Wednesday, January 16, 2019

A day trying EMTB

Silence for the best part of 4 years, yes, I know... and then just before christmas I find myself itching to take a trip to Cannock and see what all this Electric MTB'ing is about. Personally I've been doing research and am angling towards a Canyon Spectral:On, Focus Sam2 or a Haibike Xduro Nduro (Haibike's naming department really needs to have a word) as I was after something fairly long-travel, 150mm plus. Unfortunately there was nowhere with anything on demo except for Leisure Lakes and I'm not trialing that sort of bike around a flat expanse of water. So a trip to well-known Cannock Chase meant I was stuck on testing a Trek Powerfly FS7. I approached the visit as more of an "insight into EMTB" rather than an out-and-out bike test ride.

We dragged along a pal on his conventional Specialized downhill bike, an early 2000's vintage (probably a Bighit or somesuch) to belittle him and laugh in his puffy red face on the up-hills. This is the mountain bike equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight. It isn't so much "beating" your peers as "mashing their face repeatedly into a dung-covered boulder". Still, we laughed.

The Weight

...means bugger all, to be honest, in the EMTB world. Yes, we're talking 24Kg bikes, and for those of us who've been riding all these years the idea of all that weight kind of freaks us out. But in reality, of course, most EMTBs are putting out somewhere between 60 and 80Nm of torque and 250 to 500 watts of pedal assistance from their electric motors, so it should come as no surprise that pedal effort is nothing to worry about. The bike weight came into play just as you'd expect - it feels planted; sure-footed on the downs but it's fair to say you can feel slightly more effort is required to coax it into rapid change of direction... although it was nowhere near as bad as you might expect.

About the only time you'll ever be fussed about the weight penalty, then, is when you have to lift the thing in and out of the car. Or when you drain the battery, if you manage to... and, to be honest, if this happened you might be pleasantly surprised. During the ride, we were climbing a long, steady fireroad over the northern side of Cannock Chase. My daughter and I decided it would be a warming show of comraderie to turn our assistance off, and go up the hill with our friend "old skool". And, you know what, with the gearing available it was totally doable. It honestly felt no different to riding a conventional MTB uphill, albeit a rather heavier one, but we were no more out of breath than our colleague on his manual bike. In fact, maybe less so, but we'll defer that to health reasons rather than any mechanical advantage.

The Boost

So forgive me for saying the rather obvious, but let's just get it out there and said... going up the hills is where it's all about. That's your raison d'etre with an EMTB. The downs are no more compelling than any other bike. On the levels, that assistance is great at taking the edge off but as soon as you hit 15mph you sort of hit a wall on the Bosch CX powered bikes (that these Treks were). Other models using Shimano or Yamaha motors, for example, are reported to not feel as bad as the Bosch system but I can't vouch for that in person - but it is something I am very much bearing in mind for my future purchase. The Bosch system gears down the motor so when it reaches the assistance limit of 15mph and "decouples", it does it rather vicously - it's all or nothing. One minute you're flying like billy-o, then you're without assistance, pedalling a 24Kg bike with fat 27.5+ tyres and driving an internal reduction gear in the motor for no reason whatsoever.

If you're finding yourself doing lots of pedalling at 15+mph then this might be a turn-off but the reality is most trails will either be too technical for that speed, or else you're going downhill enough that it makes no odds. But I couldn't help thinking I had a valid gripe with it - 20mph would be just a slightly more sensible limit, maybe even if it halved the assistance power rather than cutting it off completely. But them's the EU rules, so there it is. Until March 29th, at least. That could just sway me to a hard-brexit.

On the Bosch system, you have 3 basic levels of assist. Eco for maximum battery, Trail for the middle-ground, Turbo for maximum assistance and a "stuff the battery mileage" mentality. Each is a simple trade-off of assistance power versus range. The display unit gives you a constantly-calculated estimate of current range based on your selected mode and the riding profile you've been performing. This model also included an "EMTB" mode which is basically an 'adaptive' mode that varies the assistance between the 3 settings automatically based on your cadence and the torque you're applying to the pedals. Since we were taking an easy day of it we spent most of the fireroads in Eco mode. In my mind, I would say Eco effectively levels the bike to performing like a normal mountain bike - it gives you just enough assistance to negate the drag and weight effects of the bike, but you still work up enough of a sweat.

Uplift Service

One moment of hilarity did come from the use of Turbo mode in conjunction with the GYMB uplift method (Grab Your Mate's Backpack). At one point during the day, and while hoiking it up a long, steady fireroad to the top of some trails, we did discover that enabling Turbo mode and having your mate "grab on" did make for a rather rapid, fun ascent of said hill. The sheer ludicrous nature of pedalling uphill at 15mph dragging another fully-grown male on an overweight old downhill bike really appealed to my childish side. Bonkers and utterly brilliant. Probably safe to say it wouldn't do your battery range any good though.

The Nadgery Bits

When you get onto the trails, the EMTB approach doesn't disappoint. As said above, these standard Powerfly FS7's don't have as much travel as I would have personally liked - they are 130mm front and rear and I suspect were a bit over-gassed for my weight so felt stiffer than I'd typically be after, but ignoring that fact they performed as you would expect over the twisties. In fact they reminded me a little of my old Trek Liquid 55 in terms of feel. On an undulating trail that assistance just helps you keep it up to speed with little burst of pedal effort, but it certainly doesn't feel like it's doing all the work for you.

The big take-away for me was that it allowed me to session a trail quickly, one blast after another. Because you keep those energy levels up, it's a relatively trivial task to loop back round to the start of a trail and hit it again without the need to stop and catch your breath.

It's not cheating

The common misconception with e-bikes is that they're "cheating". Of course, in reality, unless you're in a competition with non-e bikes, what is there to cheat yourself out of? On my conventional rides, your entire day out was a balanced equation that took into account key factors - fun, time and energy levels. Maybe some might include calorie burn if fitness is their driving factor, but for me, it's not; I'm there to have fun, nothing more than that.

For me, the reality of conventional mountain biking was that time and my physical levels of energy always limited the amount of fun I could fit into a given day. With an EMTB, the effort you exert (particularly on the climbs) is reduced - I'd guess by a factor of something between 2 and 3. Previously a full day's riding at Cannock would see me get two loops of Follow the Dog in at a comfortable pace, with a break in the middle of course. By the end of that I would be feeling it the next day. Two loops on an EMTB would feel like half the work - in the brief visit I had for this ride (about 6 miles over 3 hours - yeah, we had manual friends with us remember!) we were fresh as a daisy at the end of it.

That last point really is what it's all about, for me. Ask anyone in the know about EMTBs and they'll say the same thing - rather than do half the effort, why not do twice as much riding? It is abundantly clear to me that an e-bike allows me to maximise the amount of fun you get out of a fixed period of time riding - at the end, you'll have exhausted the same amount of physical effort to do twice (maybe even three times) as much riding in the same amount of time. And that means twice as much fun.

What are you cheating yourself out of? The only way that argument works for me is if you're purely doing cycling for physical training, but I warrant that's hardly the profile of the large majority of mountain bikers.

3 Comments:


Farqui said...

Nice one Brumster.

e-Bikes do now seem to be gaining momentum in the UK - they've been popular on the continent for a few years already.


yusron musta'in said...

nice bikeb"d


Grafixworld said...

You can go as far as to say that the best mountain bike socks are, in fact, a pair of socks. While this might not be deemed the most interesting topic on earth, it is definitely important - especially when you're out riding down a mountain trail and your socks decide to give out. With that said, let's see which mountain bike socks are the best for you!