I have just picked up a Reese moer super light Touring bike uh for the weekend to test out uh thanks to green Air across the road who I bought my bike on and all of other the people who service it uh I give you a look at the bike but I'm very excited by it because it's it's like that kind of Mercedes or Porsche or something of touring bikes it's very much more elaborate than mine uh there it is right there I've just set myself up with a GoPro on my chest so I can record myself cycling home and I be testing out in various ways over the weekend I should clarify I'm not being paid in any way for this review it's not sponsored I just got the bike to take a land off and test out likewise these are my opinions alone based on my experience so for the purpose of this review uh I cycl the bike I think about a total of 140 km including a major trip up the wicko mountains uh and I took it on lots of different terrain types that I know from my T touring experience are important in terms of gauging how well something might work demonstrating my dedication to giving you accurate reviews I've taken the super light all the way up to the feather bed which is a first clide into the mountain actually a West windy day made to see very much on the other side but uh yeah it certainly put it through it Paces anyway so I'm going to first of all bring you through the features and show you uh videos I'll be doing all that so you'll be able to form some judgments of yourself and then I'm going to talk a bit more about the actual concept of this bike which is obviously way more expensive than anything I would have thought of buying myself and I talk about that uh and also what I see as the the largest obvious problem which is the weight at 32 kilos but also as you'll see in the videos I do some experimentation around that and find ways that perhaps it's not as big a problem as it initially looks now if you go onto the green Air website you'll see that they have this coed from being just under €8,000 to just under €10,000 depending on exactly what configuration you have it set up on uh I think my configuration was actually pushing more towards that 10,000 and because it had the electronic gear shifts conditions are definitely conspiring against me a bit as you can see there's blue sky and there's lots of gray sky let's take an opportunity to have a look at the features of the bike I just turn the camera all right and uh I parked it up here some with a good view had to climb I think I'm 700 M to get here um so what do we have the lot basically so we have front and rear suspension and as part of that rear suspension the back carrier is not mounted on the back wheel like it would be in most bikes but instead Mount onto the center of the frame and that allows the back wheel suspension to be to just basically cling onto the road uh while the bike itself takes all the we and this particular model they haven't put a front carrier on it would be here it would come out like that and then there's a lip on it um looks good for carrying tents and things but if it was likewise it would not be mounted on the front forks but the ways would be back coming back here uh and mounted on the stem so in other words all the way the and all the luggage is sitting on the center frame of the bike and both front and rear suspension are moving independently of that so the key difference here is by going up into uh the second assist level I can actually maintain a speed of about 20 and the rattling doesn't really affect me so yeah as I go over them I mean I can feel it I'm shaking but I'm not losing any control really at all over the steering H despite the fact that I'm up around 20K so this would have been transformative in my cycling in Spain where I was getting lost Offroad on Forest Trails or the rougher stretches of the Camino where I was having to slow right down to you know 12 and it was to be honest it was still pretty scary cuz I was slipping around a lot on those uh whereas here I can stay up around 20 now if you think about what that means for the distance you can cover or how quickly you can cover say 50 km of rough trail on this maybe it's 2 and 1 half hours in that other situation was 5 hours oh we have some deer perhaps grass isn't a tough enough test so I went up the Dublin mountains excellent opportunity to test that suspension on this road [Applause] uh you can probably see how bouncy this is and it's handling it absolutely no problem whatsoever it's kind of extraordinary actually I tried a lot of surfaces this is very rough gravel even when I'm going off the paths I'm retaining full control it's got one funny gimmick which is the saddle if you push I think this button goes down uh but the saddle depressors uh now I actually couldn't I mean h you can use that a traffic light so you can put both feet on the ground and I wasn't seeing that many other uses for it until I uh gave a friend a test ride who and she's a little bit shorter than I am not massively uh but she couldn't get a leg over the back of it so we depress the saddle and then she could climb on so actually uh particularly as you get older uh that could be quite a useful feature indeed um the engine is the performance line CX that's an 85 Newton met torque uh and that's an important measure