ebiketips
And another one! e-road bike week continues here on ebiketips with the news that Wilier are entering the fray with a brand new bike, the Cento1 Hybrid. With a claimed weight of less than 12kg it’s one of the lightest off-the-shelf e-bikes out there. And it looks very smart, we’re sure you’ll agree.
How so light? Well, it’s a full carbon frame and fork, for a start. And it uses the ebikemotion system that you’ll also see on the Orbea Gain bikes, a diminuitive rear hub motor and an integrated battery in the down tube. The bike is pretty much indistinguishable from a non-powered bike, really: the rear hub is about the same size as the largest sprocket on the cassette, so visually it doesn’t stick out, and the battery is invisible. The only real giveaway is the button at the front of the top tube that controls the system.
Wilier has copied the geometry from their Cento10NDR, which is an endurance road bike with a slightly more relaxed position than the company’s full-bore race bikes, but even so it’s very much a road bike designed for longer distance riding. The motor assistance level can be adjusted using the control button, but it doesn’t end there: the bike can be paired with your smartphone too.
The shots of the app in Wilier’s launch video suggest it’s based on the same ebikemotion app that Orbea use for their ebikemotion-powered bikes such as the Katu e50 we tested recently (app pictured above). It’s a pretty good app, with routing and bike management functions, and there’s now extra functionality we didn’t see before to make the bike smarter. For instance, you can pair a heart rate monitor to your smartphone, and tell the app that you don’t want to go above a certain heart rate. When you reach that limit, the bike will feed power in from the motor to keep you working at the level you wanted.
Wilier are initially offering the Cento1 Hybrid in one build, with Shimano Ultegra mechanical gears and hydraulic discs. The list price is €4,500, so start saving your pennies now if you think this might be the e-bike for you…
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