With a crazy looking integrated handlebar display, rhino-neck head tube, and massive power, the new McLaren e-bike is a wild machine! But the British supercar manufacturer and F1 team is not the only car brand to produce a weird and wonderful MTB over the years. We run through some of the most interesting models, from a Lamborghini e-bike with single-sided chainstay, to a carbon Lotus with links to a cold war missile manufacturer, via models from Porsche and Polestar.
I dream of owning a Lamborghini or a Porsche, but I’d never buy one of their mountain bikes!
RockShox has just released it’s new Charger 3.1 damper for Zeb, Lyrik, and Pike forks, so we take a look under the hood to see what’s changed, and how to get your fork up to 2025 spec. We also look at RockShox’s new shocks, a clever new air can, and the updated Trailhead suspension tuning app.
Tweakers everywhere will love the new Geometron G1. With a gazillion different geometry, travel, and wheel-size settings to choose from, this radical new enduro bike takes adjustability to the next level. We run through how it lets you achieve all the permutations, and why this keeps the brand firmly at the cutting edge.
Finally we take a look at the surprising entry of Lidl into the e-bike market. And yes, we completely screwed up by saying it was Aldi all the way through, when it is, in fact Lidl. Anyway, this bargain e-bike costs under £2,500, yet comes with a Brose motor, internal battery, RockShox suspension, and a SRAM drivetrain. Check it out, along with all the other bits, in the latest MBR Show.
Bread, milk, eggs, and an eMTB? Lidl becomes latest supermarket to sell electric bikes
Time stamps:
0:32 Car brands that have made mountain bikes
7:16 New RockShox suspension
12:08 Geometron G1
17:33 Lidl e-bike
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welcome to the show and in the news this month McLaren surprised Everyone by launching a new ebike and at the other end of the market from the likes of McLaren discount supermarket chain Aldi has started selling full suspension ebikes are they any good we take a look bringing it back to mountain bike and rock shocks has launched new dampers for its forks and sharks so we cut through the tech to let you know what’s changed and finally geometron has a new version of its Enduro bike and it’s even more radical than it used to be so Denny all I know is where the air goes in the tires the petrol goes or the diesel goes and like how to turn the thing on like you’re the you are the petrol head here so what’s McLaren actually done with its e- mountain bikes so uh the big headline really here is power right I mean McLaren is synonymous with power the new ebike has a whopping 161 Newton met of torque wow that’s so that’s like double of what we currently have on most high torque ebikes 100% yeah and uh it’s not only that the Peak power is also crazy high 852 Watts so that sounds like going to be a ton of fun I mean it’s going to yeah it might rip the arms off you I don’t know but uh the problem is it’s too it’s too powerful for the UK or or rather you can’t buy it in Europe it’s only going to be available in the US I mean they get all the good toys don’t they they got the big trucks they’ve got the cars oh I mean you might want to hold judgment on what’s good and what’s not I mean we haven’t written it yet uh it certainly looks unique yeah I saw that photo you posted so the I mean like when most car manufacturers get involved in in mountain biking they bring some kind of weird and wonderful takes right they they don’t follow the path that we used to so this has got a a very uh unique handlebar setup arrangement with a with a display a massive display in the middle of it and it could looks a b bit like a hammerhead Shad okay with your phone sitting in it I think it has its own display you don’t know to put your phone in it but someone probably put a phone mount on there as well um and it’s got a kind of B big old sort of Hunchback neck that leads into that stem area as well so it’s it’s definitely distinctive let’s put it that way okay that’s that’s being diplomatic but the fundamentals look look pretty good it’s got you know mullet wheel set up the G the goo looks pretty good it’s you know the suspension layout is you know pretty run-of-the-mill what we’re used to with ebikes so uh and and we’ve we’ve got some secret uh sources who were there on the the the sort of photo shoot for this B and they said actually was pretty good so okay we’ll hold judgment until we we ride it yeah I hopefully we get to ride the full power high power high torque one even if it’s not available in UK be fun really fun but uh McLaren are not the only car brand to have dabbled in Mountain bikeing over the years right so this is a pretty good opportunity I think to to look back and and at some of the the weird and wonderful models didn’t make it well some made made it to Market but