ChrisF wrote: 23 Jul 2026, 8:36pm
Cugel wrote: 23 Jul 2026, 7:26am
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.......So I'm interested to hear what you found "awkward" about Fazua and what of it's nature you didn't get on with.
My aluminium e-gravel bike weighed nearly 17kg. I didn't like the clunky effect of the clutch disengaging often when changing gears. I found the combined motor/battery unit quite heavy to manhandle (my partner also has a Fazua bike and she dropped the unit onto her toe, causing it- the toe - to break). Her unit also malfunctioned and needed a firmware upgrade and reboot to get it working again, My unit developed an electrical fault (kept cutting out) which needed dealer intervention.
The motor arrangement can't be as efficient as hub motors or in-line bottom bracket motors. Having to transfer the torque through 90 degrees looses some power. As per the rise of FWD vehicles to avoid this?
Sadly, Porsche have binned their development of the Fazua system. Happily the spares, which are of very good quality and easily user-installable, will continue to be be made and marketed. Not that even the now eight year old Fazua-equipped bike has ever needed any yet.
There must be a reason they have discontinued it. Perhaps others also found problems, but you have been lucky?
The Fazua motor doesn't disengage when one changes gears. Any clunk is due to the chain being under strain from the power input of the motor when the gear is changed. It's easy to set the motor ramp up/down times to avoid this via the same procedure one adopts to avoid changing-clunks when there's no motor in the bike - momentarily stop putting heavier efforts into the chain in favour of just enough to keep the chain turning so the gear can change smoothly.
The motor/battery unit weighs about 3.5 kg. It fits the thumb & forefinger grip of one hand easily, unless one has very small hands. Is that too heavy and awkward to learn how to deal with? I suppose so for some. But then so is changing a light bulb or mending a puncture.
A firmware update rarely gets made to fix faults but rather to improve performance. I've updated my Fazua firmware twice, on all three bikes, via the USB connection to a computer, with no issue. It worked just as well before each update as after it.
Like all bike components, e-motors and their parts need to be cleaned and maintained. One of the Fazua bikes did have an issue (after 7 years use) with losing power before the battery indicated full depletion but it was fixed by a clean of the various connections inside the battery and a cell rebalancing, all accessible via the screwed-together battery casing. Another bike had a cut out of power one cold winter day, fixed by removing the battery for a wipe of some condensation that had frozen on the battery-to-motor connector.
One can easily avoid dealer-fixes (and their large charges) by learning basic maintenance procedures for bicycle bits and pieces, including e-motors and batteries. I think I've had two of my bikes fixed twice by a dealer, in 66 years of cycling. Three times, mind, if one counts the cleaning and cell-rebalancing mentioned above - done by a qualified electrician rather than me ,,, although I've since learnt how to do it myself.
The various efficiencies of power transfer in the different e-bike motor designs is a complex thing. No doubt they all absorb some of the motor power in the transmission arrangements to a degree. Some types of motor are very efficient at some rev-rates and power-production points and less so at others. For example, hub motors are generally not as efficient as mid-motors at low speeds - which tends to be the sort of speed when one needs a motor most, such as when going up steep hills.
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Still, for many cyclists a motor and peripherals need to be as simple and maintenance-free as possible, since many cyclists are rather modern and don't want to be involved with the technicalities, preferring a black box that "just works". Is the Boost system a simpler and more robust system, in this regard, than a Fazua or any other e-bike motor system? One feels that any such comparison will have results dependent on the cyclists using the various motor systems ..... but more objective measurements could possibly be made.
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Porsche apparently abandoned e-bikes altogether "to concentrate on their core business of making motor cars". They abandoned their own e-bike motor productions as well as those of Fazua, which they bought some years ago. I doesn't seem to have happened because of any particular issue with the Fazua design.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
