade solutions where people have replaced the motor with a bottom bracket adapter plate so at least the bike can live on as a useful bike. I do think though that we’re approaching a time where earlier generations of ebikes are going to start failing more regularly and I’d love to come up with a mass-produced solution to at least adapt them to be regular bikes, but I don’t have the time or resources to go down that rabbit hole! Then let’s not get started about the whole Vanmoof smart ebike company going bust leaving all their bikes basically unusable until someone open sourced a controller to make them work again! Quality control is certainly an issue also. A family member recently bought a gravel bike for almost €2k and it’s been back to the shop several times already for a recurring derailleur issue. It’s a concern that often bike shops aren’t able to repair or properly diagnose issues, and adding the complications of sophisticated motors and electronics isn’t going to help there either. I understand that things get knocked about and bent during shipping, but it’s not very heartening to know that a manufacturer pre-delivery inspection and a shop pre-sale inspection can both miss issues like this. Sorry to hear you’re having problems with your Cube, hopefully they can be rectified quickly!

Ha ha thanks, I'll keep it in mind! I can't pay much, but the kebab will be on me 😉

It was a tough one to swallow 😣🤣 Thanks, glad you were able to discover a new brand!

Yeah the inability to safely carry another person bigger than a toddler is probably the biggest minus point for me about the bike, otherwise it's great! You'd likely save a bit of money over the e-version getting a non-motorised one and converting it yourself too, though I can see it may be a bit too much work for some folks to do a DIY conversion. Maybe a topic for a future video!

I just priced up an Iumentum as cheaply as possible and got it down to €2289 for a complete bike (without a stand though)! I'm not going to deny these prices are quite high, but when you consider that you could spend almost €11,000 on a Riese & Müller Packster or Ca Go FS200, I think it shows there's a market for it and it brings some prices into perspective a bit.

Thanks Sam!

What didn't you like?

Thank you! It's probably for the best we didn't stop, we'd have had less riding shots after a greasy lunch break anyway 😬😬

Ok that settles it, Döner party when I get to 1000 subscribers 🤣

Well below the average usage for an ebike! As I mentioned in the video though, I was over the motor assistance level quite a lot, was in the lowest assistance mode the whole time and even had a tailwind for most of the day so all that definitely helped a lot, but still impressive nonetheless I think!

@@RobRidesCargoBikes yes it's very efficient. on the city bike with similar conditions i get about 3 when i'm in the mood to pedal pretty hard to help the motor, at 25 km / h average maybe 300 metres elevation every 100 km, rider weight 70 kg, bike 25. going much under 3 i think is road bike territory

@@markifi Yeah it's certainly impressive for a cargo bike, especially as I weigh just over 100kg and I had fairly decent load with my camera stuff, food and drinks.

I had a lot of fun on it during my short time with the bike!