I did bad things on Trek's Fuel EXe. I rode it where I wasn't supposed to. But in my defense, most of the trails where I live are closed to e-bikes, and I had a metric shit-ton of fun.
Some of the fun came from being naughty, sure. A feeling that took me way back to the mid-1980s, when I started riding mountain bikes. Back then, almost all trails were closed to mountain bikes. But my friends and I didn't care. We just rode our bikes, explored, and grew our skills, asking for neither permission nor forgiveness. We were having fun and knew we weren't hurting anyone or anything.
This is a bike review, not an essay about e-bike trail politics, but unfortunately, separating the two is difficult. What I find interesting is that I don't find my position in today's debates about e-bike trail access to be substantively different than how I felt all those years ago about mountain bike trail access. I don't feel guilty about wanting to ride an e-bike or enjoying myself on an e-bike and, I believe, neither should you. Riding e-bikes is a blast; they are not the devil many cast them as. And frankly, the quieter, sleeker, and less obvious e-bikes get (like this Exe), the more difficult it will be to tell them apart from unpowered bikes. And as they get better and lighter, also like this EXe, they're going to become more appealing to more riders. Even those who, in the past, had rejected e-bikes.
Guess what horrible event happened when I rode the EXe? Nothing. Nobody noticed, nobody said anything, and no horsemen of the apocalypse appeared. I, however, enjoyed myself immensely because, with assistance or not, the Exe is a damn fine mountain bike. And when you add its sleekly integrated and well-tuned motor, the EXe becomes one of the most compelling bikes-overall-in recent memory.
This story is from the Spring 2023 edition of Bicycling US.
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This story is from the Spring 2023 edition of Bicycling US.
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