So I met up with the girls from Fonzarelli when they were down in Melbourne earlier this week. Build quality seems to be decent for the price (AU$4,990). Took one for a quick ride around the city - unfortunately it was right on peak hour so traffic was insane but they seem to do the trick for inner city transport. Acceleration was pretty lacklustre, but after jumping of the SR onto it that was to be expected. When you buy them they'll set up the controller to match the sort of torque curve you're after so I'm assuming there'd be some room there for improvement at the expense of range. Ditto for the regenerative breaking. They top out at 75km/h so definitely not something for taking out on the highway, but good for their intended purpose. If you need a little extra they've got a boost button which brings up the max discharge rate for a 10 seconds.
Michelle, who runs Fonzarelli comes from an engineering/manufacturing background in some larger EV's (buses) so put these together as a custom design (assuming off the shelf controller, batteries, hub motor etc) with a Chinese manufacturing partner. For the battery packs they're using Samsung lithium ion cells. As the batteries are removable, chargers are all off board - there's 4 or 8 amp options. On the bike itself you have two slots for the battery (with BMS) modules. During operation though, if you're running two when one goes flat you pop the seat and switch across to #2.
All in all I'd say they're definitely filling that niche of inner city personal transport. It'll be my girlfriends call if she want one, but it get's the thumbs up from me.
