Most humans can't sustain 250W on a simple ergometer for 20 minutes. At 1000W, you are a motorcycle, not a bike.

If that is what you want, fine, but then stick to roads, stay off bike paths.

Its a DC rear hub motor, I can throttle it fully up and still hold my bike in place. It accelerates poorly and has relatively little torque. I can get my bike up to the same speed manually with the benefit of the gearing all bikes have.

On even terrain I don't have any reason to be driving around at over 15mph (and I don't), but we do have morons who will, and that's why the law is so restrictive in the EU.

Sure, morons always go by the law...

They don't bother with ebikes anyway, so they're reckless with a moped, which is way more dangerous.

The 250W limit in Europe is stupid (plus it shouldn't be a European law, it's not the correct scope).

Finally, you can be reckless with rollerblades or a bike, you don't need a motor. I guess it's more a problem of "250W is more than enough for people" just like 640kb was, for politicians.

Lots of things have a boundary, even if the boundary is somewhat arbitrary. In most places there is a voting age, there is an age of consent, and there is a drinking age. These ages differ, because there is no clear-cut boundary.

Do you think there should be no power limit, or that it should be a different power limit?

I don't see why the regulations for electric bikes should be much different from gasoline bikes (aka, mopeds). If your e-bike is powerful enough, then it's comparable to a more powerful moped.

Do you think we prevent people from drive on the sidewalk because they will be reckless? I think the greater the momentum disparity, the more likely it is that an error, like loss of control, results in injury or death. This is a wider brush than "reckless".

Are those two figures comparable though? Is an electric bicycle motor measured by its power draw or by its output? And either way, it's still not the same because at most that'd be measuring at the crank, whereas an ergometer measures at the pedal. So if I had to guess I'd say that a 1000W electric motor is roughly equivalent to, say, 500W output from a human on an ergometer (which of course is still way better than the average person can perform for any length of time).

It's hard to build an inefficient electric motor, and I'd think the headline figure is the motor power rating.

But even if we assume it's the power draw and the motor itself is terribly inefficient, we're still talking 80% efficiency? Chain drive is 95% efficient if badly maintained, but then the human power loses that, too, so we don't need to consider it. So we're still talking 800W, which is 3-4 times as much as needed to sustain 20 mph on flat ground, and utterly out of range of any human for any time period beyond a minute.

The power and speed limit of normal ebikes is a feature. It keeps us from making the same mistake we have with cars, which only ever got faster while driving discipline declined and were at any point beyond human ability anyway.

Correction: The headline figure is the motor’s maximum power rating. I tried an electric bike with a 350W hub motor, and on a moderate hill it did not have enough torque to move. Power = Work ÷ Time, Work = Force × Distance; 0 distance ⇒ 0 power.

I understand that mid-drive motors can deliver much more torque than hub motors. Maybe the OP is being realistic about what he needs in the Arizona hellscape where he lives.

Perhaps if the rider is really heavy or untrained. :p I have a 500w motor and almost never have to use more than about 4/5 of the maximum throttle.

A bit of both tbh, but that bike is getting me out 5 days a week and is helping a lot.