I don’t know whether they sold yeah that’s what I mean so I’m going to start with uh with Lamborghini right so they started making tractors but they’ come a long way and now they are probably the the car that every influencer and millionaire wants to to be seen behind the wheel of now I’m not sure about the bike though I haven’t seen I haven’t seen the bike so so what is it I I will kind of try to describe it the most distinctive aspect of this bike is it’s got a single sided chain state with a fully enclosed drivetrain oh it’s kind of like sort of real motorcycle style yeah so quite Innovative even more Innovative is the fact that it’s got a gearbox and an electric motor integrated as well okay that that is pretty cool right that’s what we’ve been sort of asking for yeah and this was back in 2018 they launched this as well so way before kind of the the pinion stuff came out has come out recently so next up we have Porsche and um Porsche actually went to the uh trouble of Designing a full suspension bike so they already ahead um and they actually did it with uh with Rott now this the the Porsche is not available anymore but um it there were two models one was a kind of Road derived uh model but they both used the same chassis one was an off-road version uh very kind of futuristic in terms of the frame design carbon all carbon um but it’s still used like a Double Diamond sort of of Trad layout so it was it was you know it had its roots in in bicycle design um but it’s kind of where it ends really for the the sort of uh off-road credentials really because it only had 100 millimeters of travel and some per perilously skinny tiles on it so it really it was kind of meant for cruising around the marina rather than hustling down whistle bike park now I’m going to move on to the analog bikes we’ve only talked about ebikes so far pole star which is uh an electric car brand they launched a mountain bike a couple of years ago but they didn’t launch an ebike so kind of weird like if you’re a electric car company you that’ be the OB that when you’re electric car runs out of power you can have a bike on the roof to drive somewhere yeah you haven’t got wor about the battery tot maybe they teamed up with Swedish bike brand called alab bike their bikes are actually pretty cool looking uh very sort of scan Chic um I mean the cars are pretty cool right the cars are very cool I do know a little bit about them that is a cool brand right exactly um so this was a down country bike had 120 mil travel carbon frame you know it looked really cool and then they sort of icing on the cake really was oldin suspension so gold suspension white frame like it keep it scand yeah looked pretty good and the last brand I want to talk about is lotus so the Norfolk sports car brand has uh had a a lot of success over the years with its track bikes so um probably the the kind of the high point for them really was the 1992 Olympics Chris bman rid the track bike broke the world record all that sort of stuff so they’re well known for that uh but in that year they also came out with a mountain bike and it’s almost as distinctive as the track bike um wasn’t so successful maybe in international competition but it was very significant for a couple of reasons the the frame was sort of inspired by like a leaping dolphin it’s kind of very organic well I think the so the designer was actually a uh scuba diving Enthusiast so that’s how he came up all right nice um but it was the first ever monocot Carbon Mountain Bike produced yeah ense which is so yeah it was Pioneers in car they were Pioneers in carbon yeah and it had these wayer thin titanium dropouts that were made by a cold war ballistic missile manufacturer that’s very right yeah totally totally so yeah there we go some some definitely some interesting stuff and I think um I don’t think McLaren will be the last car brand to get back into mountain bike you know and they always bring something new to the table so it’s it’s it’s always something to talk about so Al it was two years ago Rock shocks brought out the charger damper uh and the all new kind of chassis for the the Pike lric and Zep platforms um but they’ve now got uh an update to that they have yeah they G to the charger on the forks they’ve gone to the charger like 3.1 damper they try to do is get a they’ve got a wider range of adjustment but with less damping okay um so basically what happened was you you have experienced this yourself with r and some of their more like recent Forks is that a lot of riders would just basically like turn the damping off like open it up completely even though the dials were sort of designed for you to start in the zero in the mid position in the zero position and then go minus or positive so the whole idea was to shift the down curve so that you start in the zero and then you add or subtract from there rather than just kind of being more at the open end of