AtomicSans
New Member
- Region
- USA
- City
- Pacific Northwest
Okay, so I don’t really know how to structure this, so what I’m gonna do is give my thoughts on individual parts and components in no particular order, then circle back and discuss what I think of the bike and its ride as a whole.
Frame. It’s very nice. Probably not a perfect fit for my height - I’m a 6” tall woman, which is a difficult body type to shop for at the best of times - but I find it comfortable enough to not actively bother me. The fit and finish is actually excellent and beyond expectations for the $1600 MSRP that it ran at the time I bought the bike. Welds are basically seamless - the bead has been… sanded down? Ground down? I’m not sure about the manufacturing processes at work here, but the aluminum frame almost resembles carbon in appearance.
It is, however, quite heavy. The downtube is extremely wide, and I suspect it’s overbuilt and overly thick in many places. I am not a frame expert and will never claim to be, so I cannot make accurate judgments. But I believe that the level of rigidity necessary for a Class 3 does not need to come at the cost of this much weight.
I should mention that the matte gray paint on my particular bike is lovely-looking and wears hard. I’ve scraped against a bike rack or two, smacked some corners walking the bike, and fallen once on black ice, and there are no visible gashes, scratches, or even scuffs.
Overall, the frame’s fit and finish is a high point of this bike, to the point where I worry it might be too nice and other components might be suffering for it to hit the low price point. I will expand on this later.
Wheels and tires. Combining these two for simplicity. I may be wrong here. Please correct me if so. But I don’t understand this Schwalbe Super Moto X tire choice. 27.5x2.4 is - make no mistake - WIDE. It’s fat and wide, and I’m not sure it’s doing anything useful here. It might be doing something if Ride1Up had chosen a knobby MTB tire, and I’ve been frequently tempted to do so and give it a try myself, but I never have, because removing the rear wheel is a huge pain - I will touch on this later. The tire handles well on dirt trails, gravel paths, and the like. It grips. But a 700c gravel tire would do the same, so I’m not sure what I’m getting here. I’ve tried snow, however, and it’s utterly non-functional in situations where the same size MTB tire would likely at least get me somewhere. And on the road, they’re just a bit slow, to be honest. If there’s something I’m missing here, I’m open to being wrong, but as it is, I feel as though I’m getting a mediocre to bad experience on both road and off-road. That said, while I’m curious how MTB tires would work here, including them by default on this bike would probably be misleading, because…
Fork. It’s bad. Not terrible, not Walmart terrible, but it’s bad. The tensioning does not work. Sitting on it sags and no amount of adjustment changes this. Incredibly, while it seems to absorb no shock whatsoever on rough surfaces, it’s exceedingly bouncy and buoyant on perfectly flat surfaces. I keep the fork locked at all times like a solid fork, even on my ill-advised trail adventures. It’s that bad. I would take a solid fork over this suspension fork any day, and I would have saved a buck doing so.
I wish all bike companies would do what Trek does, and refrain from including a suspension fork unless it actually does something.
Drivetrain. I tire of writing too much negativity, so thankfully, I can be more positive here. The drivetrain’s not bad at all. Wellgo pedals give power to a KMC chain, and then to a Shimano Acera cassette and derailleur. It’s a budget group, but it’s thoughtfully budget. Shifting’s fast and pretty accurate, and while it clunked when new, it stopped doing so pretty quickly, so shifting is quite quiet now. The shifter is satisfyingly clicky, with very little travel on upshifting and a three-gear dump for downshifting. I have essentially no complaints here, but a couple notes.
First, I did not realize this for months, but the derailleur hanger was slightly bent out of the box. I hope this is not a frequent issue out of Ride1Up’s factory, because I think many riders may never notice this.
Second, my particular derailleur occasionally fails to downshift from 4th to 3rd. I believe this is a normal wear-and-tear issue that I could easily get fixed up, but I don’t really care right now, since it’s easily remedied by half-shifting down from 3rd. Shifting’s fast enough that the occasional mis-shift is not a speed or safety concern on the road.
