The electric assist controller and the battery charging instructions are written entirely in Japanese and my Japanese is pretty rudimentary, so I had to get some help with translation. This bike is really, truly a Japanese bike and it has some quirks. The bars next to the plug symbol indicate how much charge is left in the battery. The pedal assist controller: Off at the top, On in the middle, and Eco at the bottom. On mild to moderate hills the assist is helpful although not always necessary, but even with the assist it is still work to crank that much weight up a steep hill. Guys wearing lycra on light road bikes pass us going uphill, although we pass regular commuters. With a 35 pound preschooler on the back the combined weight makes this bike really slow, even with the assist. It does not have a throttle: if you want power, you have to pedal. The motor, which sits in the rear hub, is not especially powerful compared to the BionX-assisted Big Dummy I rode in Portland it is several years old and a first generation pedal-assist and evidently Japanese bicycles limit the power anyway. My mamachari is a single-speed and it weighs 65 pounds.
This particular bike and its assist do not work miracles.
So for the past three weeks I’ve had the option, when I want to, of riding an electric pedal-assist bicycle. When I saw it on craigslist, I assumed that given the less-than-a-new-bike-at-Walmart price that there must be something wrong with the electric assist. Last month I mentioned that I bought a mamachari. The Bridgestone Assista, brought to us by the Land of the Rising Sun
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