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When discussing the two types of e-bike motors, the best mid-drive e-bikes and hub-drive e-bikes give riders a surprisingly different riding experience. With one, you only need to work as much as you want. With the other, you’re involved.

It’s a little more complicated than this, but I think it’s automatic vs. stick shift.

Most mid-drive motors use a torque sensor to judge when to turn the motor on and off. They also add an additional layer to the experience. By detecting how much pressure is on the pedals, they allow the motor to change how much it helps you pedal.

From the moment a rider pushes down on a pedal, the motor springs to life. Power addition and subtraction come in proportion to the rider’s effort. Furthermore, the proportion of power applied is determined by which PAS level the rider has selected.

While the experience of riding a mid-drive e-bike is natural and seamless, it also means that the rider is going to have to work harder to go faster. A Class 3 mid-drive e-bike, for example, won’t go 28 mph without the rider making some real effort.

We’ve tested a myriad of e-bikes with mid-drive motors and have selected a handful of options that we consider to be the best. Whether you want a relaxed city cruiser or a tough and active trekking bike, look no further for the best mid-drive electric bikes!

• Ride1UP Prodigy V2
• Aventon Ramblas
• Specialized Turbo Vado SL 2
• Trek Allant+ 8s
• Tenways AGO X
• Specialized Turbo Como 3.0 IGH
• Vvolt Centauri II
• Borealis Keystone
• Specialized Turbo Levo Comp Carbon
• Tern Quick Haul Long D9
• Trek Marlin+ 8

One of the best practical applications for e-bikes might be the all-American pastime of hunting. Hunters using e-bikes can conserve energy, access more remote locations, and haul heavy loads of gear or game more easily than on foot.

This list of the best electric hunting bikes highlights some e-bike brands that deal semi-exclusively in e-bikes for hunters, fishers, and overlanders. These companies offer a wide assortment of accessories and add-ons to make the job easier, and many of their e-bikes even come in camouflage color schemes!

Our list also showcases some quality-built e-bike options made for more general off-roading purposes. These may be less directly geared toward outdoorsmen (and women), but they can still be a significant upgrade to your hunting experience.

So what differentiates a top hunting e-bike from the pack? Many factors are involved, but these electric bikes tend to have powerful motors for tackling tough terrain as well as high-capacity batteries to support off-road riding with large amounts of weight.

Hunting e-bikes often sport large tires with aggressive tread and at least some sort of suspension to make off-road riding more comfortable. Many also include cargo racks for carrying game or gear between the truck and the tree stand.

Before we discuss the benefits of hunting e-bikes further – and reveal Electric Bike Report’s picks for the best electric bikes for hunting – there are a few important things to consider:

First, while hunters are free to use e-bikes as they wish on private land, agencies like the US Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) limit the areas where these vehicles can be operated on public land. It’s important to thoroughly research the laws and regulations governing e-bikes where you plan to hunt.

Second, we perform range tests to determine the distance most riders should expect to travel on a single charge, but hunters hauling a lot of gear, towing a trailer, or riding over difficult terrain should expect significantly less range than we achieved. It’s likely best to make conservative estimates or spring for upgraded/additional batteries when possible.

Those caveats aside, electric bikes have many additional benefits to help you blaze a faster trail to your next 12-point buck. With sound and scent being some of the most important factors when hunting, e-bikes make minimal noise and emit no odor, giving them distinct advantages over gas-powered ATVs or UTVs.

Whether using e-bikes to scout potential hunting areas or travel to an established location faster, e-bikes can provide relief to aging hunters with physical limitations. E-bikes can also help hunters avoid sweating and overheating, which can quickly lead to shivering in the colder months.

Now that you know some of the benefits e-bikes can offer, see below for a list of models we consider to be the best electric bikes for hunting!

Our Best Electric Bikes for Hunting for 2025

Affordability and value are often used interchangeably, but when purchasing a product like an e-bike, the distinction between the two is crucial. An affordable product may have a low price, but as indicated by the phrase “you get what you pay for,” it may not provide good value.

In this list of the Best Value Electric Bikes, we explain the importance of shopping smart before sharing our picks for the e-bikes we feel provide the most bang for your buck.

That’s the key here; the e-bikes that provide the best value are those that include the highest quality components, the most features, and/or the best performance for the dollar. They may not have the lowest prices, but they do equate to a good buy that you’d have a tough time beating elsewhere.

In many cases, the market is saturated with similar models from different brands – and options that may be cheaper but are of dubious quality. The following e-bikes are those that we’d consider buying for ourselves, as they offer the highest ratio of quality and performance for every dollar.

