There are two electric bikes at home. Mine is an old Luyuan model with a lead-acid battery, bought years ago. The other one belongs to my wife, a newer Sunra with a lithium battery. I’ve already replaced the battery on mine twice, and hers once. But at this point, both of them have clearly aged to the point where they’re becoming hard to rely on.
My wife is home taking care of our second child, so lately I’m the one riding both bikes. Most of the use is just taking the kids to and from school, but it had gotten to the point where I’d regularly have to get off and push one of them partway through a trip.
The frustrating part is that the bikes themselves are still basically fine. My old Luyuan especially is the old bicycle-style kind. The suspension isn’t great, but the frame and overall build have held up incredibly well. I really didn’t want to part with it. The one thing beyond saving, though, was the brake setup. It has an old drum brake, and it’s probably worn down to nothing by now.
Honestly, if I had a little workbench of my own, I’d have been tempted to repair it myself and just keep riding it with a fresh battery.
That was my original plan anyway: replace the batteries and keep both bikes going. So I asked around at a repair shop about the cost. A new lead-acid battery would be around 400 to 500 yuan. A lithium battery replacement would run somewhere from 800 to over 1,000 yuan, and even the 800-yuan option was reportedly out of stock.
The repair guy suggested that buying a lithium battery on Taobao would be more cost-effective. But after looking around, I couldn’t find one with the exact same casing, which meant I’d probably have to piece things together myself after it arrived. That didn’t feel safe at all, especially after seeing so many videos of e-bike batteries catching fire.
So once the government’s trade-in program for boosting consumer spending came along, the choice became pretty straightforward. I was looking at two options: spend more than 1,500 yuan replacing batteries for two old e-bikes, or trade one in and put that money toward one new bike.
In the end, I chose the trade-in route. I exchanged my old Luyuan for a new Sunra and got 600 yuan off. The new one is a small yellow bike called Little Pudding, and it uses a lead-acid battery too.
The listed price seemed to be 3,299 yuan. The shop owner said the repair guy had introduced me and that he was giving me an extra 100-yuan discount, so the trade-in allowance supposedly went from 500 to 600, bringing the final price down to 2,699 yuan. Later, though, I checked JD.com and found that the discounted online price was also under 2,699 yuan.
So much for the “special deal.” That kind of sales talk is basically nonsense.
What made it worse was the invoice. When they first issued it, it was for 2,599 yuan. They did correct it afterward, but that only made the whole thing feel more suspicious. If they were able to issue an invoice at 2,599, then clearly that price existed somewhere in their system. Otherwise whoever handled the invoice would have had to eat the extra 100 yuan out of pocket, which is hard to believe. Once that happened, the whole shopping experience immediately dropped through the floor.
Another thing that bothered me was the electronic invoice itself: they wouldn’t include my ID number on it. That makes me wonder whether a merchant could quietly void the invoice later for tax tricks. With an electronic invoice, voiding it doesn’t require taking back the original copy, and most buyers aren’t going to log onto the tax website just to verify whether it still exists. If a personal ID number is attached, the tax bureau system can usually push the invoice information directly to the corresponding tax app account, and any later changes would show up there too.
As for the remaining old Sunra, I’ll wait and see whether another trade-in promotion comes around. If it does, I may swap it out too and try a different brand next time.