 Nearly a year ago, I emailed Wave Electric Bikes about their Wave Beach Cruiser, which claims to be the world's most affordable e-bike ever at $599 USD for early backers, available through Indiegogo. It seemed too good to be true. And it was. The Wave 1.0 was a terrible bike with a shady crowdfunding campaign, but more on that later. So, they've sent us the follow-up, the Wave 2.0. Is it the improvement they need to re-earn consumer trust? Or is it just a slightly less terrible bike with a slightly less terrible marketing strategy? TunnelBear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. Try TunnelBear for free at the link in the video description. The Wave 2.0 is a non-crowdfunded bike that is currently listed on Wave Electric Bikes website for $1,000. The box comes with a big red warning stating that professional assembly is required, if you don't opt for the $95 charge in the checkout to have someone come and do it for you. Though the included instructions seemed pretty clear to me, so I, apparently, took my life into my own hands by putting it together myself. I guess I won't be able to make any warranty claims. Now that it's assembled, let's see what we've got. The Wave 2.0 features a 750 watt brushless hub motor, six speeds, and a reported 25 mile per hour top speed, with 23 miles of range using the throttle only and 40 miles with pedal assist. These numbers are likely thanks to the 500 watt hour battery with Samsung cells and the aluminum frame, both of which are big upgrades over the Wave 1.0's generic cells and steel frame. And my real world numbers actually get reasonably close to those. I've got to give them credit for that, considering that Wave Electric Bikes obtained these numbers with a 165 pound rider on perfectly flat terrain with no stopping. But electrical components aside, as a bike, the Wave 2.0 just feels kind of cheaply made. The handlebars have a lot of play no matter how much you tighten everything. It doesn't come with fenders or a quick release on the front wheel. The pedals are plastic, the brakes squeak horribly when wet, the motor shudders as it starts up, the luxury stitching on the handlebar grips is already coming undone, the kickstand has already broken, my battery case arrived with a crack in it, and the rack is useless to hold any pannier bags because the battery is completely in the way unless you raise it slightly with washers like I did. That would have cost them what, 25 cents? Furthermore, there's no deceleration curve for the motor controller, so it abruptly cuts in and out as you go below and above 20 miles per hour. The only way to avoid this is by switching the bike to off-road mode, which instantly removes the speed limitation and allows the bike to put out full power regardless of speed, making it very explicitly not street legal in parts of the United States and Canada. Make of that what you will, not everyone is concerned that their vehicle isn't street legal. One thing I do like about it is the fact that the front and rear lights are both powered by the main battery and can be turned on and off with the press of a button, though I wish they were significantly brighter. And the complaints don't end there. The LED display has no odometer, wattmeter, speedometer, or estimated remaining range. It just has readouts for battery and pedal assist levels. And if you want no pedal assist, you have to turn the entire thing off for some reason. Also, it can be difficult to distinguish the buttons or the LEDs from one another, especially if you're wearing gloves. So overall, the Wave 2.0 is just a cheaply made bike. I wouldn't pay $1,000 for it, and neither should you. So what happened here? Why is it so lame? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I did promise to look into the history of Wave electric bikes, and wow, did I dig up some dirt. The Indiegogo campaign for the Wave 1.0 e-bike ultimately raised $1.1 million, and once they had the money, their promises began slipping away. Delivery dates were pushed back multiple times. The Samsung batteries were changed to generic cells. The one-year warranty vanished. The promised top speed and total range were decreased. When the bikes finally started shipping, customers received parts that were damaged, incorrect, non-functional, or just missing. In all fairness, some customers are happy with their purchase, but many are not, and these folks are still posting angry comments on the Indiegogo page, demanding refunds and decrying the lack of communication from Wave electric bikes. I spoke to my contact about all of this, and he said that, We definitely had some issues, but we were able to resolve these issues and produce the Wave 2.0 without any of these issues. Really? What brand of alternative facts are these? Because more than one and a half years later, some of the original backers have still not received their Wave 1.0 bicycles. And it gets a lot worse. While the campaign was still active, someone posted this image comparing the Wave 1.0 e-bike to a seemingly identical bike from Alibaba.com, available for $400. But upon closer examination, it's... Yeah, it's exactly the same bike. Turns out there's a company that's literally called OEM Bicycle that sells these bikes in lots of 100, and they told me they've been doing so since 2014, before the Wave Indiegogo campaign even launched. And they're currently doing the exact same thing with the Lady Wave, or should I say, the OEM EN 15194. That would be pretty disturbing, since reselling a product is against Indiegogo's terms of service. Digging deeper, I found this forum post, which points out similarities between Wave's branding and music, taken from Rad Power Bikes, and I also discovered that Wave's logo is almost identical to Wave Broadband's logo. Is there anything they didn't rip off? My contact at Wave Electric Bikes denies that any of these things are ongoing problems, and even says that it's the Alibaba vendors who are copying Wave and not the other way around. And that Wave 1.0 customers and Wave 2.0 customers are completely unrelated. Whatever that means. Because I don't agree. It looks like the Wave 2.0 has the same frame design, brakes, LED display, battery case, motor, and motor controller as the Wave 1.0. I wouldn't be surprised if OEM Bicycle, or some other Chinese vendor, is still supplying Wave Electric Bikes with parts or even entire bicycles. But because the Wave 2.0 is not crowdfunded, there's nothing inherently wrong with this. And lots of Chinese products are marked up and resold for much higher margins than what I believe Wave is taking. But none of that changes that the Wave 2.0 is a cheap bike, sold by a sketchy company with a track record of disappointing and misleading its customers. They say they've moved on to a different business model, but some of the Wave 1.0 backers and all of the Lady Wave backers have still not received their bikes. Despite the fact that you can currently buy them straight from WaveElectricBikes.com, which is making the backers very upset. Which leads us to a pretty clear conclusion. There are some significant and unavoidable costs associated with building a good e-bike. So you're probably not going to find one for less than $1,000. If that's too expensive for you, my completely unbiased advice is to just get yourself a regular bike from a well-established brand like Specialized, Giant, or Trek. Or you could get a moped or even a fixer-upper motorcycle if you're mechanically inclined. Just don't buy anything from WaveElectricBikes at least until they've made things right with their current outstanding Indiegogo supporters. And always remember kids, if a crowdfunding campaign looks too good to be true, it probably is. FreshBooks Cloud Accounting software has been redesigned from the ground up. It's custom-built for how you want to work, and it's a simple way to be more productive and organized. Create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds and see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to those guessing games. For your unrestricted 30-day free trial, head over to freshbooks.com forward slash tech tips and enter Linus Tech Tips in the Where You Heard About Us section. Thanks for watching guys. Leave a comment below about your favorite bike or electric bike. Don't forget to hit the like button or the dislike button or both. Ah, that doesn't work. Get subscribed because we've got a lot more electric vehicle reviews on the horizon. And click up here for the last crowdfunding e-vehicle that I hated, the FlyKly SmartPad.