Greg's Weekly eMTB Briefing - 27 April 2026Another week in which the eMTB world continued to process the aftershocks of Sea Otter like a rider who's just cased a massive jump and is quietly checking whether all their limbs still work. The Avinox M2S ecosystem is everywhere — eight bikes, a deep-dive test, and approximately four thousand forum arguments about motor assist ratios. Meanwhile, Specialized quietly dropped a longer-travel Levo 4 EVO into the world, and Rotwild reminded us that German precision engineering and a taste for the dramatic are not mutually exclusive.
Eight Bikes, One Motor: The Avinox M2S Ecosystem Is Now Officially UnavoidableWell, here we are. The Avinox M2S — the motor that promises 800% assist and enough torque to make a Bosch engineer quietly stare at the ceiling — has now accumulated enough launch bikes to fill a small bike shop, and E-MOUNTAINBIKE has done the sensible thing and lined all eight of them up for a proper comparative look. We're talking Rotwild, Mondraker, Orbea, Commençal, and several others who have apparently decided that if you're going to strap a 1,500W-capable Austrian rocket to a carbon frame, you might as well commit fully. Which, to be fair, is a reasonable life philosophy.
What makes this genuinely interesting — beyond the frankly alarming power figures — is what it signals about the broader motor market. When Pivot and YT were switching away from Bosch mid-cycle, some people called it an anomaly. Now you've got eight distinct brands launching around a single new motor platform within weeks of each other, and it starts looking less like a trend and more like a tectonic shift. Bosch has dominated this space with the quiet, confident certainty of a company that knows everyone needs them. That certainty may be due for a gentle recalibration.
The E-MOUNTAINBIKE buyer guide is genuinely useful if you're trying to work out which of these eight bikes is "right for you," which is the kind of question that would have seemed absurd eighteen months ago when the answer was simply "whichever one your local dealer stocks." Now apparently we have options, geometry preferences, suspension kinematics, and battery capacity to weigh against each other. The future is, improbably, both heavier and more complicated.
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Rotwild R.EXC: German Engineering Discovers Its Inner HooliganRotwild — a brand that has historically carried itself with the quiet dignity of a Bavarian forest — has apparently decided that subtlety is for other people and launched the R.EXC with Avinox power and what the press material cheerfully describes as "endless geometry tuning." Which is corporate speak for "we put in a lot of flip chips and now nobody can accuse us of making a bike that doesn't fit." The "race" positioning is laid on thick, because of course it is, and the all-carbon construction with integrated battery is very much one for the lottery winners and dentists. Still, it's a genuinely interesting machine from a brand that doesn't launch things frivolously, and the geometry obsession suggests someone at Rotwild HQ has been reading the forums rather too carefully.
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Mondraker Zendit RR S: Speed, Apparently, Is the PointE-MOUNTAINBIKE has put the Mondraker Zendit RR S through its paces, and the headline — "Need For Speed" — does at least have the virtue of honesty. The Zendit has always been Mondraker's way of saying "we know Forward Geometry sounds like a furniture brand but trust us," and the RR S with Avinox muscle is apparently a properly rapid thing on trail. The test reads like the kind of review where the tester has a very large grin and some mud in places mud shouldn't be. If you've been waiting for independent confirmation that the Zendit platform translates well to Avinox, here it is.
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Specialized Turbo Levo 4 EVO: More Travel, Same Familiar Existential QuestionsSpecialized has released a longer-travel version of the Levo 4, called the EVO, and E-MOUNTAINBIKE has been out on it already. The first ride review asks, with commendable journalistic courage, whether it's still "the same Levo" — a question that will have divided opinions depending entirely on how you feel about the Levo 4 to begin with. The added travel suggests Specialized has been listening to the people who found the standard Levo 4 a touch conservative in the descending department, which is either a sign of customer responsiveness or an admission that they left something on the table the first time around. Either way, the Levo faithful on this forum will have opinions, and the Show Us Your Levo 4s thread will shortly have new material.
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Atherton S.170E: Built on Atherton Terms, Which Are Different From Everyone Else's TermsEnduro-MTB has tested the Atherton S.170E, and the phrase "on Atherton terms" in the headline is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Atherton Bikes operates with the quiet conviction of a family who have collectively won enough World Cups to have opinions about frame construction, and the S.170E is emphatically not a bike designed by committee. The additively manufactured lugs, the Reynolds tubing, the whole considered-peculiarity of the thing — it's a genuine alternative to the sea of carbon monocoques, and the eMTB version is no less singular. Whether that singularity justifies the price is, as ever, a matter of perspective and bank balance.
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Maxxis MaxxTerra: New Rubber Compound, Familiar Existential Tyre DebateMaxxis has a new rubber compound — MaxxTerra — slotting in somewhere between MaxxGrip and EXO territory, because apparently the existing tyre naming system wasn't quite baffling enough. E-MOUNTAINBIKE has reviewed it, and the short version is that it offers a reasonable middle ground between longevity and grip, which is either exactly what you wanted or precisely not what you wanted depending on your soil conditions and opinions about tyre wear. For eMTB use specifically, where rear tyre consumption is already a small ongoing tragedy, any improvement in compound durability without catastrophic grip loss is worth paying attention to.
