The Midpower Marvel: Orbea Rise LT M10 review

The Orbea Rise LT M10 may have a full-fat motor but it’s still the lean, mean, mile-munching mid-power machine that it always was. Brand: Orbea Produc …

By ben_haworth

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The Midpower Marvel: Orbea Rise LT M10 review

What isn’t so nice is the cable routing. And the stem. Maybe you like cabling to go through the headset. Maybe you like bespoke stems and spacers that can’t easily be changed. Maybe you are mentally ill.

not sure if emoji’s are working properly, so I’ll just say: ROFL! 🙂

I prefer the slightly earlier Rise (which i own) in terms of aesthetics but i could live with this one for sure. I don’t come home rinsed from a Rise ride though, i just cruise around mostly, but i think i’m an outlier on this.

I will be taking mine to Dyfi next week though.

The internal headset cable routing, i’d actively go out of my way to avoid that though, anything i could buy that didn’t have that, i’d rather own.

Is the Orbea Rise still midpower? Although the bike ships in its software-restricted ‘RS’ mode (with a maximum of 60Nm of torque) the new Gen 2 version of the Shimano EP801 RS can be set to kick out the full 85Nm

RS mode is 56nM in boost, RS+ is 85.

What makes it mid-power is that the *power* is limited – you should get up just as steep a slope as your mates on full fat but you won’t do it quite so quickly.  It’s not stuff that shows up in the Shimano app but I *think* the power settings in RS are 150/250/350w with the max power in RS+ maybe 500 (still below the full peak motor power of 600w).  Probably makes very little difference on the flat or descending when you’re running up against the speed limit rather than motor output and it’s climbing that eats battery anyway.

I wonder how much of the cadence response is custom to Orbea and how much is just the ‘assist character’ settings in the RS/RS+ profiles.  You can’t change the power limits without hacking it to put on standard firmware but you can create your own profiles and choose the assist character and max torque for eco/trail/boost.

Assist character can be set between 1 and 10.  RS mode is 2/3/6, RS+ 3/5/9 (which are all a notch or two up from the same mode settings in the older Rise)

With the range extender attached the system does not give out the higher end of assist. Exact figures are elusive but it feels very much like it goes into the trad RS restricted mode

That’s exactly what it does.  The piggy back battery can’t deliver the same current as the main battery so when it’s connected the bike runs in RS mode.  (it runs the piggy back down first, once you’ve rinsed it you can disconnect it but you’d need to find some way of protection the port on it if you stashed the cable)./

The new GripX damper in the Fox 36 fork feels significantly less comfy than previous 36 dampers

That’s a shame – the old 36 Grip2 weren’t the plushest – this new gen was supposed to be better and the early reviews sounded promising.

If it wasn’t for the heaqdset routing I would already have ordered on/be riding one (depending on lead times). But sorry Orbea, this is just so unnecessary. I love my Rise which I have had now for almost 3 years. But I have already bought its’ replacement and it does not have any stupid trend-driven standards. Hopefully they have sorted out the weak and overly awkward rear pivot/mech-hanger/bearing arrangement. It was also a major weak spot and another potential reason not to buy another Rise.

Surely the controller should be able to read the current a drawn from the extender and if you ask for more power than the extender can support, it could switch it off and draw from the main battery instead.

Can’t be that hard, surely?

(said as someone who is neither an electronics nor software engineer)

The headset routing thing annoys me. I’d love one of these to replace my 22 Rise. If I made a list of all the things I wanted to change about the frame, the new model has them all.

Unless Orbea can offer a little reassurance around continued support for spares though, I’m not sure I could bring myself to buy another one.