Brakes. Another thing I’ll praise. These are quite standard Tektro hydraulic brakes and have never caused me an issue. The front brake has notably more stopping power than the rear, as you would expect. I’ve had some brake squealing issues, but I identified the cause as a contaminant, so not the fault of the brake. These are quite strong brakes. Pull hard enough downhill at 25 mph and you’ll send yourself over the handlebars. That’s a good thing.
Ooookay. Let’s move onto the electric components now. This is where my thoughts get a bit complex. I’ll start with the small stuff.
Lights. The included lights aren’t bad, as long as you understand them. The rear light is a quite nice red combination light and reflector mounted on the rear of the rack. It’s bright enough to make you stand out at dusk. I do think the cable routing for it is a little janky and exposed, but I have never accidentally disconnected it.
The front light is acceptable for a “be-seen” application, but it’s not enough for nighttime illumination. It’s a short-throw light, so it doesn’t focus to a tight enough point to be considered a “headlight,” and it’s just not bright enough. Do not ride after dark with this light. I actually replaced mine with a Buchel Tour 45 SL light that I bought from BikeInn. This involves importing the light from Germany, so it takes time to ship to America, but I like this light a lot. It focuses much more light at a pretty good distance. I feel confident riding at night with the Tour 45 SL. Installing it on the Ride1Up Series 700 involves cutting away some factory-installed heatshrink tubing, disconnecting the thin wires, and connecting the new one. Bring your own heatshrink and zip ties. Seeing as this light is only $20 and three times as bright as the included Buchel UniLED light, I believe Ride1Up should simply include the Tour 45 SL standard on the Series 700.
The lights do have an unfortunate interaction with the display, which brings me to…
Display. Overall, not bad. To get it out of the way, the interaction with the lights is this: when the lights are turned on, the screen dims. This sounds like a good thing, and it often is, because the display is quite bright, enough to ruin your eyes’ sensitivity at night. Unfortunately, the dimmed display is far too dim to be seen during the daytime and isn’t transflective, so in the daytime, you have a choice between being able to see your display and having daytime running lights. This isn’t okay. Trek forces all lights on at all times, which is absolutely the right way to go about this. Daytime running lights SHOULD BE THE STANDARD, and the Series 700 does not allow you to use your lights for this purpose, even if you want to.
Okay - other than that, my thoughts are actually quite positive. The display is quite bright during the day, even in direct sunlight, and it’s the perfect dim level at night. The giant Impact-font readouts are highly readable, and the information shown to you is quite logical. Speed is enormous and takes up most of the display. Assist level is the next-largest readout, and battery level after that. Finally, the smallest readouts show things like the odometer, trip, and a very welcome real-time watt meter. The interface is visually plain, but extremely functional.
Dig into the Display and Advanced Settings and you’ll find some very interesting things to play with. If you wish to cheat your local regulators, you can set the incorrect wheel diameter and go off to the races at whatever speed you like. If you wish to override the 20mph speed limit on the throttle, you can disable that without modding or flashing, for some reason. If you wish to replace the (mostly nonsensical) battery percentage readout with a real-time voltage readout, you can do that. If you wish to keep the battery percentage, you can actually set each 10-percent increment to whatever voltage you would like, which can help you get a more accurate battery percentage as your cells age, or if your battery just has wonky voltage droop behavior from the factory. None of this stuff is strictly necessary, but it’s kind of neat to expose these kinds of “developer options” to the consumer without any modding whatsoever. I am not sure about the legal status of some of these options, but I don’t think anybody actually cares.
ONE BIG RECOMMENDATION I HAVE: Find the “Sensitivity” setting and crank it as high as it’ll go. This controls how responsive the controller is to the cadence sensor and mitigates this bike’s awful pedal lag, which I will get into further in a later section. You will sometimes get false starts, but make good use of the brake levers’ power cutoff, and you’ll be okay.
