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I appreciate your perspective as a motorcycle and car nut from age 13 on. I just want to point out that one of the key difference between vehicles being overpowered and bikes being overpowered... is that when you get a speeding ticket, disorderly conduct ticket (display of power) or wreck your car, they don't close off access to the roads to everyone. They just take away your license, impound your vehicle and/or throw you in jail. There is no mechanic for that in the trail space and thus what happens is that the easy answer is to just remove the problem entirely by removing access to emtbs. Extend that to the problem being that you can barely tell the difference between emtbs and mtbs, and the answer is removing mountain bikes.
The key about this sport is that it basically doesn't exist without trails. Trails require access to lands and deals with land managers and jurisdictions. We all know bureaucratic organizations are anything if not lazy, so it would be crazy to assume they won't take the path of least resistance and easiest/cheapest enforcement. That is the concern here. The adult in me wants to believe that more and more power doesn't matter because just because it's there, doesn't mean you have to use it. However, the 45 year old man-child in me that will still hoon the ever loving crap out of a motorcycle or car... knows otherwise.
I will say that hiking or trail running either alone, or with your family in shared mtb spaces gives you a lot of perspective. It is at times, very not fun to be sharing space with the average mountain biker... less fun to be sharing space with the average ebiker.
No, but they implement other restrictions with speed cameras, average speed cameras, chicanes, speed bumps and other traffic “calming” measures.
The biggest issues is and always will be a lack of education/mentoring… and also our protection/enforcement agencies being stripped back by centralised government, so they can’t do anything anyway. Anything that does happen as a result is normally a kneejerk decision that rarely has a positive longterm impact.
There are 2 new generations getting into riding now. Those of us that rode in the 90s and 00s were the prime gen that grew up and established it all. The current gen are entitled kids that got given medals just for turning up and they have zero boundaries and still get away with doing what they want and if you say anything to them (no matter how constructive) you’re racist/peado/genderist and simply ignored.
And then there’s the other generation that missed out on it all when they were younger, they’re the ones spending the most money (and massively propping up the industry fyi) but with complete ignorance of all the learing and effort that has gone on to build and establish the sport previously.
With 1500w youre lucky to "rinse' it for 30minutes. With your moto or sports car you "rinse" it for hrs then fill up and continue.
I think most people will be using lower power modes to get a little longer ride
Democratizing mountain biking is the most Avinox I ever read this week
There's a section of road to an overlook that's about the steepest asphalt around. 2nd lowest gear with a 32 front ring steep.
On my buddies last-gen Amflow I kicked it into boost and hit the 20mph cutoff. Utterly insane power.
yeah someone REALLY should do something about these former pro riders, blasting uphill like they have an ebike:
This a common straw man argument I see on this topic.
It’s important to remember that anyone capable of going that fast uphill is only do so with a lifetime of skills as a foundation . Anyone in a pro xco race is likely never putting out 1500w in that race, and if the are it’s for about 5 seconds during a sprint finish.
Theres just a lot more nuance man. No human is putting out world tour sprint finish power for the same duration as a 800wh battery
Humans are creatures of the path of least resistance. If you make going uphill at 28mph ( remember it’s easy to vpn your location) easy . It will happen often. If you make it hard ( pro athlete on a non-e-bike) it will happen rarely . And thus , statistically, issues with oncoming traffic are less frequent
Especially when said pro rider is on a closed course.
You're kind of making our point...thanks to Avinox every obese lazy guy with a credit card can climb faster than Nino Schurter
I still think the industry (and DJI) are hoping to "solve" the access issue by doing nothing and waiting until the technology is so compact and quiet that an ebike is barely distinguishable from an analog bike. We've already partially been there for 5 years with the launch of the Levo SL, and all the new Avinox bikes took a big leap forward in making full power ebikes look like analog bikes. I have no other good explanation for why the industry isn't lobbying hard to get eebs officially allowed in the National Forest. Seems like that's the last big shoe to drop on the entire (mtb riding) Earth for ebike access. (vast majority allowed in Canada and Europe, Latin America doesn't seem like they care at all from people I've talked to, idk about Aus and NZ access at all)
At Telluride bike park I will never forget them making my wife take her battery off her ebike to ride at because the land is a National Forest lease. That same trip I went down to Pheonix where they have BLM trail networks (allowed) right next to National Forest trail networks (banned).
^ must be this freedum americans are always so proud about we european communists can’t enjoy, lol
Ebikes are treated the same as normal MTB's in NZ, so you are allowed anywhere a normal bike can go.
I say the quiet part out loud: the huge assistant rate is mostly needed by heavy, out of shape riders. If you're light or in shape you'll notice that all full power bikes from the last 5 years have enough power. For light riders the full turbo settings are often overkill.
So this extended motor power combined with bigger battery will lead to more people reaching higher/more remote areas and trails.
In Europe we already have historic pushback against mountainbikes on trails in many countries and just recently there was a new initiative by the biggest country in Germany to regulate every path under 3,5m in the woods off limits for bikes citing ebikes creating more disturbances for wildlife or something like that.
