2 Wheel Drive eMTB Launches

Meet the Twinburst – a French eBike with motors in both hubs and a smartphone ‘dashboard’.

As we approach Eurobike (The world’s biggest bike trade show) next week it’s quite typical that our newsdesk inbox begins to overflow with the good, the bad and the ugly press releases as companies both large and small try and get as much PR as they can before the show. In previous years this kind of story would have been filed away in the round filing cabinet in the corner but things are different now. Whether we like it or not eBikes are appearing everywhere and they are now increasingly looking like mountain bikes. We’ve gone over the controversial issues with off road eBikes and the jury is still out on their future and indeed their actual point – so we are just going to show you what just turned up in our inbox.

It’s a 2 wheel drive eMTB that has motors in each hub instead of the usual gearbox around the BB setup. Traction is controlled by your smartphone and it allegedly varies the power to each hub motor depending on the traction needs at any given moment. But perhaps more useful is that fact that having motors in the hubs allows the bike to make use of regenerative braking to recharge the batteries and extend the range – something that can’t be done with BB type gearbox motors.

Twinburst models come in four types – the BigJump (Full suspension), The Jump (Hardtail), the Urban and Trekk. All are 2WD and the top of the line full sus BigJump comes with Rockshox fork and shock and, oddly for an eBike, a triple SRAM groupset.

Obviously we’ve not been able to ride one yet but from the looks of things we think it can probably be summed up as a ‘because we can‘ type of project. That said, hub mounted motors do have distinct advantages, not least in that the rest of the bike can pretty much be left to look, well, normal (apart from the enormabattery pack with it’s own gravitational field of course).

They have a website and you can apparently order your Twinburst bike right now from a ‘network of dealers’. There are no prices as far as we can see yet and you need to fill in a form and send it back to them so they can tell you where your nearest dealer is. You should expect quite a journey. Now, lets play Guess the Weight of that BigJump.

Mark Alker

Singletrack Owner/Publisher

What Mark doesn’t know about social media isn’t worth knowing and his ability to balance “The Stack” is bested only by his agility on a snowboard. Graphs are what gets his engine revving, at least they would if his car wasn’t electric, and data is what you’ll find him poring over in the office. Mark enjoys good whisky, sci-fi and the latest Apple gadget, he is also the best boss in the world (Yes, he is paying me to write this).

More posts from Mark