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DT Swiss 1700 Family Grows Up: EX 1700 Classic ReviewedDT Swiss has expanded the 1700 wheel family and Enduro-MTB has reviewed the EX 1700 Classic, which occupies the part of the market where "affordable and durable" is the pitch rather than "ultralight and terrifying." For eMTB riders who've accepted that their rear wheel is essentially a consumable item to be replaced on a seasonal basis, the 1700 series continues to make a compelling argument for pragmatism over aspiration. Classic DT Swiss: engineered by people who take wheels very seriously indeed, priced for people who don't want to take out a second mortgage for the privilege.
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FROM YOUR FORUM THIS WEEK
The Great Avinox Power Physics Lesson of 2026Possibly the most entertainingly educational thread of the week: @The undecided asked, with admirable self-deprecating honesty, whether any rider can access an eMTB's maximum power just by spinning fast enough, even with compromised leg strength. The resulting thread is a masterclass in the forum at its best. @urmom pointed out that at 4x assist ratios, putting in a mere 63W yields 250W of sustained EU-legal output — which is already beyond most mortals' all-day power, while noting that "many motor makers have creative definitions of sustained" to deliver considerably more in practice. @bmwpowere36m3 then dropped the Avinox-shaped bombshell: 800% assist means 1,500W from an M2S requires only 187W input, which isn't nothing, but is very much achievable by a committed amateur. At this rate, eMTBs will simply pedal themselves while the rider sits back with a coffee. A genuinely useful technical thread dressed up as a beginner question.
Join the discussion No Boost on the New M2S — The Honeymoon Period EndsSomeone's brand-new Avinox M2S bike has failed to produce Boost mode, which is rather like buying a sports car and discovering the turbo stays off. The thread has accumulated 52 replies in short order, because of course it has — the eMTB forums community has a finely honed instinct for gathering around any early-adopter suffering, equal parts sympathy and morbid curiosity. Details are thin in the summary data, but 52 replies on a teething-trouble thread within days of launch suggests this is either a widespread firmware quirk or one very unlucky individual with an unusually engaged support network. The Avinox M2S giveth with 800% assist; the Avinox M2S apparently also occasionally taketh away.
Join the discussion Galfer Pad Philosophy: A Surprisingly Gripping Debate@Singletrackmind opened a reasonable-sounding question about which Galfer pads to run in dry/dusty conditions with a Hope EVO GR4 setup, and what followed is the kind of thread that reminds you forums are still genuinely useful. @RustyIron offered the unexpected detail that a Galfer representative personally talked him out of the pro race pads and into the eMTB-specific purple compound, and he was right to listen. @alleeex meanwhile delivered the most pragmatic answer of the week: green pads all year, all conditions, all of the UK, specifically because bedding in brake pads is a chore and a small premium to avoid it is money well spent. Nothing says "experienced British rider" quite like optimising your brake pad choice purely around the inconvenience of the bedding-in process.
Join the discussion Pivot Shuttle AM: A Firmware Update That Came With a Free Problem@Drew502 discovered that Pivot's latest firmware update for the Shuttle AM came with a complimentary power dropout issue, which is the kind of free gift nobody ordered. The good news: @Jasong911 noticed nothing wrong over 13 miles post-update, and @RustyIron — who has apparently had a busy week on the forum — offered the useful note that the update reset all modes to factory defaults, which may well explain a few symptoms. Classic firmware update behaviour: the changelog says "performance improvements and bug fixes" while neglecting to mention "and also your custom modes are gone." Check your settings before blaming the motor.
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ONGOING: Orbea x DJI Rumour Thread — Still Going, Still UnconfirmedEighty-seven replies and counting on the Orbea x DJI collaboration rumour thread, which has now been running long enough to have developed its own folklore. The forum remains characteristically split between those convinced this will be genuinely transformative and those who feel that adding drone technology to an already expensive bicycle is a solution to a problem that didn't exist. At this rate, the bike will be announced, released, discontinued, and become a collector's item before the thread reaches consensus.
Join the discussion ONGOING: Forbidden DreadNought E — Still Dreading, Still NoughtingThe Forbidden DreadNought E thread continues to accumulate replies from people who find Forbidden's engineering philosophy either deeply compelling or deeply baffling, sometimes simultaneously. Two hundred and twenty-one replies in and the bike remains a polarising object of desire. Carry on.
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BIG THREAD UPDATESThe SZZS CEF50 main thread remains the forum's most exhaustive repository of mid-drive arcana, with thousands of posts worth of community knowledge accumulated since the last summary update. This week the thread has been active with ongoing build and troubleshooting discussion, including @borysgo2 confirming a motor axle ground clearance of 337mm on an early September 2025 frame, which he believes to be a first-iteration linkage — the kind of hyper-specific detail that makes this thread indispensable if you're deep in the CEF50 rabbit hole and utterly impenetrable if you're not.
Join the megathreadThe Levo Gen 4 Rumours and Facts thread — which has long since ceased to be about rumours and is now a sprawling compendium of ownership experience, firmware opinions, and the occasional existential question about whether Specialized made the right choices — continues to see active debate. With the Levo 4 EVO now out in the wild and generating first-ride press coverage, expect the thread to have fresh opinions shortly.
Join the megathreadThe BLEvo thread soldiers on as the definitive resource for anyone who wants their Levo to do things Specialized didn't intend — still seeing active debate across thousands of accumulated posts. The Trek Fuel EXe Megathread continues its stoic existence as a support group masquerading as a discussion thread. The Official Levo SL thread is, remarkably, still going — proof that a lightweight eMTB and a strong opinion are a combination with essentially infinite conversational energy.
Stay muddy,
Greg
Got news I missed or spotted something good on the forum? Tag me @Greg Watts or drop it in my forum.
