Trek Fuel EXe reviewed (finally)

and separated for air flight

you’re only allowed a total of 160wh per person, so you’d need to get someone else in your party to carry any additional batteries

Excellent review that. I’m amazed how much of the workding could be transalted to the Kinesis Rise Pro I owned for a short period. I bought it wxactly for the reasons Sanny suggests, I didn’t want to fly around on a new type of vehicle, I wanted a mountain bike that could assist me to ride more than my old body is capable of now.
This section particulary:

like riding with a massive tailwind. Or on ascents that have had a few degrees of gradient removed from them. Or you’ve suddenly become twenty years younger. It’s not that climbing becomes whistle-while-you-work easy (which it can do on full-power e-bikes), it’s still pretty strenuous activity on the Trek Fuel EXe.

Aside from having no rear suspension (which made it quite a difficult bike to get used to) the Kinesis could fit that description.
But yeah, as on page one the money side of things meant I had to sell it on, so much as I’d love a full-sus version of the bike I had…

The Trek rationale for this says that the range extender has been sized at 160wh because that is the max size that is allowed in aeroplanes, so you can take your bike abroad, leaving the main battery at home of course, and still get some assisted riding in.

Thats an interesting justification, but kind of ludicrous that you’d think about going to all the effort of flying with a bike to then have only a about 600m of climb in battery.

Tell that to what must be dozens of folk I’ve seen riding sworks and plenty other 5 figure ebikes in the wild. Not just ‘1%ers’ buying them either.

Surely that’s approaching the point of the guy on Question Time famously trying to claim that on £80k he was poor.

Wow! That’s proper bonkers

You sure?

Figures, when you consider how much even a 6 year old car is worth now (at 70,000 miles it’s barely run in) it means the first, 2nd and even 3rd owners are buying them on finance. Whereas previously you needed an unsecured loan (at a higher rate) to get a 2nd hand car.

And only a quarter on of the cars on the road are with their first owner (i.e. that £40k car is also a £20k, £10k and £5k car to someone else at 3/6/9/12 years old) so the figure isn’t representative of the average price anyone paid for their car.

Disposable income is a funny thing. Once you’ve paid the bills to met your basic needs it builds up fairly quickly. A 5% pay rise for a lot of people is probably the difference between a Focus and a 3-series on finance outside of austerity/cost of living crisis / brexit . So it’s easy to see why people with a couple of hundred quid spare each month end up ‘buying’ a ‘premium’ car.

I wonder how many of the optimistically prices 2nd hand e-bikes are because the owner owes that much on finance. The flipside of that disposable income increasing disproportionately with salary is it’s just as quickly erroded.

Thats an interesting justification, but kind of ludicrous that you’d think about going to all the effort of flying with a bike to then have only a about 600m of climb in battery.

I dunno – whenever I go away its always on a mostly uplift holiday, where we’ll be uplifted for most of the day with the odd bit of climbing, say 6000 feet of uplift and 2000 feet of self propelled climb, the battery would be perfect for that. Plus its actually not that bad to ride with no battery at all, not significant worse/heavier than the heavier end of the spectrum enduro bikes.

I dunno – whenever I go away its always on a mostly uplift holiday, where we’ll be uplifted for most of the day with the odd bit of climbing, say 6000 feet of uplift and 2000 feet of self propelled climb, the battery would be perfect for that.

I agree… I don’t quite understand who anyone who buys an Ebike then has to force the issue to do every climb, every day, sometimes it seems to me at the expense of enjoying the day. It’s like they’re at times trying to justify the purchase rather than just enjoying it.

I don’t quite understand who anyone who buys an Ebike then has to force the issue to do every climb, every day, sometimes it seems to me at the expense of enjoying the day. It’s like they’re at times trying to justify the purchase rather than just enjoying it.

Do you not want to go til you’re tired and spent when out on a regular bike?

you’re only allowed a total of 160wh per person, so you’d need to get someone else in your party to carry any additional batteries

 

Picking the last two airlines I used*, they both allow 2×160 wh batteries (as well as an unbelievable quantity of other batteries) to be carried, so there is carrier variation.

 

*AirNZ and Virgin

Thank you for an informative review. I am a recent owner of a 9.7 (a more modest SLX and Fox spec)

I have a chronic health condition which means my days of long fast rides are long gone, but fortunately still have something left to give. Have previously owned a “full fat” ebike I want back to “acoustic”. I hated the weight, compromised handling and overpowered nature of the ebike. For me the lightweight, stealthy, quiet, well integrated battery and motor, incorporated in a frame the rides brilliant is amazing. Sure, it’s not like some ebikes; a big SUV like hyper powered bike. I have to put effort in. But it’s such a rewarding bike to ride and gives me a massive grin, and a pace a distance I’ve lost due to ill health. It’s as close as I will get to owner, riding fast an acoustic bike. Not all of us want long range and lots of power, we just want a morning of fun riding single track. This bike massively delivers on that.

