My First E-Bike at 64: Test Riding the Easy Transit Folding Electric Trike

A Lifelong Cyclist Meets Her First E-Bike

My name is Diane, I'm 64 years old, and I have ridden just about every kind of bicycle you can name. Road bikes. Mountain bikes. The stationary bike that lives in the corner of my garage and quietly judges me on the mornings I skip it. Somewhere in there I ran marathons and finished triathlons, so bikes and I go back a long, long way. But I want to be honest with you about where I was starting from the day I climbed onto the Easy Transit folding electric trike: in six decades of pedaling, I had never once ridden an electric bike. Not for a mile, not around a parking lot, not ever. So I was excited, a little skeptical, and genuinely curious about what all this pedal-assist business was actually going to feel like under my own two legs.

I had a specific reason for wanting to test this particular trike, and I'll come back to it more than once because it's the whole story for me: I live on a hill. Not a gentle rise, a real hill, the kind that turns a bike ride into a decision. My house sits at the top and the grocery store sits at the bottom, and for years that geography quietly shrank my world. I just can't ride up that hill anymore on a regular bike, and if you live somewhere with a grade like mine, you know exactly the feeling I'm describing. You start leaving the bike in the garage. You start driving the quarter mile. So when I heard about folding electric trikes, the first question in my mind wasn't about speed or gadgets. It was, very simply, can this get me back up my own driveway?

Here's what happened in the first thirty seconds. I pushed off, I was in pedal assist level one, and I started pedaling the way I always do, expecting to work for it. And I barely had to. I mean that literally. My legs were turning, but the motor was quietly doing most of the job, and the trike just glided forward like it had somewhere to be. My first reaction out loud was probably something like, oh my gosh, this is fun, because it genuinely was. After a lifetime of earning every mile, feeling the bike carry me while I contributed a light, easy cadence was a small revelation. It's a different sensation, and it took me a beat to trust it.

That trust question is real, and I think it's worth naming for anyone who, like me, comes to electric tricycles from a background of athletic cycling. When you've spent years measuring yourself against the road, part of you resists the idea of help. There's a little voice that says this is cheating. I want to gently retire that voice, because it's wrong. The assist didn't take the ride away from me. It gave the ride back to me. It turned a route I'd been avoiding into one I actually wanted to do, and it let me choose, moment to moment, how much of the effort was mine. That choice, it turns out, is the entire point.

The Easy Transit is a three-wheeled trike, with a single wheel up front and two wheels behind you, and it's built around a 750-watt front-hub motor. Right away that layout does two things for a rider like me. The stability of the two rear wheels means I'm never fighting to balance, which matters more as the years add up. And the motor is strong enough that hills stop being the thing that ends my ride. Sixthreezero designs a whole range of electric trikes for seniors, and you can feel that intention in the details the moment you sit down: nothing about this bike asks you to be young, limber, or fearless. It just asks you to get on and go.

One more thing I loved before we even got rolling properly, and it set the tone for the whole ride. This trike has real accessories that matter for a real life. There's a basket up front, where I tucked my cell phone, and a basket in back that's big enough for actual groceries. I'll talk more about cargo later, but I mention it now because it changed how I thought about the machine. This wasn't a toy or a novelty. From the first push-off, it read as transportation, as freedom, as a way to reclaim the errands and the outings that a big hill had slowly taken off my calendar. And for someone who spent a lifetime treating the bike as exercise, discovering it could also be my grocery run was its own kind of joy.

So that's where I started: a lifelong cyclist, a first-time e-biker, a hill I'd made peace with losing, and a trike that had thirty seconds to change my mind. It did. Let me take you through the rest of the ride the way I experienced it, feature by feature, so you can decide whether this is the trike that gets you back out your own front door.

Three wheels, and suddenly no fear

The very first thing my body noticed, before the motor or the brakes or anything else, was how planted the trike felt. I have never ridden with two wheels behind me, and I wasn't sure what to expect. What I got was stability, plain and simple. It's very stable, and that stability rewrites the whole emotional experience of riding. On my road bike, a big part of my brain is always quietly managing balance, watching the edge of the pavement, bracing for the wobble. On the Easy Transit, that background hum of worry just switched off. I could relax my shoulders and actually look around.