Throttle. I have not used many other throttle-equipped e-bikes, but I hope they’re not all like this. You essentially cannot use the throttle exclusively at a reasonable speed, because the travel is so short and the friction so low that it’s effectively impossible to keep the throttle in the middle of its travel. If you’re using the throttle, you’re gonna be giving >750W to the motor. (You can change the throttle voltage in the settings, and I recommend lowering it.) I use the throttle exclusively as a crutch for the horrible pedal lag.
Motor and cadence sensor. Okay, let’s finally talk about the pedal lag. It’s bad. Nearly a full second bad. If you rolled to a stop at a bad gear, it’s gonna take effort to get moving, and once you do, the motor is going to kick in at an unexpected time.
Once you’re moving, the experience is better. The motor is loud at low speeds, but interestingly, quieter at faster ones. Also very interestingly, I’ve found that it’s actually quieter than it was when it was new, despite not having lost any power! I have no explanation for this. If you do, I’d love to hear your guesses.
The controller is smart enough not to hit the motor with all the power all at once (cough cough Bafang.) Whether you’ve just punched the throttle or started pedaling, the power ramps up over the course of a second or two. You can see this happen on the watt meter on the display in real time and it’s quite interesting to watch. This means the acceleration is quite smooth, if not responsive, but it also means you can’t get a torquey start, which some people like, as I understand. If all you care about is smoothness, you’ll probably like this!
Additionally, if power’s all you care about, you’ll get enough power out of this motor for just about anything. Power can spike to over 800W if the conditions are right.
A gripe I have with my unit: I get some mild vibration from the motor - but only at assist levels 2 and 4. None of the ebike mechanics I know or work with have any explanation for this. It’s enough that I avoid using level 2 and 4, and mostly only use level 1 and 3.
I like the inclusion of a walk mode. It’s saved my butt a couple of times.
Okay, so to wrap up, I’ll talk about the ride and a few other miscellaneous things.
It’s too heavy. 62 lbs is just too damn heavy, and that’s before all the bags and stuff you’ll probably put on it. Turning is ponderous, braking has to be done early despite the strength of the brakes. Combined with the horrible pedal lag, this bike doesn’t feel fast, even when it is fast. It’s not nimble, even compared to other ebikes, and it's very difficult to pedal without the motor. This is something I appreciate very much about the Trek Verve+ 2 I'm looking at replacing the 700 with - it's much more pedalable.
It’s surprisingly okay off-road, even with the front fork locked. Lower the pressure in the tires a bit and the ride won’t be jarring. It admittedly crushes gravel, no problem.
Ride1Up’s accessories are pretty good. The phone mount is a little overbuilt, but the pannier bags are actually pretty good. They’re not insulated, but they’re roomy with a good mounting mechanism and they come with retroreflectors.
Fundamentally, this is the bike to teach me that I just don’t like hub drives. At all. I know that a lot of my complaints about the motor and cadence sensor are just inherent to a lot of hub drives. Some people are willing to overlook these things for the power a hub drive can offer, but I can’t.
The disproportionate niceness of the frame’s fit and finish makes me worry that too much of the cost to build this thing is spent on the frame, and not enough was spent on the components. A hundred bucks of savings on the frame might have been better spent on the front fork, or indeed, a better e-system.
In general, the choice of smooth but fat 27.5” tires is puzzling to me. I’m not really sure what this bike is actually meant for. The overall design feels a bit confused, like even it isn’t sure what it wants to be.
I only have about 800 miles on this bike over nine months of ownership, which is a little low, but do note that I’m an all-weather cyclist. If I need to go somewhere and it’s raining or snowing, I’m going regardless! So understand that I have put this bike through hell this year, and it’s stood up very well. Regular basic maintenance has gotten it by just fine, and I haven’t needed even a basic tune-up yet.
