Cast your mind back to last week, and you may remember our post about Intense boss Jeff Steber and his prototype e-Bike project. Well, it appears that it has come along quite a bit from the alloy mule we reported on.
Again Steber has taken to his personal Instagram account to post teasers of his latest project, but the bike obscured in the images is a full carbon bike that may be closer to production that we had first thought.
As we all know, building a bike from carbon isn’t a cheap job and a company needs to invest in moulds, plus research correct carbon layup, so to see Intense’s e-MTB in carbon is a pretty big deal.
On top of the obvious expense that has gone into the bike, it appears that a colour scheme and graphics have been chosen for the bike along with a new, not new name.
In our last Intense e-Bike post we had a couple of shots at naming the battery-powered bike but off the bat we discounted the Tazer name, how wrong we were.
The original Intense Tazer was an alloy hardtail designed for snappy acceleration and was quite popular back in the day (there was also a full-suspension version too). The new one? Well, it’s this carbon fibre full-suspension e-MTB that you see before you here.
While Jeff Steber is comfortable posting partial photos of the Prototype Intense Tazer e-MTB on this social media accounts, there aren’t really any official details, but we think we can spot a few things from the images alone.
First of all, it appears that the battery is now once again located inside the large downtube. We had seen in the previous leaks that a battery position both above and below the downtube has been tested, but it looks as though beneath has been chosen. We can guess that this is to improve the centre of gravity and will allow the Tazer to handle similarly to its non-motorised cousins.
We can also see from the images that the Intense Tazer has room for a bottle in the mainframe. Knowing that Jeff is quite a tall guy we can assume that he is riding a larger frame, so bottle mounting might be tight on smaller frames. Also, that triangle under the top tube – where it kind of looks like there’s a missing ‘N’ from ‘Intense’ – that looks like it could be perfectly suited to a neat storage pod or frame bag…maybe with that missing ‘N’ branded on to it. Now wouldn’t that be neat?
We can’t see much more other that the build kit of this Tazer includes Rental bars, a Fabric seat, DT Swiss wheels and Shimano’s STEP’s e-MTB motor system.
So there we have it. Intense will introduce the Intense Tazer full-suspension e-Bike at some point in the future, but we’re left wondering about cost and if will be as keenly priced as the current range of Intense bikes? And finally is this the point that we begin to see more boutique bike brands jump on the e-MTB bandwagon? How long will it be before we see the first Yeti or Santa Cruz e-Bike?