Through thousands of miles of riding, I’ve learned these e-bikes inside and out, top to bottom and front to back. That dedication to real-world e-bike testing has helped me find the best electric bicycles on the market for just about any budget. There were perhaps three weeks after I’d brought the bike home, it sitting in my living room, where I just looked at it a lot, half in disbelief that I owned a real mountain bike and half worrying about not riding it properly enough.
It’s a bold move to build a deliciously dynamic and forgivingly flexy steel trail bike in Germany, the heartland of stiffness being touted as the grail of bicycle manufacture in cycling media. I find intact collarbones to be both beneficial and desirable in my line of work and as a self-employed person, so I was overly cautious to start with, riding an alien-feeling bike on things that I can’t ride. It’s a good-looking bike with a concise and consistent design language used throughout the frame, with all the castings for the pivot points matching the dropouts and gusset shapes.
It uses the same motor as the CSC FT1000MD we featured above (the Bafang M620 mid-drive), but cranks up the current to provide closer to 1,500W of power. When it comes to all-wheel-drive electric bikes, the $3,299 Ariel Rider Grizzly is one of my favorites. The Tern Quick Haul features a mid-drive Bosch motor, hydraulic disc brakes, Tern’s vertical parking rack, and a relatively lightweight but high utility design that is meant to carry just about anything in your life.
Together, we made a decision about the direction that my riding would realistically take. It didn’t seem appropriate for my skill level to go for an all-in enduro tire like the sticky yet resilient Tacky Chan, although there were points riding through the UK winter that I wished I had. Instead, we chose the faster rolling and much lighter weight Wicked Will Super Trail EVO for the rear with the matching Nobby Nic on the front. It’s nothing about hyper bicycles the effects of tires, suspension, and steering geometry, but the stiff bars worked nicely in the context of this bike. The BEAST rims also felt incredibly stiff both vertically and laterally, but again complemented the dynamic handling characteristics of a big squishy bike quite well. They were very light and felt incredibly solid, sustaining zero permanent damage from being repeatedly smashed against rocks when the tires bottomed out.
Plus you can capture all of your ride footage on the bike instead of bringing along a Go-Pro camera. The bike rolls on 20″ moto-style wheels and comes with nice parts including hydraulic disc brakes, hyper mountain bike a bench seat, dual suspension, and a big moto-style headlight. The lighting is ultra bright and it features other nice parts like powerful hydraulic disc brakes and an included rack/fender setup.