Most forum posts are about problems; that's the nature of forums. But people often forget to come back and talk about their experience when things are going well. I thought I would come back here and let people know how my experience has been with Golden Motor and my two Magic Pies after 8 months of ownership. This is my honest experience.
When I first enquired about the Magic Pies I contacted GM Canada. They were very helpful during the ordering process, answering my questions quickly even late at night. Once the order was delivered I had a few questions and issues but I wasn't able to get any help or replies at all from GM Canada once they had my money. I later learned from forum members that they were struggling to cope with the amount of inquiries. I was still disappointed though, because aftersales is very important to me, especially with such a technical product. They were super responsive when they were working at getting the sale but after it went through I was totally on my own.
With the help of the forum I was able to figure things out and overcome/fix any small issues. A couple of months later my battery indicator started failing and I tried contacting GM Canada for some help. This time I found that rather than directly email them, they had a new support ticket system. I submitted a ticket and I got a reply to my support request this time, which made me happy. They answered my question, which enabled me to go on to solve the problem on my own. Getting that reply from GM Canada restored my faith a little and made me feel that they were working to improve the customer support via the new system.
For the last 8 months I've been riding my rear mounted Magic Pie 4 Vector about 4 times a week on average. Sometimes it's just a 2km trip to the post office and other times it's a 25km ride through the countryside. And I absolutely love it. It's ultra quiet, it has plenty of torque and it is reliable.
The only issues I have had with the Magic Pie 4 are:
1: I never could get regen braking to work on 48v no matter what settings I tried in the software - it will only work on 36v. No big deal.
2: Sometimes when going over a bump on a trail, the system with shut off and I will have to turn it off and on again to be up an running. This has happened about 4 times. It has also happened when going up a grassy hill twice.
3. When I first installed the motor, there was a scraping/grinding sound that would present itself after about 20 minutes of riding. This went away after a few months so whatever was scraping clearly grinded itself free.
I'm not asking for help here with the above issues, I'm just mentioning them as part of my experience.
The other GM motor I bought at the same time is the little Smart Pie (the non vector one). That's fitted to my girlfriend's bike on the front and it works well for her. It gets much less frequent use than mine but she has had no issues with it at all.
With the two pies, my partner and I have been able to enjoy long bike rides all over our local area, through beautiful country scenery and to explore areas where we were house hunting in a way that would not be as effective by car. I built and installed a removable basket for the back of my bike and with that we take our 16lb dog on trips to the lake and the park during the warmer weather. It's always a great time and our dog has a lot of fun. My battery (not supplied by GM) has recently reached the end of it's relatively short life and I will be buying or building a new one in due course. I'm really glad I bought these motors and did the conversions and I look forward to warmer weather so we can get out riding more often.
I would recommend the motors to anyone and although the support was very lacking in my experience, it's really not hard to install these systems yourself if you are a tinkerer at heart and have some basic experience with tools, electronics and building things. It might seem complicated at first but it's really all quite plug and play. There are some great and helpful people on the forum (like Bikemad) who really helped me and others. I'd like to thank those people for that.
All the best and happy riding!
