What are Fat Tire Electric Bicycles?

In today’s e-bike market, when you are browsing e-bike websites or brick-and-mortar stores, you are sure to run into Fat Tire electric bicycles. These days they have gained great popularity in the e-bike industry, evolving among manufactures, dealers, and professional riders. As a novice in the e-bike market, while you are consuming plenty of time selecting your favorite product, do you know what exactly a Fat Tire e-bike is and why these models are so widespread?

The definition of a “Fat Tire” varies from website to website. Some believe that Fat Tires refer to any tire that is 3.5 inches or wider, while other strict regulations require the minimum size to reach over 4 inches. Besides, Fat Tires often lower than other bike tires, but allow for a larger contact area between the tire and the ground you’re riding on. At first, the trend started with mountain bikes used in snow or sand. After a short period, people noticed that this kind of design was also capable of traversing diverse terrain types including desert, bogs, mud, pavement, and traditional mountain biking trails. These days, the trend has taken over the e-bike field, and e-bikes with Fat Tires have become the choice of off-road enthusiasts.

What makes Fat Tire e-bikes outstanding?

Fat Tire e-bikes have many advantages over traditional designs. In short, thanks to its large surface, Fat Tire e-bikes can provide a better ride quality by adding more stability and traction to your riding experience.

Stability

You may wonder if Fat Tire's design is redundant for you if all you need is an e-bike for commuting around the city. The answer is that this is not the case. While you'll spend most of your time riding on tarmac, an e-bike isn't a motor vehicle, so you'll be able to navigate through corners, alleyways, obstacles, bicycle lanes, and smaller roads in cities. While some areas can be difficult to navigate with normal bikes and high-speed e-bikes - In these cases, the Fat Tire design can help. Because of the larger contact area, there is more friction between the tires and the ground on Fat Tire e-bikes, providing greater stability that is crucial to ensuring safe cycling, especially given the e-bike's fast speed.

Apart from that, if you hit some bad weather during your commutes, such as heavy snow or muddy roads, the Fat Tire e-bike will get a chance to shine. Roads will be slippery on rainy or snowy days, decreasing the friction between bicycle tires and the ground. Without a contact area large enough to support the bike, it's easy to lose balance while riding. This problem has plagued many bicyclists, who often have to take buses or taxis in bad weather instead, increasing the cost of commuting and making it very inconvenient. For Fat Tire e-bike this kind of weather and environment is no problem at all. It can easily overcome the challenge and run smoothly in bad weather to ensure riders’ safety without losing a lot of speed.

Moreover, Fat Tire e-bikes are easy to get the hang of riding because of the better all-around control and balance. For a complete e-bike novice, Fat Tire e-bikes offer an easy chance to learn and master the skills of cycling thus helping them to discover the joy of off-road cycling.

Traction

Also due to greater surface area, the Fat Tire e-bike has stronger traction, which allows it to withstand gusty winds instead of being overturned by its strong power. If you live in the Great Plains of the American Midwest, strong winds can make cycling difficult but a Fat Tire e-bike can use its powerful grip to keep itself firmly to the ground and hurl freely on windy days. So you don’t need to skip your cycling exercise because of this. If you live in Alaska it feels like the howling winds can sometimes send your bike flying out into the Arctic Ocean 😉 but a powerful Fat Tire e-bike can ride over ice and snow. Of course, a fat tire bicycle can not move in the snow as high as your height in any case, but compared with the ordinary bicycle, the Fat Tire e-bike is undoubtedly more suitable for this cold lifestyle.

Weight

Considering the size of the wheels, it can be hard for people to ride ordinary Fat Tires bikes. Because of this many people have seen Fat Tire bikes just as exercise bikes and not as easy riding cruiser bikes. It’s true that with Fat Bikes, riders need to push the pedal hard to reach the speed of a traditional bike and that this kind of exercise works many parts throughout the body, burning fat and gaining muscle. But If you don’t want to get that much exercise, with an e-bike Fat Tire the engine can help you get rid of the bike's weight. No need to ride hard, an e-bike will offset the added resistance by firing up the motor, enabling you to cruise to your destination.

Now if all this made you excited about Fat Tire e-Bikes please check out Dirwin Seeker and Seeker Step-Thru which are a great choices also for beginners!