Editorial Independence

LAST UPDATED JULY 18, 2026

You trust us to tell you which vehicle or piece of gear is worth your money. So you deserve to know how we work and who pays us. This page lays out the rules we hold ourselves to: how we get the products we test, what we accept from brands, what we refuse, and how the affiliate links here actually work. None of these rules bend for a big brand, a free unit, or a good relationship. If that ever changes, this page changes with it, and the date stamp above tells you when.

What we buy vs what we borrow

Wherever we can, we buy the gear we review at full retail price, from the same stores you would use, as an ordinary anonymous customer. Paying our own money keeps us honest. We feel the price the way you feel it, we get the same box, warranty, and support line you get, and no brand can cherry-pick a hand-tuned unit to send a reviewer.

Some things we cannot buy outright. A brand often lends us a $2,000 e-motorcycle or a full lineup of scooters, we test it, then we return it. That is normal in this field, and it is no problem as long as we are straight with you about it. So we are. Every review carries a plain label at the top telling you how we got the unit: purchased at retail, a long-term loaner, or a short press loan. When a unit goes back, it goes back. We do not keep loaners, and keeping one would never soften a review.

How we got it	What that means	How we disclose it
Bought at retail	Paid full price as a normal customer	Labeled “purchased” at the top of the review
Long-term loaner	Brand lent the unit, we return it after testing	Labeled “loaner” with the return noted
Short press loan	Brief hands-on at an event or a few days with a unit	Labeled “press loan” and flagged as first-ride, not final

Brands never see a draft before it publishes

No brand, PR agency, or sponsor reads a review before it goes live. No preview link, no quote approval, no heads-up on the score. A company sees what we wrote at the same moment you do, when the page goes public.

We will check a hard spec with a manufacturer, a battery capacity, a torque figure, a weight, because getting a fact wrong helps nobody. That is fact-checking, not editorial input. The wording, the criticism, the score, and the final call are ours alone. If a brand dislikes what we found, the fix is to build a better product, not to edit our copy.

No paid placements

You cannot buy your way onto a PEVGear list. Not the top spot, not any spot. We do not sell rankings, “editor’s pick” badges, or slots in a best-of guide, and we do not run sponsored posts dressed up as reviews. In the rare cases we run advertising, the ad is clearly marked as an ad, and it stays walled off from the people who decide what earns a recommendation.

A product appears on a list because it earned the place against our published criteria, full stop. If a company we do business with makes something mediocre, it does not make the list. If it makes something great, that business tie is not the reason it wins.

How affiliate links work

This is how the site pays for itself, and nothing about it is hidden. When we link to a product, that link usually goes to Amazon. Click it, buy something, and Amazon pays us a small commission. You pay the same price you would have paid without the link, because the commission comes out of Amazon’s margin, not your wallet. No markup, no surcharge for using our link.

We keep it Amazon-only on purpose. One affiliate program means one set of incentives to watch, instead of a tangle of brand-by-brand deals that quietly reward us for pushing whatever pays most that month. Amazon pays a similar rate across most categories, so we have no financial reason to steer you toward one brand over another. The commission is the same whether we tell you to buy something or tell you to skip it.

The rule that makes this work: a commission never changes a verdict. We decide the score and the recommendation first, on the testing, and the link goes on afterward. A product we pan still gets a link so you can check the current price and read the listing yourself. A product we love does not get one extra point for being on Amazon. If the best choice is to buy nothing, that is what we will say.

The rider profile behind every test

Range, comfort, and handling depend as much on the rider as on the machine. A hill that a 140-pound rider floats up can bog down a 240-pound rider on the same bike, and a battery figure quoted in mild weather falls apart in the cold. So every review states the rider profile behind the numbers. We tell you who rode it, in what conditions, and for how long, so you can judge how close our test is to your life. This is the block we fill in for every vehicle we test:

The two-week, fifty-mile floor is a hard rule for any review carrying a final score. Anything shorter, a show-floor sit or a few days on a press loan, gets labeled a first-ride and does not get a number. We would rather tell you “we need more time” than hand you a score we do not yet trust.

How we test and how we score

Independence is only worth something if the testing behind it stays consistent. Two companion pages spell out the rest of the method. Our how we test page walks through the bench and road protocol we run every unit through, and our how we score page shows how those results turn into a number, with every category weighted the same way for every product in a class. Read those next to this page and you get the full picture: how we get the gear, how we test it, how we score it, and how we get paid.

Questions about how we work, or think we got something wrong? Reach us through our contact page. We read every message, and corrections get posted in the open.