…That’s just about all the thoughts I have for now. Sorry for not organizing them better. If you would like clarification, further thoughts, or have a question to ask, please ask. I’ll be happy to expand further.
Thanks for reading!
Frame. It’s very nice. Probably not a perfect fit for my height - I’m a 6” tall woman, which is a difficult body type to shop for at the best of times - but I find it comfortable enough to not actively bother me. The fit and finish is actually excellent and beyond expectations for the $1600 MSRP that it ran at the time I bought the bike. Welds are basically seamless - the bead has been… sanded down? Ground down? I’m not sure about the manufacturing processes at work here, but the aluminum frame almost resembles carbon in appearance.
It is, however, quite heavy. The downtube is extremely wide, and I suspect it’s overbuilt and overly thick in many places. I am not a frame expert and will never claim to be, so I cannot make accurate judgments. But I believe that the level of rigidity necessary for a Class 3 does not need to come at the cost of this much weight.
I should mention that the matte gray paint on my particular bike is lovely-looking and wears hard. I’ve scraped against a bike rack or two, smacked some corners walking the bike, and fallen once on black ice, and there are no visible gashes, scratches, or even scuffs.
Overall, the frame’s fit and finish is a high point of this bike, to the point where I worry it might be too nice and other components might be suffering for it to hit the low price point. I will expand on this later.
Wheels and tires. Combining these two for simplicity. I may be wrong here. Please correct me if so. But I don’t understand this Schwalbe Super Moto X tire choice. 27.5x2.4 is - make no mistake - WIDE. It’s fat and wide, and I’m not sure it’s doing anything useful here. It might be doing something if Ride1Up had chosen a knobby MTB tire, and I’ve been frequently tempted to do so and give it a try myself, but I never have, because removing the rear wheel is a huge pain - I will touch on this later. The tire handles well on dirt trails, gravel paths, and the like. It grips. But a 700c gravel tire would do the same, so I’m not sure what I’m getting here. I’ve tried snow, however, and it’s utterly non-functional in situations where the same size MTB tire would likely at least get me somewhere. And on the road, they’re just a bit slow, to be honest. If there’s something I’m missing here, I’m open to being wrong, but as it is, I feel as though I’m getting a mediocre to bad experience on both road and off-road. That said, while I’m curious how MTB tires would work here, including them by default on this bike would probably be misleading, because…
Fork. It’s bad. Not terrible, not Walmart terrible, but it’s bad. The tensioning does not work. Sitting on it sags and no amount of adjustment changes this. Incredibly, while it seems to absorb no shock whatsoever on rough surfaces, it’s exceedingly bouncy and buoyant on perfectly flat surfaces. I keep the fork locked at all times like a solid fork, even on my ill-advised trail adventures. It’s that bad. I would take a solid fork over this suspension fork any day, and I would have saved a buck doing so.
I wish all bike companies would do what Trek does, and refrain from including a suspension fork unless it actually does something.
Drivetrain. I tire of writing too much negativity, so thankfully, I can be more positive here. The drivetrain’s not bad at all. Wellgo pedals give power to a KMC chain, and then to a Shimano Acera cassette and derailleur. It’s a budget group, but it’s thoughtfully budget. Shifting’s fast and pretty accurate, and while it clunked when new, it stopped doing so pretty quickly, so shifting is quite quiet now. The shifter is satisfyingly clicky, with very little travel on upshifting and a three-gear dump for downshifting. I have essentially no complaints here, but a couple notes.
First, I did not realize this for months, but the derailleur hanger was slightly bent out of the box. I hope this is not a frequent issue out of Ride1Up’s factory, because I think many riders may never notice this.
Second, my particular derailleur occasionally fails to downshift from 4th to 3rd. I believe this is a normal wear-and-tear issue that I could easily get fixed up, but I don’t really care right now, since it’s easily remedied by half-shifting down from 3rd. Shifting’s fast enough that the occasional mis-shift is not a speed or safety concern on the road.
