Mrs. Wow and I had a try on one of these yesterday.We picked it up from Longstanton and rode it, mostly along the Cambridge Guided Busway, to my sister's house in St. Ives.
It was, of course, great fun. We were given the once-over with the controls - there is a small LCD panel with the on-off switch and displays telling you your speed, what gear you are in, how much battery capacity is left, that sort of useful stuff, and two flick-switches, one either side. The right hand operates the gear chance (all electronically powered) and the left hand changes the amount of power being used. There are 4 levels: off, eco, normal and high. You can ride the bike without the power on at all, but you can't change gear if you do. You can also put it in automatic mode, in which it selects gears for you based upon your speed, cadence rate and the amount of effort being put in. I didn't like this when I tried it.
The 7.5 miles to my sister's place took 44 minutes, according to the Garmin. That is considerably faster than our normal moving average on the tandem, and I had it in eco-mode for the entire trip. I really like the busway - an old railway line which has buses zooming along it at high speed, kept on the straight and narrow by sensors on the wheels. There is no barrier between the cyclepath/bridleway and the buses, and my sister told me a horror story about her grandson, profoundly deaf, who was only pulled out of the way of the bus at the last minute by his cousin. When the buses are in guided mode, the driver, it seems, sits back and does not much.
Because of tedious traffic problems in the morning, we arrived at Circe's workshop about 2 hours later than planned. That really cut down on time with my sister, which was very annoying. At 4pm I phoned the shop to see what time they closed, and was asked to be back there by 5. That meant getting on with it, as I had promised my sister and her partner a try. He did fine on the front, but she panicked and didn't get to try it, which was a shame. He rode it round the block and was very entertained by the whole idea.
We set off again at about 4.20 and this time I bunged it in "high" mode and we started pushing. We went almost the entire way in gear 8 and arrived back at 4.50! Mrs Wow and I averaged 15 miles an hour! We've never done that before.
Then came the tetris: could we fit it in the car? Off came the front wheel and the QR bars/seatposts. It just squeezed in diagonally. Could I fit my bike in? Provided I removed both wheels, the bars and the seatpost - not ideal. There was still somewhere let for our granddaughter to sit. We would still have to squeeze a tent in, but that would not be beyond us, I am sure! So, we are going to buy one. It's much lighter and more manageable than our wonderful Thorn tandem, and we can go faster.
One other very nice feature: the Shimano Step motor is on the pilot's bottom bracket. It is a feature of this that the pilot can freewheel whilst the stoker is pedalling. This, of course, leads to the cranks being "out of sync", but more importantly, allows her to say "He's not pedalling at the front!"