Ride1Up slashes Prodigy price to cheapest Brose e-bike in history amid overstock

I've heard sketchy things about Ride1Up from a bike mechanic in one of my local mountain bike chats. He said something about them using proprietary spokes and the shop having to throw hands with the OEM. Took two months for them to get the spokes mailed into the shop.

That put me off of buying R1U. The two brands I considered buying from were Juiced Bikes and Aventon, both of which I grilled and cross examined closely with their support teams. Juiced seems to be using a fairly good number of relatively off the shelf or replaceable parts. Some third party sites sell stuff like planar gears for the motors, and Juiced itself reuses a lot of parts across its product stack (wheels, displays, batteries (and XLR chargers), throttles, motor controllers, all of which can be bought on the site)

Aventon is a bit less repairable yourself, but has shop support all over. They were committed to keeping batteries for a number of years, but they aren't standardized across the lineup.

In the end, I went with Juiced and have put 634 miles on my bike in the past few months, largely without issue (some of the factory screws were too tight and stripped when I was replacing my motor controller with a more powerful variant. Other than that, no issue)