The Ananda R900

The R900 puts two things in the back wheel that usually live apart: an electric motor and a set of gears. The motor drives the wheel, and a 3-speed gearbox inside the same housing changes gear on its own as you ride.

Ananda launched it at China Cycle in May 2025, where it won a Gold Creative Award. The name is less familiar than the company’s size suggests, because Ananda builds motors for other bike brands rather than selling its own bikes. It was founded in 2011 and makes around 7 million motors a year across six factories.

The R900 changes gear using a system Ananda calls PedalFlow, which reads three things as you ride:

From those, it follows one rule. Push harder while slowing down and it drops to a lower gear; ease off as you pick up speed and it moves up. Each change takes about 0.2 seconds, and it can shift while the bike is stopped.

Riding a bike with an R900 mostly feels like the gears have disappeared. You pedal, and the right gear is there. Ride On described its first ride as “silky smooth”, and Electric Bike Review found it shifted cleanly on a steep ramp, both from a dead stop and at about 16km/h.

All the gearing sits inside the hub, so everything outside it is a single speed: one ring at the front, one sprocket at the back, in a straight line. That’s what makes a belt drive possible. A belt can’t move across a cassette the way a chain does on a derailleur bike, so on most bikes with gears it isn’t an option.

Put together, that’s where the low maintenance comes from: sealed gears, nothing to adjust, and a belt that doesn’t need oil. The R900 also comes in a chain version (3.8kg, against 3.9kg for the belt version), so not every R900 bike runs a belt.

On a ride, the rows that matter most are torque, gear range and water rating. 50Nm and three gears suit commuting and city riding, and IPX6 covers riding in the rain and washing the bike.

The R900 is built for commuting, city streets, bike paths and rolling routes. Ride On describes it as pitched at urban and light recreational riding rather than performance cycling, and the numbers line up with that: 50Nm of torque and three gears spanning about 62%.

The Auren EV5 runs the R900 at 250W and 50Nm, paired with a carbon belt drive. That puts everything above on one bike: a low gear waiting when you pull away, no derailleur to adjust, and no chain to oil. We chose it because the brief for the EV5 was components that don’t ask anything of the owner.