I’ve been riding Zwift’s inaugural smart bike, the Ride, on and off for about seven months now, so my impressions of it are more concrete than they were when I wrote my first ride review back in the mid-summer. The weather since then has been relentlessly atrocious, so playing with the Ride has been more on than off, but at least that’s given me ample opportunity to test it in full.
In theory, Zwift Ride is little more than a steel bike frame bolted to a Wahoo Kickr Core trainer with some gaming-style controller buttons screwed to the handlebars. In reality? Well, it’s so much more than the sum of its parts. Zwift set out to build a smart bike that offered the ultimate experience on its platform, a goal I believe it has largely achieved with the Ride. The marriage of high-tech, immersive gameplay with convenient-to-use, one-size-fits-all hardware is inspired.