Wot wipeout said makes me happy 🙂

OK….. so what makes this bike so *IMPORTANT* compared to something like the Orbea Rise?

OK….. so what makes this bike so *IMPORTANT* compared to something like the Orbea Rise?

Better marketing department.

The motor makes this bike.

I’ve ridden the Rise and it’s a great bike, but not as good. It’s noise and power delivery from the motor that makes the EXE the better bike. The TQ motor is much quieter. It is more responsive, less surge and less overrun. It’s a very natural riding experience. I reckon the Harmonic Pin-Ring gear will be much more reliable than the normal gearboxes. The motor is much smaller and so doesn’t compromise the frame design. Ebike or not the Trek Fuel EXe is a great trail bike because of that smaller motor.

I don’t know whether the Trek is genuinely all that important or not, but I suspect it’s more impactful than the Rise for “death of a thousand cuts” type reasons.

So the Rise is an ebike that looks very normal and non-ebikey, which is nice. The EXe does the same thing, but more betterer. The Rise, as nice as it looks, does have a fairly obvious motor in the bb area. The EXe just doesn’t really (or at least, you have to look hard to guess it’s there).

And then there’s the acoustics: you can hear the motor on the Rise, but the EXe is (reportedly) pretty much silent. So again, it’s just that bit closer to a normal bike.

Minor things, but maybe they add up, IDK. Plus, as STW said in their first look at the Exe, the fact that it’s from a big manufacturer is by itself a statement.

but the EXe is (reportedly) pretty much silent.

it really is near as damnit silent, its quite remarkable, and a very nice thing having ridden a bosch gen4 bike for the last 2 years. Its not just the lack of whining noise when pedalling, but there is no rattle from the motor when going downhill without pedaling like you get with the shimano ep8 (& ep8rs in the rise) & bosch gen 4.

I still think the rise (especially in aluminium form) is the best value e mtb (not just out of the lightweights, but e mountain bikes as a whole) out there at the moment though .

I haven’t read all the replies but another topic seemingly ignored in reviews is the battery life. Not how long it lasts on the ride, but how long until it needs replacing because it has degraded. Do the manufacturers have a recycling/replacement program? I have spoken to Orbea and apparently they don’t, whereas Trek seem to have thought about this and as far as I can tell, they have a system in place.

If you can’t replace the battery, or have to go through the hassle of disposing of it (not that easy nowadays) then you are just storing up problems for yourself. Your LBS is not going to get involved so it is down to you.

Food for thought when choosing a bike perhaps?

replacement batteries are available (about £520 for the fuel exe) for most ebikes, I guess you’d keep the degraded battery as a kind of range extender for big days out – or thats what I would do. once its completely useless (to me) I’d take it to our local recycling place.

These look to be available with massive discounts at the moment.  Some £10brand models going at 50% off. I appreciate the better spec doesn’t make up for the range anxiety, but as a potential buyer, it starts to look a lot of e-bike for (still quite a lot) a better buy.

 

agree some cracking deals on these just now, higher spec ones available in every size at around half price, with a bit of googling.  I think it just highlights the savings on a new but 23 or 24 model expensive bike.  My initial reaction was around the huge ‘depreciation’ associated with ebikes, but looking at same model year regular bikes from Trek and others the savings to be found are comparable, so it’s not just ebikes.

It does confirm that the second hand value, should you wish to move one of these on, having paid original full or near full price, is a losers game.  I think this is more the case with ebikes due to the likely problems with motors and batteries when out of warranty.

I did look at selling my hardly used and heavily upgraded 2020 Levo SL earlier in the year, and surmised I’d be better keeping it even if I do only rode it once a month or so, as I’d be lucky to get much over 2k for what was a 10k bike.

Back to the Trek, if I was looking for another ebike I’d be buying one for sure, infact my LBS, Sprockets have my size in stock and half price…

I love this sort of eeb. I had a Thomus for a while to test with the similar specced Maxxon motor and I loved how I could smash out big laps of places like GT at a pace I haven’t had in 20 years and still not feel destroyed afterwards, but never really felt like I was riding an ebike.

I think the sprung weight argument is overplayed – the bigger factor that eBikes have over regular bikes (IMHO) is that the Eebs decouple the drive from the cranks, so you get a fully free suspension set up, no pedal kickback, no clutch dragging on your drive. Thats similar to the effect of an o-Chain but even more so.

Eebs decouple the drive from the cranks, so you get a fully free suspension set up, no pedal kickback, no clutch dragging on your drive. Thats similar to the effect of an o-Chain but even more so.

That’s interesting, but I know very little about eebs – how does this happen? Is there effectively a clutch on the cranks when not pedaling?