Also some popular alpine trail (blindsetrail) will get closed for mountainbikers in austria citing complaints from hikers and other tourists. Idk if you north americans have an idea popular hiking destinations in the alps can get during the holiday season. People blasting past groups of elderly hikers on fast ebikes surely won't help trail access.
And the people who hold the true power on land access in Europe are our natural enemies: aristocrats who are often hunters, rural counties with conservative parties at the helm who are loyal and connected to the hunting lobby. They will pick up quickly on the power wars and weaponize it for their never ending quest for ending trail access for MTBs. We are the easiest target and Avinox is painting it on our backs.
To be fair , even without emtb's those groups will find something to restrict regular mtb's from "their" trails. It's a numbers game. Emtb's create more cyclists = more say at the table.
Sidenote: after looking through a number of the last comments i was thinking. I've had my eeb now into my 7th year. I ski half the year so i ride 150days/year and non bike park km's are at 16000. Average i suppose but in that time the only close call collision i've had was from a group of pro xc racers. Most of the group was aware and acting accordingly on a bidirectional singletrack trail, even one former wold champ in the group, apart from one hammerhead burying himself off the front and into a tight corner with zero line of sight. Our group of mixed mtb/emtb going slightly downhill managed to avoid him. He kept hammering right past us up around the corner. I thonk the emtb allows you to interpret trail in front of you better in those xc situations. Im rarely head down burying my self unless its a super tech climbing day and those climbs are slow speed even with full power. In the mts clombing big tech climbs into the alpine i can go thru my 540w battery in half an hour.
It's going to vary by location and im generally avoiding busy trails because i can but soetimes thats unavoidable. I just simply adjust and have been virtually conflict free, apart from one hammerhead and a few dickheads in thd early days gbat sas a motor and thought they'd create an issue that wasnt there
yt decoy x core with avinox - https://www.vitalmtb.com/news/press-release/yt-launches-full-avinox-m2s…
The car analogy is a stupid one because you don't have cars sharing a road with other users who are going 10x-15x slower (2mph avg walking speed vs. 20-28mph cutoff).
Saying that easy delimiting can be addressed by enforcement is a terrible solution. There's one park nearby where the managing agency hates bikes despite them being 80% of the users, and actively enforces a 20mph speed limit with rangers and radar guns. They literally hide behind trees on fire road connectors they know people use to connect the few singletracks and slap you with a $400 ticket. I do NOT want that to be the norm in other parks where there are bike trails just because some douchebags want to VPN hack their Amflows to go 28mph up fire roads past the dog walkers.
Speed cut offs are fairly appropriate. How fast you get to that relatively slow cut offs is mostly irelevant. Conflict happens mostly on lower angle trails where both directional users can get to the upper reaches of that cut off, wether assisted or not. Thats why emotos don't mix well on those mtb/emtb bidirectional trails. 50-60mph is way too fast to avoid oncoming users unless line of sight is massive. Steep narrow non tech trails could be a conflict at emtb/mtb speeds but most steep trails, through technicality, limit uphill and dh speed. Thats the nature of mtb/emtb. In 7 years i've seen or heard of few actual trail incidents related to the current emtb cut off speeds. I'm hesitant to assume what is going to happen. I'd like to stick to data. I sometimes think cut off speed could even be a touch higher , as in NZ, but then i can accept that maybe that wouldnt work in some locations. I know i wouldnt want to be limited like the UK. I guess i should count my self lucky at tge speed cut off we have and realize it actually works as it should with very few issues
Hahaha indeed. America is weird. We now have strange bedfellows of typically center-left MTB/eMTB riders, liking the DOGE cuts because it means less Forest Service rangers to hassle them about riding a bicycle in the woods.
I’m so glad I’ve never had to ride in a trail area that doesn’t have dedicated one way mtb trails. It seems like it just causes so many problems.
My guess is that they will sell the heck out of the YT Decoy for those prices.
Wasn't the dismantling done to sell the land to the highest bidder and the forest industry? If that would be true it would be a very short sighted vision.
I fear it doesn't work like that. In Europe we have certain lobbyist and interest groups that slightly differ from country to country but in general it's mostly land owners and hunters/aristocrats who are often the same people or have connections that want basically everyone banned out of their woods. But they can't because it's written into law that everyone can wander the woods on foot and turning over that law would be impossible. But the mountainbikers have a bad Image as reckless adrenaline junkies which is pushed by those groups and the media.
So more powerful ebikes will just give them more ammunition to get us banned from trails or even fireroads. There doesn't even have to be a high profile case. They will just get to know about the higher power output race and add it to their spin to get more weight behind the argument why we are bad for the hikers, animals, plants and trails.
Maybe, but the can has been opened and there is no putting the bikes back in a can. Whether anyone likes it or not mtb's, emtb's znd even emotos are still going to be sold so evdntually their just place is going to be figured out based on data. Eventually we'll get there
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