because that basically means it's good at climbing Hills uh it can give you more of a shove up a steeper Hill than most engines can and certainly it's noticeably better than my normal riding bike that it's actually the biggest change of all and I've done a bit of testing with that and I'll show it all right okay so now I'm going to do the tough test which is this hill I would guess it's probably at 30% maybe uh it's pretty steep anyway um and if we start off I'm going to go into the highest gear so I'm going into turbo and it can do it on this but it's that's hard work as you're getting up to the top you're slowing right down and now let's try it whoops with a super Delight so now we're going to do exactly the same thing with the super Delight in Turbo and I'm expecting this to be a lot easier and oh my God that is so much easier that's ridiculous okay that is astounding Yeah so basically even this hill which is a nasty vicious Hill you almost don't feel it I didn't even stand up going up us and I don't think I'm even in the lowest gear very very impressive Rive Andrew you might object that's a very short Hill it's not a proper test and I agree uh so the next thing I did was I took the bike with me to the Dublin mountains uh I I did 1100 M of climb all together that day but this key segment is the climb up to the viewing point at Kil key unfortunately you can't see very much here uh which as anyone who is a cyclist in Dublin will tell you is a very very long tough climb with a particular steep bit at the end and that in fact is where I'm coming back in with the audio now I know this is a hard exhausting one so I'm going to go up to sport just giving me another push and again in comparison with my other bike with a much weaker weaker engine smaller selection of Gears this is far easier uh both suspensions you can actually lock out so if you're Road cycling uh you can turn off the suspension so you're not wasting energy running it um the chain isn't it's a chain isn't he says what do you mean by that it's not a chain it's a belt so look no lubricant I think at least they've forgotten to put it on if there is meant to be on uh so the big deal with those um is that they probably only need to be replaced every 10,000 km whereas my one I probably need to replace every 2,000 and it could be on this because the engine's so much more powerful you'd be replacing it every 1,500 to 1,000 so that's quite a big deal uh we have the nion display uh which you can basically get to show an endless amount of information so this is a fairly standard nion setup uh this one is showing you the speed you're moving at datawise that but this is always probably the most interesting display which is what proportion of power comes has been coming from you and What proportion from the engine and then you can set up loads more screens on it uh this isn't my control unit it's the one that I got with the loan I'm actually not sure what would happen if I put mine on it so I don't want to in case it resets things or something uh but on mine I've set up about 10 of these screens with loads of information on them and then and of course the main thing is turning up through the power so this is off this is Eco this is tour mode sport mode and turbo mode which is basically giving you the full 340% assist I built a new tile uh with extra information this is very easy to do on nonon you just add elements as you need them uh so what I have added is an indication for what gear I'm in what gear it's recommended I go into uh how many meters I've ascended what my top speed has been and what the total distance Cycles that's a bit of an odd one to put in that category but it's basically I'm just curious as to how far this bike has gone so far so that's that's the odometer that's turning up there it's one of the nice things about the N is you can have oh there's loads of screens I think you basically put far more information on a thing you'd ever actually read we have electronic gear shifting so there are 14 gears and they shift electronically and so they're not very far apart and that feels really strange when you're using it h because they're so close together so the gear shift over here and it's electronic you actually don't feel the change at all like there the the the vaguest sense of a click it's also got the feature that if you're for instance coming down a steep hill doing lots of speed so you're going up into the biggest gear and I'm sure a lot of people have done this you'll then stop and forget you in the biggest gear and it's really hard to start again H well what happens with the electronic shifts is they shift back into a mid-range gear that you have predefined to test the gears I took the bike to another notorious Dublin Hill which is knoon Hill at the back of the Phoenix Park coming up from the strawberry beds H it's a long Steep Hill that gets steeper and steeper as you get towards the top and has broken many cyclist Hearts um so with this test I kept it in the lowest assist mode which was t uh and I just used the the gears to climb the hill and of the 14 gears by the time I oh the other thing I I did was I stopped at the bottom so I had no momentum going into it uh but of the 14 gears by the time I got to the top I had shifted down to I think