Why standover, reach and crank length decide whether an electric bike gets ridden, what a bad fit actually costs, and how the rest of this site is organized.
An electric bicycle that does not fit gets ridden for about three weeks. It then sits against the garage wall behind the recycling bins, fully charged, and the owner tells people the battery was disappointing. That is almost never what happened. What happened, in most of the cases worth studying, is that the bike was too long in the reach, too tall over the top tube, or too heavy to lift off its kickstand on a slope, and the rider stopped choosing it for short trips. The money is already spent by then, which is the part that matters.
What a poor fit actually costs
Start with the obvious number: the purchase price, typically somewhere between a low four-figure sum and a good deal more once a rack, lights and a decent lock are added. That money is not fully recoverable. Used electric bicycles sell slowly and at a discount, partly because buyers are wary of a battery with unknown cycles on it, and partly because the resale market for a bike that did not suit its first owner is thin by definition. Add the sales tax, the assembly fee, and any accessories cut to fit. The real cost of the wrong frame is the whole outlay minus a resale figure that is usually disappointing.
Then there is the cost that does not show up on a receipt. A bicycle bought to replace car trips that instead replaces nothing has a running cost of whatever the car was going to cost anyway, plus the depreciation on an unused asset. Retrofits rarely close the gap. A shorter stem, a setback-reversed seatpost and shorter cranks can move the fit by a useful margin, but they cannot shrink a standover height, and the parts bill for that experiment runs into the hundreds before labor.
Why wattage and range claims are the wrong first question
Motor output and advertised range are the two figures printed largest, and they are the two that vary least in practice among bikes a rider is realistically choosing between. A 500-watt hub motor and a 750-watt hub motor both climb the same neighborhood hill; the difference is felt in a narrow band of steep, loaded starts. Range claims are laboratory conditions, and every manufacturer knows it. Meanwhile the difference between a 28-inch standover and a 25-inch standover is felt at every single stop sign, by every rider whose inseam sits below about 29 inches, forever.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission oversees bicycle safety requirements in the United States, including the mechanical standards a bike must meet before it is sold here, and that regulatory floor covers brakes, reflectors and structural integrity rather than whether a given frame suits a given body. Fit is left entirely to the buyer. That is not a flaw in the system so much as a statement about where responsibility sits: no agency is going to tell a 5-foot-2 rider that the small in a particular line is a medium with a different sticker, so the checking falls to the person writing the check.
What was actually measured here
The material on this site comes from two sources. The first is a run of shop test rides, taken over several months at three dealers, where each candidate bike was measured before it was ridden: standover height at the crotch of the top tube, effective reach from saddle nose to grip, crank arm length in millimeters, brake lever reach at full adjustment, and total weight on a bathroom scale with the battery installed. The second is a year of ordinary use on one bike: grocery runs, a bike path with a steep access ramp, and a garage with a two-inch lip at the door.
The lip mattered more than expected. A bike in the low fifties of pounds is manageable rolling and awkward lifted, and the difference between a rider who takes the bike out on a marginal errand and one who does not often comes down to whether that lift is a nuisance or a project. Step-through geometry helps here, which is one reason the frames marketed as an e bike for women often suit shorter riders of any description, though the label describes the marketing category more honestly than it describes the engineering.
How the rest of these pages are organized
The sequence follows the order the decisions should be made in. Frame geometry comes first, because standover and reach are fixed at purchase and cannot be adjusted afterward. Component sizing comes second, since crank length, handlebar width, brake lever reach and saddle choice are all changeable, at a known parts cost, and are worth treating as a budget line rather than a dealbreaker. Handling weight comes third, covering the stairs, the car rack and the curb. Motor, battery and range come last, not because they are unimportant, but because by that point the field has narrowed to bikes the rider can actually operate.
Each page states what was measured, on what bikes, and where the measurement stops being reliable. Nothing here is for sale, and no manufacturer supplied a test bike.
The useful test at the shop is short and slightly undignified: stand over the top tube in the shoes worn for riding, and if there is clearance, ride the bike to the end of the block and stop four times. Four stops tell more than four specification sheets, because the stop is where a bad fit announces itself, and where a good one quietly stops being noticeable at all.