Velotric T1 ST Plus

The bike that breaks this site’s superlatives

Most of the other bikes on this site are fat-tire machines weighing between 60 and 110 lb, built around the largest battery the frame will swallow. The Velotric T1 ST Plus is a 39 lb city bike built around not having one, and adding it to our data forced us to rewrite several claims elsewhere that had been true until it arrived.

It is now the lightest bike here, the smallest battery, the lowest torque figure, the lowest rated motor, the narrowest tire and the only 36V system among the twenty-two bikes we cover. It is also the second-dearest stored energy on the site, behind VTUVIA's FMB, which most buyers meet last and should meet first.

What $1,399 buys, measured in watt-hours

Velotric lists the T1 ST Plus at $1,399, reduced from $1,649, as of the price check in our data file on August 27, 2026. The battery is 36V and 9.8Ah. Multiply the two and you get 352.8 watt-hours, which is the only battery figure worth comparing across brands — voltage alone tells you nothing and amp-hours alone tell you nothing. Then divide the price by it: $1,399 ÷ 352.8Wh = $3.97 per watt-hour.

For context, the AMYET V9-G60 works out at $689 ÷ 960Wh, or about $0.72 for the same unit. The T1 charges roughly five and a half times as much per watt-hour as the cheapest energy we cover, and more than the EUNORAU SPECTER-S at $3.57, which held this record until Velotric arrived. Velotric held it in turn until VTUVIA's FMB arrived: $2,999 ÷ 672Wh is $4.46, and the T1 is now second. The dearest bike here is a three-way tie at $2,999 between the SPECTER-S, EUNORAU's SPECTER-ST 2.0 and the FMB — a different record from the dearest watt-hour, though the FMB happens to hold both.

So on the measure that dominates every budget e-bike listing, only the FMB does worse. That is not an accusation, it is the design brief. You are not buying watt-hours here; you are buying the absence of them, and everything the absence makes possible.

The 70-mile claim, and the footnote nobody else prints

Velotric claim up to 70 miles on pedal assist. They also print the conditions, which is the genuinely unusual thing: a 187-lb rider using PAS 1 in Eco mode on flat roads. No other brand on this site states test conditions at all — not AMYET, not VTUVIA, not EUNORAU. Their range numbers arrive bare.

Take Velotric’s own figures and divide: 352.8Wh ÷ 70 miles = 5.04Wh per mile. Five watt-hours a mile is a very light draw. It is achievable on a 40c tire at the lowest assist level with a rider doing most of the work, which is exactly the scenario the footnote describes. It is not a commute.

That is a wide gap between claim and use, but an honestly framed one, and the framing matters more than the number: a brand that tells you the rider weighed 187 lb and rode flat roads at PAS 1 has handed you the tools to discount its own claim. Our range guide sets out the method.

Thirty-nine pounds is the specification

The next lightest whole-bike figure we cover is the VTUVIA SF20H at 60 lb — Velotric’s Discover M also states 60 lb, but excludes its fenders, kickstand and pedals from that figure, so it is not the same measurement — and the heaviest, EUNORAU’s FLASH and SPECTER-S, are both about 110 lb. The T1 weighs a little over half what a 70 lb fat-tire bike weighs, which is not a refinement of the same experience but a different one.

Weight decides a set of ordinary questions that specification sheets never ask. Whether you can lift the bike onto a car rack without help. Whether it goes up one flight of stairs to a flat or stays locked to a railing overnight. If neither is your problem, the 39 lb saves you nothing and you should buy watt-hours instead.

Everything else follows from it. The rigid 6061 aluminium fork on a 12 × 100 mm thru-axle is not a cost saving — Velotric fit an 80 mm hydraulic lock-out fork to both dearer bikes in the range — it is a weight decision. The 160 mm rotors are the smallest here, where every other published figure is 180 mm, and that follows too: there is far less bike to stop. The 350W rated motor, 600W peak and 40 Nm are the three lowest such figures we publish, and on a 39 lb frame they read differently than they would on a 70 lb one.

