If you haven’t bought an eBike because of range anxiety or shy away from certain routes because you aren’t sure if your battery will last, Bosch’s new Range Control option may be for you.
What is Bosch Range Control?
Range Control, in a nutshell, is Bosch’s eBike Flow app throttling the amount of assistance your e-bike motor provides based on the predetermined GPS route so you have the battery range you want at the end of your ride.
That was a long run on sentence, so here is a formula:
eBike with Bosch Smart System + Flow App Navigation + Range Control Battery Range decided before your ride = AI controlling your motor output to give you a better battery range at the end.
This new feature can be found on the latest 1.22 Flow App. It is a cool concept but a bit of a bear to use the first time. Let me try to walk you through this in a quick video:
What do you think of this tech so far?
Bosch Range Control AI
Artificial intelligence comes in because it is learning from each ride you take. The first rides will be focused on your speed and elevation graph based on the route, but as you ride more often, it will learn how much your system weighs, how much drag the motor has, your riding style, and, I assume, how healthy your battery is. Every time you ride, Bosch claims that it will become more and more accurate.
Cons of the Range Control System
There are a few nuisances to using this system:
- First, you have to use the phone app and navigation for this to work. I’m not super fond of their mapping system and would prefer to use a physical GPS like Garmin, Wahoo, or Ride with GPS on my phone. This also means your phone needs to be charged enough for the entire ride, and you have somewhere to mount it so you can use their navigation to get the true predictive measurement of AI since this is the route used to predict your elevation and difficulty. Yes, if you have a Kiox, you could rely on their basic follow-the-white-line mapping, but I don’t recommend doing that. You can see above the difference of my phone showing the Bosch navigation vs the Kiox 300.
- The Range Control is not available on S-Pedelecs or when using Auto Mode.
- My last major con is that I must be near my bike with it turned on for all of this to work. I often try to plan routes from my computer so I can look at Google Maps and Ride with GPS heat mapping. I would love for Bosch to have a web version of their navigation that could use the data from my bike to provide an estimated battery range.
Even if this were to plug into their preferred mapping partner, Komoot, I would happily pay for it. Please, use the data from my bike and recent rides to help me plan a trip and understand how my bike range will perform on that ride. In an ideal world, it would also tell me where to charge or hot-swap batteries with eBike battery partners. This is how I plan major EV car trips with a Tesla, and it is invaluable.
Final Thoughts
I don’t see using this in my day-to-day where my rides are 3-4 miles, and I charge up fairly often. I am excited about this for welcome this for my longer rides where I want to explore and don’t have a good sense of my battery range. In fact, my family is currently planning a trip to Acadia National Park, and I may choose to ride a bike with the Bosch eBike Smart System so that I can have Range Control for long days out in the middle of nowhere.
What do you think of this new AI-driven motor support? Let me know in the comments!
If you are thinking about Bosch eBikes or want to learn more about them, make sure to read all of our articles on the Bosch eBike Smart System.
Thanks so much for reading!
-Arleigh
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