This electric folding bike will never* let you down

The papers say that bicycles are “Satan’s hobby horse”.

You should read a better quality of paper. In fact, it’s been proven by scientists that bicycles are the most efficient form of human transport in the universe!

Which is why this one has a cracking big electric motor on it, I suppose?

Of course! Humans love outsourcing effort. Tired of tilling the soil, we made horses. Weary of shackling up multiple horses to the giant ploughs we had bought (after reading a review in Total Clod Mover magazine) we invented the one-box multihorse, AKA tractor.

Horses became horsepowers, farms became mechanised and farmers now control the whole operation from their beds using a Nintendo Classic controller and Google Cardboard headset.

I think you’ve both lost the direction of this story and upset the farming community.

Hey, farmers are bigger geeks than any of us city dweebs. They were embracing computer-controlled cultivation techniques when we were still marvelling at cameraphones.

But, yes, bikes. To answer your broad swipe at electric bikes, the defence is simple. Electric bikes allow people who might not otherwise ride, to ride. Whether their reticence is biomechanical, psychological or geographical, an assisted hog might get them over that hill. Which is one fewer car in the city, one fewer armpit into which you find yourself shoved on public transport.

Ugh. And this particular electric bike?

Is a marvellous bit of packaging. We’ve seen folding electric bikes before, like the Vello Bike+. They tend to have smaller wheelhub-based motors but the Tern Vektron manages to incorporate a big-boy Bosch crankcase motor and battery.

That makes it quite heavy, at 48.8lb, but enough torque to crush steep hills without needing sweatsafe clothes, plus enough range – 40-80 miles, depending on power mode and terrain – that you might go a week’s commuting without needing to charge it.

All this on a bike that’ll origami up small enough to be taken on the train during folders-only peak hours.

If the trains are running.

Well, quite. Tern has been making folding bikes for eons, so should you find yourself faced with an unexpectedly long ride, you can take heart that the geometry, materials and crucial components such as tyres have been chosen to look after you.

Mind you, there’s a price to pay for all that design and engineering: the Vektron is expected to be £3100 when it arrives early next year. Which is probably the upper end of electric bike money right now, but we reckon it’ll be pretty far from your foremost thoughts as you breeze up a hill past endless jammed-up motorists.