That low, steady feeling comes from the trike's design. It sits close to the ground on small 16-inch tires, which keeps the center of gravity low and the whole platform feeling grounded. I'll be candid, three wheels do handle differently than two, and you want to take corners with a little awareness rather than leaning into them like a road bike. But riding straight, cruising, rolling along a flat street, it felt steady and sure the entire time. If balance is the thing that has kept you off a bicycle, whether from an injury, a health scare, or just the honest arithmetic of getting older, this is the feature that quietly gives cycling back to you. Sixthreezero's adult tricycles are built around exactly this idea.

Sharing the road without the knot in my stomach

Here's where the stability really proved itself. At one point I had a whole line of cars moving right next to me, and going down a hill no less, and I want to tell you I felt totally safe. Not white-knuckled. Not counting the seconds until they passed. Safe. I could feel the balance of the two wheels behind me the entire way down, and that steadiness translated directly into confidence. Lots of cars beside me and not even a worry, which is not a sentence I would have said on my skinny-tired road bike on the same stretch of road.

That's worth sitting with for a moment, because road anxiety is one of the real reasons people stop riding. It isn't that they can't pedal. It's that the fear stops being worth it. When a trike removes the balance question, it also removes a huge share of the fear, and what's left is just the pleasant part: the breeze, the movement, the being outside. For a lot of riders that's the difference between a bike that lives in the garage and a bike that actually gets used. If you're weighing options, it's genuinely worth taking a test ride with this exact concern in mind.

Tires that let me stop worrying about the pavement

I'll admit something a little vulnerable here. I love my road bike, but I'm not that comfortable on those skinny road tires anymore. I catch myself scanning the ground, afraid I'm going to hit a rock or a crack and go down. That low-grade dread had been creeping into my rides for a while. The Easy Transit's tires are a completely different animal, wider and semi-slick, and they gave me such a smooth ride that the anxiety just evaporated. I stopped staring at the pavement and started enjoying the ride. Small bumps that would have made me flinch on the road bike simply disappeared underneath me.

Brakes I could trust with a light touch

The braking surprised me in the best way. The brakes are sensitive, and I mean that as high praise. You don't have to do that hard, desperate, full-fist squeeze to bring yourself to a stop. A light, easy pull does it. I ride my brakes a lot going downhill, that's just how I'm wired, I like to feather them and stay in control, and the Easy Transit made that effortless. Coming up to a stop sign, I found I could scrub speed smoothly and predictably, no drama, no lurch.

Responsive brakes are one of those features you don't appreciate until you have them, and then you can't imagine going back. On a long descent, or in traffic, or when a squirrel makes a poor decision in front of you, the confidence that you can stop, gently and immediately, is worth more than almost any other number on a spec sheet. Between the wide tires, the two-wheel stability, and brakes that respond to a fingertip, I spent my whole ride feeling in control rather than hanging on. That combination is exactly what makes a trike feel safe enough to actually ride every day, and it's a big part of why sixthreezero's electric tricycle lineup has found such a loyal following among riders who want confidence first.

The hill problem, finally solved

Let me come back to my hill, because this is the part I'd been waiting for. I live at the top of a big one, the grocery store is at the bottom, and that single fact had been slowly narrowing my life. I just can't ride up that hill anymore under my own power, and I suspect a lot of you are nodding right now. Hills are where riding dies for a lot of us. Not the flat, pleasant miles, the climbs. So the real test of the Easy Transit was never going to be a nice level street. It was going to be a grade.

The trike is built around a 750-watt front-hub motor, and if you're new to this, 750 watts on an e-bike is a lot of muscle. During my ride I came to a genuinely steep section and thought, all right, here we go, this is the moment of truth. I moved up to a higher level of pedal assist, and then, because I could, I added the throttle. What happened next made me laugh out loud. I powered up that hill without exerting a ton of energy. At one point I wasn't even pedaling, I was just climbing, steadily, easily, watching the grade go by like it was nothing. Oh my gosh, I love this, is roughly what came out of my mouth, and I meant every word.

Assist levels and a throttle you can lean on

Let me explain how the power actually works, because the flexibility is the magic. The Easy Transit gives you pedal-assist levels, and I moved among them constantly depending on the terrain. On the flats I mostly stayed in level one, where the motor gives you a gentle hand and you still feel like you're doing the pedaling. When the road tilted up, I'd bump up to a higher level and let the trike shoulder more of the load. The higher levels give you a lot of assist, sometimes more than you need, and it's genuinely fun to find the setting that matches the moment.