the spectrum yeah that makes to total sense so theoretically that should be better for lighter Riders better yeah better for lighter Riders better for everybody really because then the adjusters sort of make more sense and the other thing they’ve done is they’ve kind of especially with the forks is they’ve tried to reduce friction okay because they made they made a big fuss about that two years ago when they launched all of these forks and new lowers and everything but yeah but I think the fork were they I don’t know if it was quality control but the forks could still be quite sticky and it’s really hard like when you’re riding a fork it’s really hard to determine whether what you’re feeling is friction or if it’s damping um because they both kind of offer support and like a heavily damped Fork can kind of feel like a harsh fork and a and a sticky Fork feels like a harsh Fork so it’s hard it’s hard to separate them so what they’ve tried to do is like eliminate friction and basically reduce the overall damping on the fork um so it should offer a pleasure ride I mean you’ve got the the new that’s the new on your bik Ze ultimate in the fancy red color that looks pretty pretty swish yeah it does look really good so fingers cross like the performance can match the looks yeah so do you need to buy a whole new Fork to to get the benefits of this no you don’t there’s two options actually you can put the whole charger 3.1 damper assembly into existing Forks or into into older forks and then if you got a fork with a 3.0 charger damper you can just buy like a little upgrade kit which is the is the bits that upgrade your current damper to bring it to 3.1 stand I think that’s 72 which pretty which is pretty reasonable so that’s just like a you take the d damper apart effect put the so and then the other one is a damper Sage I think it’s about 320 quid or something that drop in the whole leg top to bottom that’s really good isn’t it yeah so a bit of backwards compatibility and then what’s uh what’s happened on the shock side well it’s a similar story really I mean that’s what they’ve tried to do is they’ve tried to increase oil flow um so that the shocks kind of like they they’re more Supple but but what’s really interesting I was looking through the pr and they’ve got they’ve actually got a new airan so its full name is the Debon a plus linear XL and it’s basically like a two sleeve air can on the Super Deluxe shock you currently put your volume spacers in the eyelid of the shock so you pull the air can off and then they go in they go over the shaft up into the iset and you can put four in there like solid plastic SPAC isn’t it with the new one it’s got with the new Air can you can basically put it you put the air can on and then you’ve got the ability to put the bands into the air count so you can have eight volume spacers in total so that’s double the amount of the previous ones the current ones right and and they have they also had so they had a linear and this where it gets complicated they had a linear and a progressive airan both with four spacers in the eyelet this new airan covers pretty much the full range of those two previous air can in one air can yeah once you with with the combin with different combinations of those eight volume spaces because you got four in the aan and four in the eyet right so you you get that and basically you can pretty much you can have any spring curve you want from the other two air cans basically with that one air can so that’s pretty pretty Innovative so they got anything else well yeah I mean they got something really cool I mean you’ve got the the Vivid shock the Vivid air on there and like we’ve both been super impressed with like how that shock feels and how the adjusters work on like you can actually real world feel the adjusters working as you’re riding they just brought out the Vivid coil okay so basically same damping assembly but just a different spring yeah just coil spring so if you want that super Supple coil spring feel then you’ve got that option now which I think is really cool so it’s a really comprehensive range Now isn’t it absolutely and I think uh the other thing that they’re bringing out uh is an update to the trail head app so you know if that if all of that suspension tuning get that’s really it’s really important down that part yeah yeah so um I think what you do with this we haven’t had a chance to play with it yet because it’s uh it’s out not quite out when we’re filming this but from the serial number it knows what bike it’s fitted to in the tune of the shock so then you put your air uh your weight in your body weight in and then it’ll give you a really good starting point I think anything that makes suspension setup easier for everyone is a really good move yeah so Al next up we’re going to talk about the geometron aren’t we they’ve got a new version of the G1 out yeah so what’s interesting