Es are good! Es are good! How are they good? Let us count the ways. Ten of them to be precise, as we kick-off E-Bike Live Week here on mbr.

1. Your own personal uplift

Since you can ride the climbs much more quickly on a e-bike, you get to do more of the fun stuff and, in our book, that’s riding downhill. An e-bike is also a great tool for practicing lines and dialling-in technical sections, because you can repeat trails so much more easily, and this ultimately improves your skill level.

Read more: Best electric mountain bikes – join the riding revolution!

2. The great leveller

On an e-bike ride everyone rides at the same pace, so no one gets left behind. You don’t have to wait for stragglers and no one gets the hump because they never get a rest. Best of all, you can chat on the way up rather than having to gasp for breath pretending it’s not hurting. E-bikes make group rides more sociable and more fun.

3. Training tool

We all ride to escape our normal lives but sometimes it gets in the way and over the winter months you can lose easily fitness. An e-bike will get you back on track, because the different levels of assistance let you choose when to go hard. You’ll also never get stranded in the middle of nowhere totally exhausted; an e-bike will get you home.

4. Every mountain is a molehill

Getting to the top of a bloody great big hill is a challenge but most are often off-limits to all but the strongest riders. An e-bike allows you ride places you’ve always wanted to go but never had the fitness. E-bikes literally open up a whole new world where everything is suddenly within reach.

5. Young at heart

An e-bike is like taking human growth hormone without the side effects. It allows you to roll back the years and keep up with riders half your age. You can also pack twice as much riding into the same amount of time, ride more frequently because you don’t need so much time to recover, and knock out miles any cross-country pro would be proud of.

6. Tackle technical terrain

Most mountain bikers look for the easy way up, and more often than not that means a boring fire road, but on an e-bike you can go the hard way. Technical climbing requires good technique, so it’s not only challenging, but good for your skills too. By enjoying the ups as well as the downs, you’ve just doubled your fun and given yourself a whole new playground to explore.

7. Mud plugger

It’s tough to get motivated on a wet and miserable day, but an e-bike polish a turd of a day and then roll it in glitter. You’ll get close to the speeds you enjoyed in the summer, so it’s never a demoralising slog, and the climbs will still be rideable. Extra weight and bigger tyres let you charge along sticky trails and smash through puddles. e-Bikes are also incredibly stable on wet roots and when they do start to slide, they do so in a really predictable and controllable manner.

8. Relights your fire

Remember the excitement of mountain biking when you first started? Over time this excitement can dull somewhat. Help relight your passion for pushbikes with an electric bike. As many, many others have found,  not only do ebikes give you new found inspiration of riding in a different way, they also tend to make lapsed riders get back out on their non-electric ‘acoustic’ bike a few times as well.

9. Opens up trail options

On an e-bike you find yourself no longer intimidated by certain trails or hills. This means you find yourself linking up sections of trail networks that you’ve never even attempted before on your regular mountain bike. Go up there! Go across that! Yes, I will go and explore! This boundless freedom is an aspect of e-biking that doesn’t get shouted about enough.

10. Just one more run

An e-bike ride is never over until the red light on the battery starts blinking at you. But with careful management of the battery and motor there’s always time for one more run, one more loop round, one more helping of power-assisted gluttony.