the fourth gear in other words I actually still had three more uh lower gears that I could have gone to if I had needed it now working back up through the gears they're very very smooth when you get the hang of them it's still a little unsettling that you just can't there's very little feedback uh they should probably I me there is a button under there I can feel it they should probably put a haptic touch kick or something just to give me more reassurance something is happening but fantastically smooth uh we've got the tires so these again are very different from my normal ride they're 50 mm I think so they're calling the fat bike tires so together with the suspension that means I can ride on this sort of rough gravel here and it's not bad you know it's like if I was on my other bike I'd be skidding all over the place and probably not wanting to risk it to be honest but here it's it's not at all bad H so batteries of course so you've got two batteries you've got a top battery here which is 500 watts and you have a second battery here underneath which is I think 625 Watts giving you 1125 Watt hours of power that's a lot of power um it gives this bike on eco mode a range of 200 km plus I'll take a bit actually probably a bit over 200 km was flat I'm testing it out today I have climbed about 800 M on very steep hills and I'm still going to get about 210 km out of it I'd say so so here we have the estimated range is only 180 km at the moment uh that's possibly because it's still working off the last bit I cycled yesterday which was on grass uh so we'll check back in with that later on and see where it's got to now climbed up to 600 M I think up here of potential range of right down to 47 km however don't panic because we've actually only used 18% of battery so what that tells you is that that's entirely due to all the climbing you've just done and you could basically turn around trace my roof back and that would use almost no battery CU it would all be downhill and so over 25 km an hour with no assist okay so let me show you something uh we've come down off the feather bed that was a descent so the battery range indicators now look very different to the last time I showed you now I'm in tour mode here and it's still showing me a range of 127 and that was like 56 uh and if I go into Eco my range is 195 km again so that's a very good illustration of the way the range is so so dependent on what you've been doing in the last couple of kilometers uh on the way up right down to 56 come down a bit M to 192 yeah and currently we see a range of 156 and that's cuz I'm coming up the hills again but I've now done 20 uh 34 so consistently the reasonable estimate range uh are coming in around the 200 km Mark in eco mode and that's really using a little bit of the higher modes going up the hills as well so that's a pretty reasonable range I mean that's certainly a day cycling and uh probably for a lot of people to days cycling at the end of the day I'd have 150 range left with 65 Dawns so what's that 215 all together oh it's got a rear brake light which I've never had before uh front light is extremely bright it's on a kind of low setting at the moment but it's also got a highbeam setting when you turn the lights up you can definitely see quite well ahead of you and actually I don't know if you can see it but the actual light button itself has a little blue light on it I was having s locating it because like everybody these days they just love doing bues that are based off that joke and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where a hijack spaceship and all the Contra controls are black lights lighting up black buttons and black panels and somebody took that very seriously in the world of design um it actually comes with a bicycle luck so that is an apus bordo uh foldout lock which A friend of mine has for her bike which she bought separately because it qualifies for that gold level lock that you need for insurance so it's kind of Handy to have it built in the only thing that I do think about that is I wonder if the lock wasn't there could I fit a small frame bag underneath and uh store more stuff it's not a huge space of course the key thing with the Touring bike has been able to hang things off the bike itself uh so the configuration as that I picked up isn't really a full touring configuration uh so I'll just bring you around what it does have though and talk about the one big missing element I've just got a couple of my bags hanging off it it takes the panels very comfortably and again the impressive thing is that all the weight of those bags doesn't go on the back wheel like it would on many bikes but instead goes on uh the seat post uh and that basically gives you a very effective suspension system um so the major item that's missing is uh Rees and Muller do a front uh uh paner which comes out like this it again doesn't attach to the wheel it attaches to the post and basically that would be coming out like that about here with the little lip on it uh so it's pretty much ideal for instance for putting a tent on um or H you could probably get a substantial enough roll bag on there as well certainly like my big handlebar bag is 12 L it would very easily take that and I suspect it would take a bigger one um so between