Brakes. Another thing I’ll praise. These are quite standard Tektro hydraulic brakes and have never caused me an issue. The front brake has notably more stopping power than the rear, as you would expect. I’ve had some brake squealing issues, but I identified the cause as a contaminant, so not the fault of the brake. These are quite strong brakes. Pull hard enough downhill at 25 mph and you’ll send yourself over the handlebars. That’s a good thing.
Ooookay. Let’s move onto the electric components now. This is where my thoughts get a bit complex. I’ll start with the small stuff.
Lights. The included lights aren’t bad, as long as you understand them. The rear light is a quite nice red combination light and reflector mounted on the rear of the rack. It’s bright enough to make you stand out at dusk. I do think the cable routing for it is a little janky and exposed, but I have never accidentally disconnected it.
The front light is acceptable for a “be-seen” application, but it’s not enough for nighttime illumination. It’s a short-throw light, so it doesn’t focus to a tight enough point to be considered a “headlight,” and it’s just not bright enough. Do not ride after dark with this light. I actually replaced mine with a Buchel Tour 45 SL light that I bought from BikeInn. This involves importing the light from Germany, so it takes time to ship to America, but I like this light a lot. It focuses much more light at a pretty good distance. I feel confident riding at night with the Tour 45 SL. Installing it on the Ride1Up Series 700 involves cutting away some factory-installed heatshrink tubing, disconnecting the thin wires, and connecting the new one. Bring your own heatshrink and zip ties. Seeing as this light is only $20 and three times as bright as the included Buchel UniLED light, I believe Ride1Up should simply include the Tour 45 SL standard on the Series 700.
The lights do have an unfortunate interaction with the display, which brings me to…
Display. Overall, not bad. To get it out of the way, the interaction with the lights is this: when the lights are turned on, the screen dims. This sounds like a good thing, and it often is, because the display is quite bright, enough to ruin your eyes’ sensitivity at night. Unfortunately, the dimmed display is far too dim to be seen during the daytime and isn’t transflective, so in the daytime, you have a choice between being able to see your display and having daytime running lights. This isn’t okay. Trek forces all lights on at all times, which is absolutely the right way to go about this. Daytime running lights SHOULD BE THE STANDARD, and the Series 700 does not allow you to use your lights for this purpose, even if you want to.
Okay - other than that, my thoughts are actually quite positive. The display is quite bright during the day, even in direct sunlight, and it’s the perfect dim level at night. The giant Impact-font readouts are highly readable, and the information shown to you is quite logical. Speed is enormous and takes up most of the display. Assist level is the next-largest readout, and battery level after that. Finally, the smallest readouts show things like the odometer, trip, and a very welcome real-time watt meter. The interface is visually plain, but extremely functional.
Dig into the Display and Advanced Settings and you’ll find some very interesting things to play with. If you wish to cheat your local regulators, you can set the incorrect wheel diameter and go off to the races at whatever speed you like. If you wish to override the 20mph speed limit on the throttle, you can disable that without modding or flashing, for some reason. If you wish to replace the (mostly nonsensical) battery percentage readout with a real-time voltage readout, you can do that. If you wish to keep the battery percentage, you can actually set each 10-percent increment to whatever voltage you would like, which can help you get a more accurate battery percentage as your cells age, or if your battery just has wonky voltage droop behavior from the factory. None of this stuff is strictly necessary, but it’s kind of neat to expose these kinds of “developer options” to the consumer without any modding whatsoever. I am not sure about the legal status of some of these options, but I don’t think anybody actually cares.
ONE BIG RECOMMENDATION I HAVE: Find the “Sensitivity” setting and crank it as high as it’ll go. This controls how responsive the controller is to the cadence sensor and mitigates this bike’s awful pedal lag, which I will get into further in a later section. You will sometimes get false starts, but make good use of the brake levers’ power cutoff, and you’ll be okay.