Then there's the throttle, which is its own kind of freedom. The pedal assist rewards your pedaling with proportional help, but the throttle is pure on-demand power, a little lever you tap and the trike simply goes, no pedaling required. On a steep climb, that's the difference between grinding and gliding. I'd set my assist level, tap the throttle, and float up a grade that would have ended my ride entirely on a regular bike. That 750-watt motor is exactly what's going to get me back up my own hill at home, and knowing that changes everything about where I'm willing to go. If you want the full breakdown of why this trike delivers so much for the money, sixthreezero wrote up a close look at the Easy Transit's value that's worth reading alongside a test ride.

The stoplight test, and why it matters more than top speed

Here's a scenario that separates a good e-trike from a frustrating one, and it happened to me twice on my ride. You're stopped, on an incline, with traffic behind you, and now you have to get moving again from a dead stop while pointed uphill. On a regular bike, that's the moment you're stuck, standing on the pedals, wobbling, holding up the cars. On the Easy Transit, I just tapped the throttle and it pulled me right out of the situation, smooth and immediate. There was a lot of traffic, and normally I'd have been stranded at that exact point. Instead I was gone.

I want to flag that experience specifically for anyone who rides in a hilly town or a busy neighborhood, because it's the kind of thing you only discover matters once you've been caught out by it. Starting from zero on an incline is genuinely hard on a conventional bike, and it's one of the quiet reasons people give up riding in real-world conditions. The throttle turns it into a non-event. I'll be honest, I'm not a fast rider by nature, I was cruising somewhere around ten to thirteen miles an hour most of the day, and I never once felt the need to go faster. What I needed wasn't top speed. What I needed was the confidence that a hill, a stoplight, or a steep driveway would never again be the thing that left me stranded. The Easy Transit gave me that, and it's the same promise that runs through every trike sixthreezero designs for older riders.

A seat that changed my mind about comfort

I have to talk about the seat, because it genuinely surprised me. I've spent years on mountain bike saddles and road bike saddles and stationary bike seats, and my body knows all their particular complaints. The Easy Transit's seat has a little bit of back support built into it, and I was totally digging it from the first minute. It's a small design choice with a big payoff. Instead of perching, I was sitting, supported, with something behind me. For anyone who has spent their riding life hunched forward over drop bars, this alone is worth the trip to try one.

Sitting up, and why my back thanked me

This is the part I'd underline for every rider my age. On my road bike, after a while, you're all hunched over and your back starts to ache, and that hunch has slowly become the price of admission for riding. On the Easy Transit, that's simply not the case. The riding position is upright and natural, with that touch of back support, and it kept me comfortable the entire ride. No folding myself over the handlebars. No sore lower back at the end. Just an easy, relaxed posture that let me look up and out at the world instead of down at the front tire.

I laughed at one point that my road bike was going to be sad, because I'm not sure I'm going to ride it much anymore. And I was mostly joking, but there's truth in it. When a bike stops punishing your back, you ride it more. That's not a small thing. So many people quit cycling not because they lost the love of it but because their body started sending the bill after every ride. An upright, supported position like this one keeps the bill low, and it's a big reason sixthreezero's electric bikes and trikes for older riders lean so hard into comfort-first design.

A low step-through that respects your knees

Getting on and off is its own quiet test as we get older, and the Easy Transit passed it beautifully. It has a low pass-through frame, which means there's no high bar to swing a leg over and no awkward, tippy moment while you sort out your balance. You step through, you sit down, you're ready. And dismounting is just as graceful, you step through and you're off, no drama, no strain on the knees or the hips. For anyone managing a little less range of motion than they used to have, this feature matters enormously, and I noticed how easy the whole business of mounting and dismounting was every single time I stopped.

The display, the gears, and choosing your own workout

The display sits right in front of you, front and center, easy to read at a glance. It gives me my speed in miles per hour, my distance, and my battery level, so I always knew exactly where I stood, how far I'd gone, and how much charge I had left. No squinting, no guessing. It's the kind of clear, simple information that makes a ride feel manageable rather than mysterious, and if you ever want a walkthrough of the controls, sixthreezero put together a step-by-step guide to operating the Easy Transit that covers all of it.

And then there are the gears, which I came to appreciate more and more as the ride went on. The Easy Transit has a set of gears on top of the electric assist, and I loved having them, because they let me decide how hard I wanted to work. This is the part that reconciled the athlete in me with the e-bike. If I want to just cruise, I let the motor carry me. But if I want to burn some calories and get an actual workout, I can drop into a gear that makes me put real energy in, and I did exactly that on the flat stretches. Six was perfect for what I was doing on level ground. The beauty of it is that you get to choose, mile by mile, whether this ride is transportation, recreation, or exercise. Some days it can be all three. That flexibility is why an e-trike works for a former marathoner and a brand-new rider alike.

