I remember the precise moment I was ruined. I was riding in the Presidio, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge, when I spotted a roadie up ahead. He was covered head-to-toe in his expensive kit, in a tight tuck, struggling against the wind on his unobtainium bike. Moments later, this wheezy ex-smoker with bad allergies and a serious aversion to exercise blew past him like he was standing still.
Oh yes, I need one of these.
"One of these" is the Specialized Turbo, the first electrically assisted bike from the crew in Morgan Hill, California. It's been on sale in Europe for a year, but pesky federal laws that poorly define the line between bike and motorcycle made it too fast to sell in the States.
Until now. Specialized added a top-speed limiting gear that won’t let you go over the magic 27 mph figure. And that was enough to make it legal in the U.S.
“Turbo” is an appropriate name for this rig. With a 342 watt-hour lithium-ion battery pack sending juice to a 250-watt hub-mounted motor, this e-bike will hit its top speed without breaking a sweat. It's also the first electric bike that doesn't look like a grade-school science experiment or a rejected Blade Runner prop.
Two color choices are available: red and black. Go with red and make sure to attach as many reflectors, lights, strobes and air horns as you can stomach – you’ll be going so fast people will need to see you coming.
This is among the few electric bikes that actually looks like a bike. It's an odd blend of mountain bike ruggedness and city bike ergonomics. It’s sized like a 29er, but the lack of any suspension combined with the stiff tires that look like over-inflated tubes make it strictly something for the street. And be prepared to use your legs as buffers when going over ruts and uneven asphalt.
Make no mistake – this thing is huge. The downtube, which holds the battery, is about the size of a softball bat, and every other tube had to be similarly oversized to maintain some semblance of visual balance. And although the frame is made of aluminum, the Turbo tips the scales at more than 50 pounds. You’ll feel every ounce of it as you huff and puff along without the electric assist and, worse, as you schlep it up and down the stairs to the train. Shouldering this thing is quite a workout, and will leave you with more than a few bruises and aching muscles if you aren’t careful.
If there's any stylistic knock against the Turbo, it's the front-mounted headlight which – while an absolute necessity for nighttime urban blasts – looks like a tacked-on impulse buy from REI.
The greasy bits come from SRAM, and it all works as you’d expect – which is to say, well. The shifts are crisp, the brakes...
The Turbo is the first electric bike that doesn't look like a grade-school science experiment or a rejected Blade Runner prop.Oh hell. No one cares about that stuff. This baby’s electric, so you want to know what that’s like.
Amazing, actually.
Flip the motor to its highest of four settings – called, appropriately, “turbo” – using the red button near your right thumb and this thing flies. It’s like a tailwind on demand, providing superhuman boost that has you over the 20 mph mark in seconds. There's no throttle to twist, no buttons to push. It all depends upon the amount of pressure you apply to the pedals. An LCD display mounted on the handlebars tells you how fast you’re going, and the number is almost always higher than you think.
The instantaneous speed is a blessing and a curse. While it’s crazy fun while riding, you must keep that hair-trigger acceleration in mind when stopped. Apply the slightest bit of weight to the pedal and the Turbo rockets forward beneath you. It’s best to hold the front brake when stopped.
If unfettered speed isn’t your thing, Eco mode drops the assist down to 30 percent of capacity to maximize range. "Off" is self-explanatory, and useful only if you really want to build up your quads. “Regen” applies a little drag to the rear motor while coasting to send power back to the pack. It’s a bit disappointing that the system recovers just 5 percent of the kinetic energy otherwise lost as heat while braking, a figure that does little to top up the battery unless you're bombing down Alpe d’Huez. Specialized says boosting the amount of regen would decrease rideability while increasing weight and cost.
The pack is good for 45 minutes to an hour of moderate to high-speed riding before the battery dies, something that never happened during week days I rode around the San Francisco Bay Area.
Recharging is a snap – plug one end of the charger into the bike and the other into the wall. Specialized offers a "travel" charger that weighs in at hefty five pounds, which is more than you'd want to stuff in your backpack, but definitely something you could leave in your desk. Plug into a standard 120 volt wall outlet like your laptop uses and bringing a dead battery back to life takes a little more than two hours.
Despite the elephantine weight of the Turbo, the electric assist coupled with the comfortable ergos and responsive geometry make it a sweet commuter and cruiser. The ride is a bit punishing, but it isn’t unbearable. Specialized makes no bones about the Turbo being strictly for the street, but hinted on several occasions that the this is but the first in a line of electric bikes we’ll see.
If you haven't figured it out already, I am not a hardened bike nerd. I haven’t ridden since I got my driver’s license back in the first Clinton administration. And I’m exactly the type of guy Specialized is aiming for with the Turbo. It’s the perfect lazy man’s two-wheeler and a great reintroduction to a sport all of us have, at some point, enjoyed. I'm getting a modicum of exercise while blasting around town feeling like a hero and reliving the joy every kid feels speeding along on a bike.
But that feeling is expensive. The Turbo comes in at an eye-watering $5,900. For the ardent bike nerd, that’s chump change. But for the Turbo’s target audience, it’s a tough sell. The only real case to be made is for a rider that’s interested in getting a motorcycle for blasting around town, but doesn’t want to go through the hassle of getting an M1 license, shelling out the coin for a real bike and dealing with the inevitable spousal spat that goes with owning a crotch rocket. That’s an infinitesimally small overlap of the venn diagram where biker meets rider, but if you’re simply looking for a fast, fun way to dispose of some of that disposable income, you could do a lot worse than the Turbo.
