It's been partially restored for a hot rod, a family member of mine has an LT1 engine for it and all but has run out of money to finish it so it got to primer and got put aside until finances allow which may be a while longer.
Since I put that post up I've made a different battery at 48V and a little over 8Ah and the speed and range have both increased somewhat. I just got back from about a twenty mile ride and I still had roughly 3 Ah left in the battery but I pedal a lot, particularly uphill.
Really the battery is the biggest single cost by a considerable margin, I want 48V about 20-25 Ah when I finish my pack but I'm doing it a bit at a time. There's an seller on Ebay that has salvaged Samsung laptop cells that are about as cheap a source of battery storage as you're going to find but you need nearly $250 worth with shipping to make a really strong 48V pack and you have to put it together yourself and you'd need about a $100 charger. The main thing about doing yourself is you end up with a maintainable pack, if a single cell (out of 96) goes bad it's easily replaced. The purchased packs unless you spend about twice that money are not particularly reliable and not always maintainable if you have a bad cell.
I've got over a thousand miles on the drive with the new battery now and other than a couple of loose connections before I redid the entire electrical system I haven't had any problems with it.
For rough and hilly roads I'd go with something with a 24" or smaller wheel (for climbing torque) and a decent suspension as well as balloon tires. The more hills you have to deal with the smaller the drive wheel should be for good hill climbing but it cuts your top speed. The "gearing" is fixed with a hub motor so varying the wheel diameter is the only way of changing effective gearing. My rear wheel is 21" in diameter with the balloon tire on the rear, I have about a quarter mile long steep dirt/rock driveway to negotiate going in and out and it handles that quite well at about 8 or 9 mph and half throttle or so.
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