Throttle. I have not used many other throttle-equipped e-bikes, but I hope they’re not all like this. You essentially cannot use the throttle exclusively at a reasonable speed, because the travel is so short and the friction so low that it’s effectively impossible to keep the throttle in the middle of its travel. If you’re using the throttle, you’re gonna be giving >750W to the motor. (You can change the throttle voltage in the settings, and I recommend lowering it.) I use the throttle exclusively as a crutch for the horrible pedal lag.
Motor and cadence sensor. Okay, let’s finally talk about the pedal lag. It’s bad. Nearly a full second bad. If you rolled to a stop at a bad gear, it’s gonna take effort to get moving, and once you do, the motor is going to kick in at an unexpected time.
Once you’re moving, the experience is better. The motor is loud at low speeds, but interestingly, quieter at faster ones. Also very interestingly, I’ve found that it’s actually quieter than it was when it was new, despite not having lost any power! I have no explanation for this. If you do, I’d love to hear your guesses.
The controller is smart enough not to hit the motor with all the power all at once (cough cough Bafang.) Whether you’ve just punched the throttle or started pedaling, the power ramps up over the course of a second or two. You can see this happen on the watt meter on the display in real time and it’s quite interesting to watch. This means the acceleration is quite smooth, if not responsive, but it also means you can’t get a torquey start, which some people like, as I understand. If all you care about is smoothness, you’ll probably like this!
Additionally, if power’s all you care about, you’ll get enough power out of this motor for just about anything. Power can spike to over 800W if the conditions are right.
A gripe I have with my unit: I get some mild vibration from the motor - but only at assist levels 2 and 4. None of the ebike mechanics I know or work with have any explanation for this. It’s enough that I avoid using level 2 and 4, and mostly only use level 1 and 3.
I like the inclusion of a walk mode. It’s saved my butt a couple of times.
Okay, so to wrap up, I’ll talk about the ride and a few other miscellaneous things.
It’s too heavy. 62 lbs is just too damn heavy, and that’s before all the bags and stuff you’ll probably put on it. Turning is ponderous, braking has to be done early despite the strength of the brakes. Combined with the horrible pedal lag, this bike doesn’t feel fast, even when it is fast. It’s not nimble, even compared to other ebikes, and it's very difficult to pedal without the motor. This is something I appreciate very much about the Trek Verve+ 2 I'm looking at replacing the 700 with - it's much more pedalable.
It’s surprisingly okay off-road, even with the front fork locked. Lower the pressure in the tires a bit and the ride won’t be jarring. It admittedly crushes gravel, no problem.
Ride1Up’s accessories are pretty good. The phone mount is a little overbuilt, but the pannier bags are actually pretty good. They’re not insulated, but they’re roomy with a good mounting mechanism and they come with retroreflectors.
Fundamentally, this is the bike to teach me that I just don’t like hub drives. At all. I know that a lot of my complaints about the motor and cadence sensor are just inherent to a lot of hub drives. Some people are willing to overlook these things for the power a hub drive can offer, but I can’t.
The disproportionate niceness of the frame’s fit and finish makes me worry that too much of the cost to build this thing is spent on the frame, and not enough was spent on the components. A hundred bucks of savings on the frame might have been better spent on the front fork, or indeed, a better e-system.
In general, the choice of smooth but fat 27.5” tires is puzzling to me. I’m not really sure what this bike is actually meant for. The overall design feels a bit confused, like even it isn’t sure what it wants to be.
I only have about 800 miles on this bike over nine months of ownership, which is a little low, but do note that I’m an all-weather cyclist. If I need to go somewhere and it’s raining or snowing, I’m going regardless! So understand that I have put this bike through hell this year, and it’s stood up very well. Regular basic maintenance has gotten it by just fine, and I haven’t needed even a basic tune-up yet.
…That’s just about all the thoughts I have for now. Sorry for not organizing them better. If you would like clarification, further thoughts, or have a question to ask, please ask. I’ll be happy to expand further.
Thanks for reading!
