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to help her not become lazy and unfit
To my mind, this is a misconception. It will be up to your mum how much she uses the electric assistance. If you think of the e-element as her insurance policy, you could argue that it might encourage her to be bold and make trips that she otherwise wouldn't make.
FWIW - I have several years of experience of delivering inclusive cycling programmes and I'm confident that the likes of Wheels for Wellbeing and their kind would back up my assertion.
I do agree about the weight issue - perhaps look into options where the weight is carried as low as possible to minimise the top-heavy feel.
Re the smaller wheels - my experience is that a bike with smaller wheels can feel more unsteady if your balance is sub-optimal. I'd encourage you to trial a smaller wheeled bike before you give that option too much serious thought.
You've had loads of good advice/responses on here - it's great to see such a supportive response to keeping your mum on two wheels!
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Quincy
@salad
@ioreka ..thank you very much for your elaborate reply, I appreciate it!
She would be using the bike mostly for little shopping tours or visiting friends nearby (for everything else she'd use the car anyway as she lives in a rural area) - so I figured it might be a good idea to do this on a regular bike (instead of an ebike) to help her not become lazy and unfit. Also I thought it's not worth it to spend a lot of money on an ebike for these little trips - but yea, maybe she would consider bigger tours if she had the electrical assist.
To answer your questions on what it is she needs - she specifically asked for a (low) step-through frame, so ideally like these -
Front basket for shopping / handbag would be sufficient I guess as for bigger / more stuff she'd use the car.
Gearing wise it would be good if it went down quite low. She's small, has little stamina, and well, she's old :-)
Looking at it / trying it out in a shop would be great, but not sure that's an option (not many shops where she is, also she's not in the UK but in Germany). So ordering online and me setting it up when I visit her next time will likely be the way to go..
Again thank you for your input!