HuckGnarris

Damn straight. Think of it as an aggro hardtail with just a bit more in the tank for bigger hits.

Tom here, hi! Happy to indulge: I had a Druid that I had “accidentally” run at something like 45% sag, compensated with a ton of LSC for a bit and actually liked it, I have a 160 hardtail I love but do not enjoy big hits on it, and I live in Olympia (now Bham) so felt having a big ass fork for steeps and large compressions was ideal, but when it gets steep enough I don’t use the rear travel as much, and 180/120 is “more balanced” than 160/0, so, screw it, let’s make it. Adam Prosise thankfully didn’t think it was totally stupid so he took a stock SST tear and modified the front end to keep the BB height reasonable with the giant fork and tweak angles, so it wasn’t just an afterthought and would ride well. Basically, if you ride it like a hardtail it rewards you greatly, doesn’t beat you up nearly as much, and has more in the tank on big hits and drops. We’re also building a turnkey GR86 rally car (Matt, founder of Outbound Lighting) that’s pearly white with orange side mirror and rally gold wheels, so this was built to match, down to the full width underbody skid plate with ISCG tabs on both sides of the shell for support. The key was rally suspension inspiration, where they rely on tons of negative travel and insane LSC so the dampers support the car on big landings, same idea here except bikes have so much less unsprung mass we can’t rely on negative travel, but can use the damper and HBO with a short rear so this bike still feels good on heavy impacts, only really hurts it in flat chundery stuff where you just need to ride more actively, like you would on a hardtail. If it was a great idea I feel like any non-zero number of companies would do it, but I freaking love it. Raced Trans New England Enduro on it blind and it felt like the perfect choice.

So we made the bike in the spirit of a rally car, because we (Outbound Lighting) were going to make park our GR86 rally conversion in the middle of our booth at Sea Otter with the REEB hanging on the back, so the full body skid plate just felt right. Freaking works too, just had Adam Prosise weld another set of ISCG tabs on the BB shell so it would be well supported and then exquisitely crafted the plate with a large hammer.

It’s the long-travel v2, not the v2.1, that might be it?

Two things: 1. Statistics are scarce, so actual fire rates per 100,000 eBikes, not just raw numbers, are not available, which makes a lot of comparisons to other battery-powered vehicles moot, or misleading at best. 2. Tucked in at the end is "For well-made and properly used e-bikes, the fire risk is extremely low." Cheap eBikes are being sold in insane volumes, because they're less expensive. How many cheap EVs do you see catching fire? You don't, because there are so many safety hoops and regulations around selling a motor vehicle that cheap shit can't pass. I don't want regulaton on bikes more than anyone else, but in the world of "you get what you pay for" I'm not all that surprised to see fires on cheap eBikes. Show me how many Pivots, Ibis, Specialized, etc have caught fire and then we'll talk.

@powturn: not necessarily, because bar lights are below your eye line they project shadows out from roots and rocks in the trail that you can look down into, which makes them look 3-dimensional. Any helmet light, because it’s mounted above your eye line, won’t produce those shadows, the net effect being that everything looks flat. At high speed, you’re looking down trail and reading the terrain in front of you out of your periphery, which if it looks flat, makes it more difficult to process if that rock has a hole after it or if it’s flush with the dirt, so you end up riding out of position more or just guessing, making you ride slower, unless you just know every rock and root in that specific trail. If your helmet light is more powerful than your bar light, you can easily wash out all that depth rendering the bar light much less useful. That, and bar lights really need a super wide beam so you don’t lose the trail when you countersteer into a corner or even just get offline a bit, covering a wider field of view at similar intensity means you need more lumens/power to do that, whereas a helmet light can be a bit narrower beam since you control where it’s pointed, meaning it can use less power, which means less battery, and less weight on your head/neck where you actually feel it. There’s always exceptions, if you’re riding big jump lines where the terrain is buff and you need to see into big gaps, helmet light is king, for sure, because depth doesn’t matter and your bar light doesn’t help as much. If you’re in the desert, it’s so wide open but super rocky, you can get away with just the bar light and no helmet light, to better read the trail. Horses for courses.

@valrock: I’ll correct a little science here: LEDs can absolutely sustain high output continuously, as they heat up they can dim ~10% or so, but the only reason they would burn up is because of poor thermal design getting the heat out. That’s not even the reason most companies just have the light taper off as the battery dies, that’s so they can claim longer runtimes according to FL-1 standards that are based on incandescent bulbs and alkaline batteries. Companies can absolutely rate things correctly and honestly, but they’re not incentivized to, because the numbers don’t look as good on paper. Outbound at least published runtime graphs for each product to show the light output over time, and it’s just the Adaptive mode that tapers at all, High/Med/Low all hold constant outputs. I’ll talk about how dumb FL-1 is all day, but I don’t think anyone wants to hear that, ha. Otherwise I agree, 2-3klm is generally more than enough for riding at speed, particularly with a good beam pattern putting the light where you need it.

That’s actually a great analogy for how they run their business too.

You’re correct, they just have difficulty translating to English terms sometimes.