about that bike they were going One Direction with it and then they just scrapped it and then like changed the suspension again oh yeah and they admitted that as well well Chris you know Chris will tell you anything right he will yeah totally they weren’t H they weren’t happy with it they weren’t happy with the performance from the suspension so right okay this direction is not work and and they kind of and they sort of kind of looked at the numbers and then tweaked it and now we got the final version which is available I wonder how many brands do that not many probably very few yeah yeah very few um so it’s what’s really cool about the new bike is the old bike was like super adjustable this one’s like insanely adjustable yeah I mean I had I kind of like oh I’m going to need my laptop for this because because when I when I started looking at all the options uh I actually clicked on a I clicked on a separate link that opens a spread sheet and I’m just like oh my lord it’s like it’s a Minefield but what’s really cool is there are base it come there’s a baseline kind of factory setting which you can just start there um so let’s get into all the different yeah options on the B right so we start should we start with that then yeah we hear a lot about like proportional geometry and adjustable geometry stuff but they’ve really gone to town on this so the new bike’s got five different front triangles yeah and it’s got six rear center options which you can have with any front triangle okay so they’ve not just sort of gone hey look this is what we believe to be proportional geometry for your size you can choose your proportional geometry wow that’s really interesting so how do they do that then um that’s where it gets complicated okay so they they’ve got this they’ve basically got they’ve got two swing arm options yeah and then they’ve got these mutator switchable inserts in they’ve had they’ve had on the old B they yeah so these are in the chain stay at the kind of horse link pivot and in the seat stay where the shock kind of is and basically that just gives them like a multitude of options so that’s so the chain stay runs from the chain stay length or what we could call the rear center measurement runs from 446 at the shortest setting to 481 481 yeah wow yeah it’s big right that is big but then they’re big bikes so they need big chain STS right so like that’s proportional that’s gener proportional and the other thing they’ve got now is they got they’ve got a new Straight head tube um and that’ll give you plus or minus 5 mil reach or you can run an angle set in it so you can adjust the head angle independently of the the kind of rest of the geometry but like as if that that in itself would be like I mean seriously when you look and it’s really interes in the way they’ve done it on the spreadsheet CU like they’ve got the kind of the chain stay member length and then they’ve got like when you add the the mutator to it or whatever they want to call it it’s like it’s it’s it’s really complicated but like if there’s one company that can communicate to you you can literally just pick up the phone and speak to the guys that design the bikes it’s a great thing isn’t it unbelievable right um so so so not only is the geometry crazily adjustable the travel is crazy adjustable so the stock bike is 162 mil or 175 mil in the base configuration so they’ve got you’ve got they’ve got like a flip chip in The Rocker link so two positions for the shock in The Rocker link which allows you to have two travel sets on your bike but by using three different shock options so that’s three different strokes with three different eye to eye lengths okay yeah you can also have a shorter travel bike with 142 or 155 M travel because it’s got the two positions or you can have a crazy long travel option with 18 182 mil or 200 mil so basically you can have everything from a kind of average sort of trail bike to a long travel andur bike to kind of a downhall bikik in one frame right so it’s crazy adjustable and and it’s not like one of those bikes where you kind of you have to fudge it to get it they really thought about how everything pieces together so you don’t end up with like yeah I’ve got 200 200 M of travel but I got a BB height that’s under my armpit yeah like the old you know fit a link to it to get more traveling right um so we’ve got super adjustable geometry super adjustable travel and you can put three different wheel sizes on it three different wheel sizes yeah three different wheel size options yeah so you’ve got 29 full 29 you’ve got mx so 27 rear 29 front or you can run it 275 275 oh cool totally everyone’s covered so you know if you’ve got like if you got one of the smaller sizes which are still pretty big cuz they’re quite long um and you wanted to kind of like just keep the bike lower and lighter and you’re a smaller Rider you could run 275 or if you were into like doing like