Pitfalls to avoid when purchasing an e-bike

Many e-bikes dealers and even manufactures advertise unrealistic performance on one hand or not suffice information on the other hand.

You have to make sure that the performance are backed up by real and accurate measurement.

Here are a couple of points worth considering:

It is widely common to advertise that the battery can sustain 1000 full charge and discharge cycles. 1000 cycles is enough for about 3 years of quite massive use but usually, you will only get one year worth of warranty.
A common traveling distance number that you will see in a lot of advertisement is 30km (or 20miles). It seems like a magic number. It seems like the distance is not affected by the bike components and materials, motor, gears, design and efficiency.I doubt that many of this advertisement are real. I doubt that the retailer has really bother to check the range in the real world. You can't escape from considering whether this amateurish style of work is also radiant on other aspects of the business such as the offered warranty?! and maybe even other misleading information.
Sometimes the range published is based on a specific assistance level. You can't compare two different ranges when one is based on purely electric work and one is based on 25% assistance level. Pay attention for the asterisk (if available) to understand on what the performance are based on.You have to know the assistance level in the case of a pedelec or the assistance of pedaling in the case of an e-bike.
For the first phase of investigation, you can use the e-bike calculator to see if the published data is making any sense at all.

I would like to see in a future, a standardization of e-bike characterization. It should include assistance level or amount of pedaling, different terrains and much much more.

Open your eyes and try to be suspicious about other blur information, be careful and critical.