Our Best Value E-Bikes for 2025

Riding bikes with your kids can be amazing fun. It’s a great way to connect with family and be active outside. Fun as it can be, keeping everyone together can be a challenge. Kids have shorter legs and ride on bikes with both smaller wheels and smaller gears. The bike world now has a solution for that: E-bikes for kids.

An e-bike for kids offers some great opportunities for parents, as well as a few areas for reasonable concern. The big opportunity is that if your child is riding an e-bike, it will be easier to keep everyone together. Kids can hit their endurance limit both hard and unexpectedly. A throttle can keep a fun spin from becoming a death march home.

One of the other terrific benefits of an e-bike made for kids is that it is much easier for them to reach a speed sufficient to balance. Of course, there’s also reason to be concerned: A tiny person moving faster than you can run can be pretty scary.

We took a hard look at the e-bikes out there—there are more than you might guess—and have rounded up the best options in a number of different categories. Rather than divide the bikes according to use, we’ve organized them according to the age group they are most likely to fit. We’ve done our best to include objective sizing based on rider height because what parent hasn’t had the experience of buying a shirt for a six-year-old that fell to their knees?

Knowing the ways our kids have sometimes displayed more enthusiasm than judgment, we’ve weighted our collection toward those e-bikes that enable a parent to restrict the e-bike’s top speed. More control provides greater safety until you see how much control and skill the child can exercise over the e-bike while riding.

Our list begins with e-bikes for kids young enough to learn how to ride, and we follow them all the way up until they are big enough to begin riding adult-sized e-bikes. While we’ve assigned age ranges for each of these e-bikes, the fact is that most of them can accommodate riders well outside those narrow ranges.

You’ll find a broader sense of who they fit in each of our reviews. To get these age ranges, we took the manufacturer’s sizing recommendations and then correlated them with Centers for Disease Control data on height.

The youngest age in our range corresponds to children in the 75th percentile of height for their age, and the oldest age in our range corresponds to children in the 25th percentile—from the youngest kids who might reasonably fit an e-bike to the oldest kids who might fit it.

• Best Electric Bike for 8-9 Year Olds: JackRabbit OG
• Best Electric Bike for 10-12 Year Olds:Lectric XP Lite 2.0
• Best Electric Bike for 13-15 Year Olds:Aventon Soltera
• Best Electric Bike for 16+ Year Olds: Ride1UP Portola
• Best Electric Mountain Bike for Kids: Specialized Turbo Levo SL Kids
• Best Electric Mountain Bike for Teens: Trek Marlin+

Calling an e-bike “cheap” is a risky proposition. That you’re looking at this right now means you’re probably looking for an e-bike, but have a budget that is at least snug, if not tight. But as members of the media, we have to be careful when we call something cheap because readers might think we are saying the product suffers from poor quality. Hopefully, using the words “best” and “cheap” together in the title clued you in to our purpose, which is to round up a number of e-bikes that won’t break the bank, or out on the road.

When we look at the great many e-bikes that go for less than $1500, or even less than $1000, we see some terrific e-bikes that do a terrific job of balancing quality while not forcing someone to empty their wallet.

Shoppers of Alibaba, Amazon and Ebay can find e-bikes that go for less than even the least expensive that we’ve included here. And they aren’t included here for a several reasons. We’ve reviewed every one of the e-bikes on this page and found them to meet our standards for performance and safety while keeping their price as low as it can responsibly be. Some of them have even been awards a top overall pick for 2025!

As with most things in life, the e-bikes that look to be too good to be true invariably are. If a company is advertising an e-bike with a 1000W motor for $600, run, don’t walk. We’ve vetted these e-bikes with rides to test their range, their power and their braking.

Put another way, these are the e-bikes we would refer our friends and family to if they said they needed to squeeze all the pennies.

• Best Cheap Multi-Purpose Electric Bike: Lectric XP 3.0
• Best Cheap Folding Electric Bike: Ride1UP Portola
• Best Cheap Step-Through Electric Bike: Aventon Pace 500.3 ST
• Best Cheap Touring Electric Bike: Ride1UP Turris
• Best Cheap Electric Bike for Off-Road Riding: Rad Power Bikes RadRover 6 Plus
• Best Cheap Lightweight Electric Bike: Aventon Soltera.2
• Most Stylish Cheap Electric Bike: Electric Bike Co. Model A
• Best Cheap Micro Electric Bike: JackRabbit
• Best Cheap Cargo Electric Bike: Lectric XPedition