The torque sensor on the cheapest bike in the range

The most interesting fact about Velotric is an inversion. The T1 ST Plus is the cheapest of the six bikes we cover from the brand, and it is the only one with a torque sensor alone. Both the Nomad 1 Plus at $1,899 and the Packer 1 at $2,199 use cadence sensors; the three Discovers, all of them dearer, combine the two.

A cadence sensor asks one question — are the cranks turning — and if the answer is yes, it delivers whatever assist level the display is set to. Your effort is not part of the sum. A torque sensor measures how hard you are pushing and scales the motor to match, so the assist rises as you stand on the pedals and recedes when you soft-pedal.

On a battery this small the sensor is doing a second job. Because assist tracks effort rather than sitting at a fixed output, a torque-sensed bike spends more of a mixed ride below the level you selected, and so draws less over the ride as a whole. On 352.8Wh that is not a nicety; it is part of how the arithmetic above survives contact with a road.

700 × 40c, and where you cannot take it

The tires are KENDA 700 × 40c on 700c rims: the largest rim diameter on this site, on much the narrowest rubber. A 40 mm tire at road pressure rolls with a fraction of the drag of a 4-inch fat tire at the low pressures fat tires want, which is the other half of why a small battery goes as far as it does. It gives up everything on sand, packed snow and loose gravel, and with a rigid fork it will report every ridge and drain cover to you in detail. Our fat tire guide explains where that line falls; the T1 sits firmly on the road side of it.

Braking is TEKTRO hydraulic rather than mechanical, and the drivetrain is a Shimano 8-speed, 11–32T. Top speed ships at 20 MPH and adjusts from 12 to 28 MPH, so the bike is Class 1 or Class 3 depending on where you set it — and where you may legally ride it changes with that setting.

The certification story

Velotric state UL 2849 for the bike, UL 2271 Recognized for the battery, UL 2580 for the Samsung or LG 21700 cells inside it, and ISO 4210 compliance for the frame. The bike is rated IPX6 and the battery IPX7.

That is four standards named on one listing, and the most complete certification claim on this site — one every Velotric here repeats. All six state both UL numbers. Outside the brand, only VTUVIA’s SF20H names both, and it names neither the cell standard nor ISO 4210 — the SF20H is also $1,399, so the two tie as the cheapest here stating both. EUNORAU’s META26 states nothing at all, and of the VTUVIAs only the SF20H names a standard. If you live in a flat this may be the whole decision, since a growing number of US buildings and insurers ask for certification in writing before a bike may be charged indoors.

What Velotric does not publish

Velotric does not publish a charge time for this bike, or for any of the other five. It publishes no warranty terms in the specification block, only in its own policy pages. And the T1 comes in one frame size, Regular, and one colour, Lava — the media library holds a full set of Sand images, but Sand is not an option you can buy, and a photograph is not a product.

Set against that, this is the only brand here that publishes the conditions behind its range claims, and the only one naming a cell standard. The silences are narrow ones.

Where it sits

Within Velotric’s own six the T1 is the outlier. Against the Nomad 1 Plus it gives up 338Wh, 400W of rated motor, 35 Nm, a suspension fork, a throttle and 110 lb of payload ceiling, and saves $500 and about 31 lb. Against the Packer 1 it gives up all of that plus a 176 lb rack and four-piston brakes, and saves $800. Against the wider field it is barely competing: at the same $1,399 the SF20H gives you 672Wh, 85 Nm and the same pair of UL numbers at 60 lb, and the AMYET S8 gives you 1,200Wh for $1,049.

Buy the T1 ST Plus if weight is the problem you are actually solving — stairs, a rack, a lift, a hallway — and if your riding is tarmac. On those terms nothing else here comes close, because nothing else here is within twenty-one pounds of it. Skip it if you want range, value per watt-hour, a hill answered or a rough surface smoothed; forty newton-metres and 352.8 watt-hours will not do any of those, and no amount of careful riding changes the division. If energy is what you are shopping for, the Velotric range is the wrong place to look.