Would be a great accessibility feature to have an option of E bikes in Zwift.
For instance I’m a fat assed 150kg rider and there’s routes and places I will never see in the game without cheating and lying about my weight.
You could have a mode where you can choose an e bike and have your wattage doubled or tripled up to an extra 250w to simulate an ebike pedal assist.
Obviously things like drops and xp would only increase as per the real watts your putting in. And it should be obvious to other riders your on an ebike to not upset them.
Also obviously these bikes wouldn’t be allowed in races or training etc. And no lap times would count. Just for free riding.
Would be a fun way to open up the world to disabled and less abled riders.
Also I’ve never been on an ebike and quite fancy seeing what it’s like even if it is in a virtual ride.
There’s no harm/shame in dropping your weight in game as long as it’s not during a race. Some organisers encourage it to make staying in a group a bit easier and to make it a more enjoyable experience.
I totally disagree - as someone trying to improve my fitness and drop my weight in real life, I would ruin all my best times and performance data logs in Zwift, Garmin and Strava. Id set records that id never be able to beat in the future without cheating again… When I finally have the fitness to get up alpe du zwift i want that time to be legit (even if its likely to be 3 hours or more)…
Having an assisted “e-bike” mode with no data logged (or if you guys are cleaver enough) could log them as seperate rides with their own data points ie it could have its own graphs of amount of electric power used and balance between user input and assistance etc… that way i could compare two e-bike rides up alpe du zwift for instance and see i did them both in 1hr 20 but used less power assist so my fitness is improving.
IMHO this is unlikely in lower end w/kg group rides, but I accept your point.
I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. I do not think we would ever implement a feature like this. But wish you the very best in your fitness journey. I started out as a 100kg 1w/kg rider, started by entering low (eg 1-1.3w/kg rides).
Is the issue you expect to face in climbing something like the Alpe strictly due to the effort you feel you would need to put out, or is it time-related? If it’s just the weight, what about lowering the trainer resistance (presuming you’re on a controllable trainer)? If it’s time-related, you’re likely correct that you fitness would need to improve to get to some parts of the Zwift routes.
You could always do a training ride, and just select the course you want to do the training in. Make it a custom training session as Free Ride, etc. There are no gradients in training rides if that’s the concern.
You have the option of not saving the ride at the end. And the option of saving it to Zwift but not to Strava or Garmin.
In Strava, IIRC private rides don’t get included on leaderboards, so I think any PRs set on a private ride wouldn’t be recorded either (I’m not 100% on that, as I seldom mark anything private). If that’s the case, you could possibly still upload the ride to Strava and have it recognised for Fitness/Freshness and annual totals, but not recorded as a best time.
Zwift only stores your best time for 30 days anyway, so that’s not likely to be an issue.
Another option would be to reduce “Trainer Difficulty” to OFF, or just reduce it to 10% or so.
That will have the effect of “flattening” the hills. So your trainer won’t offer as much resistance, but you can still ride the longer or steeper climbs.
I suggested the exact same thing a month or so ago! No response from Zwift. It would allow new or slower riders to participate in many more fun group rides just like an ebike in real world. I’ll bet Zwift’s retention rate for new riders would be much higher with an ebike option right out of the gate.
Hello @RoyCruse@Steve_Fine I didn’t understand.
You can enjoy your ride on zwift with your weight.
Just stay with a group with the same level and you don’t need more power or something like that.
No VOTE from my side, sorry
I have to say I think an in game ebike would be great. I had my 11 year old nephew and 8 year old niece try zwift recently and even at their correct weight, the game was just too slow to keep their interest. If there was an ebike or world where everything was faster they would be more likely to join.
This would be a great idea. My wife would like to start on Zwift as well, but she’s a beginner and probably wouldn’t be able to do .5W/Kg at the start. We could go to the expense to buy an E-bike, but it would be nice to have the ability to just have Zwift have an e-bike mode.