The holy grail of e-bikes is an e-bike that that doesn’t look like an e-bike. They’ve come a long, long way in the last decade, evolving from things that looked like a hybrid of a dirt bike and a Singer Sewing machine into far more aesthetically pleasing forms. Batteries the size of Belgium and clunky, chunky motors are a thing of the past, and you no longer need to work out at the gym just to lift them up the curb.
And some e-bikes now do look pretty much indistinguishable from some less sleek human-powered bikes. But they still don’t look like classy, high-end racing bikes, do they?
But they’re getting ever nearer, and the newly launched Cervélo Rouvida is about as close as they come yet.
Cervélo has entered the power-assist market with a road bike and a gravel bike that reflect the sleek aesthetics of the quality road bikes it’s famous for.
Both of these Rouvida models accelerate to 28mph (limited to 20mph in the UK and Europe), thanks to a Fazua Ride60 motor and 432Wh battery, with all the electric components placed inside the respective frames.
“While the design brief didn’t actually say, ‘Don’t make it look like an e-bike,’ it was definitely at the forefront of our thoughts throughout the process,” say Cervélo. “Our bikes are refined, design-forward performance machines. The addition of a motor and battery couldn’t change that. From the reorientation of the battery to the relocation of the speed sensor, we made every effort to ensure that Rouvida meant Cervélo just as much as S5 or Áspero do.”
The gravel setup, which will be or more interest to our bikepacking Advnturers, features a 0.7° slacker head tube angle, while the road version retains steeper, more conventional angles. The gravel setup has a 7mm taller stack and a 5mm shorter reach, while tire clearance is 43.5mm for the gravel model and 34mm for the road model.
The Rouvida comes in two models for road – the Red for $13,000 (US) / £11,000 (UK), and the Rival for $7,500 (US) / £7,200 – and two models for gravel – the Force for $9,800 (US) / £9,500 (UK) and the GRX for $6,200 (US) / (oddly there’s no price listed on the UK site). Both gravel bikes come in gray with yellow accents.
For more details visit the Cervélo website.
