How many electric bikes to convert for a fleet pilot
Five to eight converted bikes is the right size for a first fleet pilot: enough to see real route and rider variation, small enough to fix mistakes before scaling.
Five to eight converted bikes is the right size for a first Karaa fleet pilot. That’s enough riders and routes to see real patterns, and few enough that a mistake in fit, training or scheduling costs an afternoon, not a fleet.
Fleet operators moving from petrol motorcycles or manual bicycles to electric conversion kits usually ask the wrong first question: how many bikes to buy. The better first question is how many to pilot, because a fleet built entirely on assumption gets expensive fast if any of those assumptions are wrong about route length, load, or how riders actually treat the equipment.
A five-to-eight-bike pilot, run for four to six weeks, answers the questions that matter before a full rollout: how many kilometres a shift actually covers against the 120 km per charge Karaa kits are built for, whether one spare battery per two or three bikes is enough rotation to avoid downtime, and which riders need more training on charging discipline than others. It also surfaces the real cost per kilometre against the petrol alternative it’s replacing, using actual fleet data rather than the standard UGX 700 versus UGX 15,000 per 100 km comparison, which holds up well on average but varies by route.
Kit pricing scales the same way whether it’s five bikes or fifty: UGX 1,650,000 untracked or 1,930,000 with GPS tracking per long-range kit at retail, dropping to distributor pricing at twenty units and above. A pilot at retail pricing costs roughly UGX 8.25 to 15.4 million for five to eight bikes before any volume discount, a small fraction of what the same-sized petrol motorcycle fleet costs to buy outright.
Common questions
Do pilot bikes need to be new, or can we convert bikes we already run? Converting bikes already in the fleet is usually cheaper and faster, provided they have 26-inch or 29-inch wheels and a sound frame; Karaa fits kits to bicycles a fleet already owns as readily as to new ones.
What happens after the pilot if it works? Scaling to distributor pricing (20+ units) and a formal service arrangement is a conversation Karaa has directly with fleet buyers once pilot data is in hand.
See kit pricing on the bikes page, or talk to us about sizing a fleet pilot on WhatsApp.
Send us your route and your load on WhatsApp. We reply within a day.