like a lot of the sort of slope style Riders they kind of like they I mean that’s why YT made a 275 2z for full 275 tuz for so long because slop star Riders ride them so this bike covers basically everything so what are you talking pricewise so you’re looking at £ 3,600 for frame and Shar and this bike’s actually designed around EXT shock so a really nice shock so it com really so like although that’s I mean that’s that’s not I mean all frame prices are quite high for for for Standalone frames so with an EXT shock on it that’s pretty good value I think and then you can get a complete bike with a Shram GX Eagle build for seven and a half now that’s awesome and it’s it’s a really unique uh sort of prospect compared to the other stuff on the market isn’t it totally but no one no one else is I don’t well I don’t know of any other brand that’s offering that degree of customization and with the support that comes with it yeah yeah I mean that is genuinely unique isn’t it I think yeah so Danny I’ve been testing a bunch of affordable ebikes but there’s one brand that never even encouraged me to look at and that’s Aldi yeah I know it’s insane crazy right so so tell me about this bike it’s actually made by a company called Fisher it’s called the montis 6.0 I fully Snappy yeah totally um and obviously like the big the big talking point here is the price right so it’s € 2,600 which is what 2,200 around about that yeah that’s so for a full suspension EB full powered full suspension ebite that’s pretty impressive right yeah and we’re not talking some kind of random kind motor that you never heard of before it’s got a Bros motor in there so this is it’s got rock shocks Parts on it you know it’s this is serious bit of Kit really so so you say I can just walk into my local Aldi and like go and get some cett and a pick pick up a broccoli and a bit and a few biscuits and then go and byy an eBay from the middle the middle aisle they what do they they call it the uh Treasure Island Treasure Island um doesn’t quite work like that uh unfortun I think it maybe just because it’s too big to fit in the middle AIS I don’t know but it’s only available in Germany online from what I can see okay so yeah we’re going to we’re going to miss out on that for I mean maybe they’ll they’ll come to the UK maybe there something to do with the Imports and the batteries and stuff like that but aren’t those um Fisher bikes some of them are available through Amazon right yeah so I guess you I guess you might be able to find them somewhere I don’t I haven’t looked into the pricing and I can’t really sort of tell you but it’s um it’s a it’s a weird it’s a kind of interesting tangent for a supermarket brand to to start doing that I mean we’ve you know we’ve had the likes of the cathon hord go Outdoors all those people getting into the the ebike market but no one no one as kind of mainstream as as Aldi so so like I could totally understand Aldi having like a folding electric bike for like commutant stuff on but having a full suspension mountain bike you’re right that’s kind of weird right but cool yeah it is if I mean we’re we’re all about getting bums on seats right so if it’s um if that’s gets someone riding a mountain bike and then they love it and they want to you know tot that’s brilliant and and like I say it’s it’s got proper stuff on it it’s 150 mil travel it’s got SRAM drivetrain rock rock shock suspension sounds a lot like this bike behind us yeah give take about 10,000 absolutely I don’t know why I’m sort of loing it around on that it’s really it’s really it’s really pretty cool like I think the thing that’s kind of blown me away about these bikes is that you’re right like I I ride those like you go and ride that Aldi bike for two and a half Grand or whatever 2,200 lb and it’s an ebike I mean the biggest the biggest thing about that is it it’s going to be so much harder for Brands to sell analog bikes at that price point yeah because I mean let’s face it those those ebikes Mak just so much fun yeah you especially if you’re especially if you’re new to the sport and you’re not like an Enthusiast you’re not cyclist so you haven’t got the kind of fitness and that kind of side you just want to go and have some fun I mean that bike would just be unbelievable yeah so Dani it’s pretty clear to me then that the trickle down effect of this technology is like it’s it’s really getting down there into the lower price points yeah I mean you you you know full fully well because you’ve spent a lot of time on these bikes recently so really important to check out the uh bike test that’s coming out soon we’ve got four affordable ebikes some actually some really amazing bikes in that test so check it out soon
2 Comments
I really want to hate car companies making MTBs… but then I see the Polestar. Holy hell that is one of the best looking MTBs I have ever seen.
Why are you promoting their joke garbage bikes?