The forum arguments about wattage miss the point. Up here, the hill decides — and it doesn’t care about numbers.
Ask an e-bike forum how much motor a Highland rider needs, and you'll get answers ranging from 250 watts to 1,500. The higher numbers usually come from people who ride tarmac. The lower numbers usually come from people who've been up a wet, rutted, gradient-8 hill track with a full pannier at ten degrees Celsius and a west wind trying to peel their waterproofs off.
The truth is that no amount of headline wattage helps you if the bike can't put the power down. What matters up here — and by "up here" I mean Glentress, the Trossachs, Kinlochleven, or my own back yard in Perthshire — is not peak output. It's whether both wheels grip when the ground turns from packed gravel to greasy mud in the space of a single revolution.
This is why we specify a dual-motor drive on the Juliet 2, and a total UK-legal 250 W system across the range. Two smaller motors sharing the work will get you up a hill that a single bigger motor spins out on, because the traction is split across two contact patches instead of one. When the rear wheel starts to slip on wet grass, the front is already pulling. When the front loses grip on a loose surface, the rear catches you. It's the same reason a Land Rover has all four wheels driven, not just a great big engine on one axle.
The 250 W ceiling isn't a limitation — it's a discipline. Because we can't rely on brute force, we've had to specify torque delivery, gearing and tyre choice around efficiency. The result is a bike that will get you up the same hill as a much bigger, heavier, unrestricted bike — but it'll do it on a smaller battery, at a legal speed, without needing a driving licence, and without setting fire to the trail rules the same rider might have to depend on next month.
There's another quiet benefit. On the way down — which is where most e-bike accidents happen, in our experience — a lighter, lower-output bike is easier to control. The Juliet 2 weighs less than most 1,500 W fat-bikes because we haven't had to over-build the frame for a bigger motor. That means better handling on the descent, better braking distances, and a bike that gets more forgiving as it gets more tired, not less.
None of this shows up in the marketing spec sheet. "250 W, 15.5 mph cut-off" reads like a compliance footnote next to "1,500 W, 40 mph top speed." But then, most marketing spec sheets have never been ridden home from Ben A'an in the rain with a stove and a night's worth of dry socks in the panniers.
The Highland is the proving ground. The hill is the referee. The Juliet 2 was specified from the hill inwards — and that's why the numbers on the sticker are the numbers they are.