those two you'd easily get your two big piers on either side I've just got some camera gear in a tiny bag there at the moment uh you'd probably get a a bag in there under the saddle the other thing that struck me is the current configuration isn't great for hanging bags on the bars and of course the shapes are a little bit awkward anyway uh so they've got the lock underneath here for instance which I think is probably an optional element so one thing you could consider is not getting the lock and instead you would get a small frame bag in there not a very big one there might be potential for hanging one off the um that horizontal as well I'm not sure that doesn't look like it' be that easy to detach now it's entirely possible that actually re and moer also do bags I don't know maybe part of the configuration process is actually uh being able to order biks that would fit but yeah you could definitely get a fair amount on uh this bike but not a huge amount now this is a very common problem with bikes with suspension systems uh you know that one of the trade-offs is that the suspension system takes up room and reduces the possibility to for instance attach Piers to the front forks there that probably wouldn't work when you've got that sort of 100 120 mm of possible travel there um but but yeah it's not a deal breaker you could get quite a lot and certainly it would be fine for uh hotel trips or uh for camping trips where you weren't encountering extreme weather so you didn't need to be carrying huge amounts of of gear with you in other words I mean it it's it's much more this bike I think is much more of a uh a bike packing setup uh you know like it's much more aimed towards being able to go Offroad than Poss possibly being able to do very very long distances ons supported uh where you would need to carry an awful lot of stuff it's not quite a pack horse I think uh whether you can change the configuration to make it more pack horse like I'm not sure so going down here which is a really tough Hill you know the brakes feel great honest I don't know if this variant has ABS brakes fitted but I know it's one of the things you can get added probably overkilled for it mly for my usage basically makes for a bike that does a very comfortable longdistance ride that is no problem at all going Offroad onto this sort of very rough gravel surface so it gets you places they B disadvantage as I've mentioned is that all those features weigh so you're looking at about 32 kilos of weight there so there's two batteries uh one in the top tube one in the horizontal tube and the horizontal tube is the bigger one I think that is the 625 Watt and this is a 500 watt they're both removable um and they well I haven't tested out uh this fully but if you remove the bottom one you can still run the bike off the top battery don't know if reverse is also true why would you want to do that well so the problem is the bike's very heavy 32 kilos uh so when I come to a barrier across a canal toe path for instance uh that I can lift my other bike over I can't really safely lift this over um I mean I could probably physically get it over but if I cycle from here to Robert Town there's at least three barriers I need to liftt it over and really struggle to lift it over is probably asking to do your back in um so I can I tested it out I can take out both batteries and that drops the weight down probably by that's probably taking 8 to n kilogram off the total weight so that's a lot including the covers H and at that stage yes I can lift the bike over H however again if I'm cycling to Roberts town then that basically means I would have to do that at least five times and possibly more and actually it's quite a struggle to get this one in particular back back in at least I found it hard I it took me about 10 minutes the first time so I definitely don't want to be doing that five times so if instead I take the bottom off and leave the top in I'm probably taking close to 5 kilos off the bike's weight that's enough for me to be just about able to lift it over without feeling I'm actually going to do any damage to myself and then I can cycle it with the bottom battery in a p and then each time I get to a barrier I take the P off uh and the top battery powering it uh and that basically means I don't need to do that removing the battery the bottom battery five times and struggling with it I can just do it the once at the start of that section and once again at the end of it uh I don't know how that works in terms of the battery balancing for your overall distance but I suspect if it's possible to do it then the system is smart enough to compensate for all that there's a charge port on the bike itself so you can charge the bike by just plugging into the charge port but you can also take the batteries off and and charge them so you know if you're on the fourth floor of a hotel or something then you can bring the batteries up and charge them there so I'm going to have another go at uh taking the bottom battery out and then replacing it this will be the fourth time the first three times I had a hell of a time putting it back in again um so let's see so the it's key it's a key system you turn the key you can see it pops out there there's a a little switch that you can