Easy to steer, easy to control

One more handling note, because it tied the whole ride together: this trike is genuinely easy to steer. I had quietly worried that a three-wheeler might feel heavy or stubborn in my hands, and it simply didn't. It turned when I wanted it to and held its line when I didn't, and combined with the low, stable stance, it gave me a constant sense of control from the first block to the last. That's the quiet luxury of a well-sorted trike. You stop thinking about managing the machine and start simply enjoying wherever it's taking you, which is exactly the feeling that keeps a bike out of the garage and out on the road.

Baskets that turn a ride into an errand

Now let's talk about cargo, because this is where the Easy Transit stopped being a bike I was testing and started being a bike I was planning my week around. There's a basket up front, where I kept my cell phone within easy reach, and a basket in back that's big enough to carry basic supplies. And here's where my hill comes back into the story one last time. The grocery store is at the bottom of my hill, my house is at the top, and that rear basket is exactly the right size to run down, grab what I need, and haul it back up. The motor gets me and the groceries up the grade, and the basket carries the load. Problem solved. A trip I'd basically stopped making by bike is suddenly the easiest errand of my day.

That's the thing people underestimate about a good electric trike. It isn't just a nicer way to exercise, it's a genuine piece of transportation. Once you can carry things, you start leaving the car in the driveway for the short trips. The pharmacy, the coffee shop, the farmer's market, the neighbor's house, all of it becomes bikeable when you have somewhere to put your stuff and a motor that doesn't care about the hills in between. That utility is a big part of why these trikes have become such a lifeline for people looking to keep their independence, and sixthreezero has written about how e-trikes are changing everyday mobility for seniors if you want to read more rider stories.

A parking brake that gave me real peace of mind

I stopped mid-ride to take a quick phone call, and I happened to be paused on a little bit of a decline. On a lot of bikes that's an annoyance, you're holding the brake, balancing, trying not to roll. Not here. The Easy Transit has a parking brake, and I set it and simply let go. I wasn't going anywhere, even pointed downhill. I stood there and took my call with both hands free and zero worry. It's such a simple feature and so easy to use, but it's a genuine safety and convenience upgrade, especially if you live somewhere hilly or you like to stop and chat, take photos, or run into a shop.

It folds, so it goes where I go

Here's the feature that quietly expands your whole range: the Easy Transit folds. That means it's easy to get in and out of the car, which opens up everything beyond your own neighborhood. I could ride around my streets on a Tuesday, then fold it into the trunk and take it somewhere new on the weekend. I'd take it to the beach without a second thought. I'd take it camping. For a machine that's this stable and this capable, the fact that it collapses down to fit in a hatchback or an SUV feels almost too convenient. It means the trike isn't tied to your driveway, it travels with you, and your riding isn't limited to the roads you already know. If portability is high on your list, sixthreezero's folding electric trike collection is built around exactly this kind of go-anywhere convenience.

So who is this trike actually for?

Let me pull it all together, because after a full ride I have a clear picture of who the Easy Transit is going to make happy. It's for the rider who wants stability without giving up the joy of being outside on two, well, three wheels. It's for anyone whose back has started protesting the hunched-over cycling posture and would love to sit up and ride in comfort. It's for people who live on hills, or in traffic, or with a little less range of motion than they had a decade ago, and who want a machine that meets them where they are. And it's for the errand-runners, the grocery-getters, the beach-goers and campers who want their bike to carry the load and fold into the car when the day's done.

I came to this as a lifelong cyclist and a complete e-bike skeptic, a 64-year-old former marathoner who assumed the assist would somehow cheapen the ride. It didn't. It gave me back the hill outside my door, it took the fear out of sharing the road, it kept my back happy, and it let me choose my own workout mile by mile. I can ride it around the neighborhood, run it down to the grocery store, take it to the beach, fold it into the car, and do it all with a level of comfort and confidence I honestly didn't expect. My road bike may end up a little jealous, and that's okay. If you've been looking for the trike that gets you back out your own front door, take a serious look at the Easy Transit folding electric trike, and while you're at it, browse the broader range of electric trikes built for comfort and stability to find the one that fits your life. Thanks for riding along with me.