put your finger in and then it comes out now here's the hard part putting it back in and got going to try a slightly different method this time which is to come it this way so you can see me struggling with it in this speeded up version uh I did eventually get it back in again uh so that was the fourth time I had taken it in and out but it is not easy and from talking to a couple of other people uh it just is one of those things that's quite tricky I presume with practice you'd get better but you definitely wouldn't want to be doing it several times in a single day so if we going to do some analysis of what I actually think of this bike what would I say uh well it was fun cycle um my initial concerns about weight I somewhat satisfied through that experiment with removing the batteries I think you could probably make it work uh I wish they weren't quite so awkward I'm not really a fan of the internal batteries and unfortunately everything is Shifting towards internal batteries I guess cuz they they're less likely to get tangled and they're probably a bit harder to steal um the price is obviously the shock Point um but I mean there's two things to be said on it uh I mean the first is that it's just the nature of if you have a really spect out high-end bike it's going to end up being ridiculously expensive that's been true for decades really um and it's unavoidable uh the second thing though is in comparison with my own bike which is 201700 one thing I would have to say is that it's got additional things that I add added to my bike later on and paid for so I got an additional battery to get the range up to a th000 oh sorry my total power to 1,000 Watts that cost me I think 750 uh I added the nonon to it that cost me another 500 uh I added handlebar grips recently which added another 50 I think uh I'd to buy a lock for it if I bought that particular lock I think that retails for something like 150 so you I think you do need to take into account that it's probably those accessories listed there are an extra thousand EUR or more um so that would bring the price down somewhat but yeah I mean that's obviously going to be way out of pocket of a lot of people and I mean my ethos and interest in in touring is that it's something most people should be able to do so that is kind of off-putting uh I guess the one thing you can say though is that um I'm approaching retirement slowly it's still a few years away but at my retirement I'll get a lump some and you know I would be tempted to take a a chunk of that lumpsum and spend it on that sort of high-end bike I don't think I'd replac my current one completely I think there's particular uses I actually prefer my bike for um but it's certainly in the right situation it it could be a bike you would use a lot um and yeah so I would say overall I'm very impressed with it i' never really had a chance to use a lot of those features before the full suspension the electronic gear shift all that all that sort of thing so that was a really useful experience for me it's G me a lot of thoughts uh so I'm putting this review video up fairly fast uh but I'm actually going to mull over the other thoughts digest them a bit uh I've cycled another couple of different types of electric bikes including a low-end catalon uh so I think I will probably do a piece where I talk about different electric bikes what your options are with them what sort of makes sense in certain circumstances but maybe not in others and I'll upload that in the future probably that's probably a month or two away um if you haven't already do subscribe to the channel so you'll see that when I upload it and if you found this video useful and if you're still watching it at this point you have make sure you do give it a like uh those of you who are regular channel followers will know most two-thirds of this channel is actually uh Roots I have cycled most recently I've uploaded cycling from Dublin to St Mullin on the Barrow in party Offroad along the Grand Canal and then the barrel uh if you if you're into those sort of things I also post photographs and video live uh to my Instagram account which is also called ebike touring life as I do those uh and in fact if you look at um if if you look at that account you'll notice when I had the bike I actually did a couple of posts on it uh so you can find out more immediately what I'm up to that way YouTube always takes me a couple of weeks to a couple of months to edit stuff together um so I'll add some more information in the video description and the other thing I do is I I monitor the comments pretty carefully so if you've got questions or comments uh do post something in there I may I'll probably respond to you there as well may also give me ideas for uh future videos but yeah overall I think this was a really good experience for me I'm glad Greener uh uh made it possible for me to take the bike for a test thanks LS for that uh and I I'd encourage other people to look at that as well um I'm I think when I when I hit retirement I will be looking at it not necessarily that exact model but certainly you know could I fit a highend um what essentially isn't he meant bike into my life I might but uh anyway thanks for watching and uh hopefully one day I'll see you on the road
2024-10-19 05:37