When Segway announced the Xyber, one of its two highly anticipated entires into the ebike market, at the annual tech show CES this week, it got everybody’s attention. I’ve reviewed quite a few electric bikes, or ebikes, in my time. And man, oh man, the Xyber is a looker. The spec sheet is to die for, and the features list contains the kind of head-slapping, common-sense equipment I wish all ebikes had.
It’ll reach 35 miles per hour. If you’re easy on the power assist, you can zip around for up to 112 miles with a second battery. Its beefy aluminum frame can hold up to 408 combined pounds of passenger and cargo. The four-piston hydraulic brakes and coil-sprung suspension, front and rear, sound more motorcycle than bicycle. Man, it can go from zero to 20 miles per hour in 2.7 seconds.
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The Xyber’s got the necessary pedals to make it technically an electric bicycle, but unless you’re a masochist, you’re never going to want to pedal something like that without the assistance of the electric motor. You could very well just use the throttle and never pedal it. So are the pedals just a technicality for what’s essentially an electric motorcycle?
so much class
Because it has a throttle and is capable of 28 miles per hour as it ships from the factory, the Xyber is a class-three ebike. That’s the highest level of ebike in a standardized classification system that the industry and legislators have agreed upon.
The hand throttle alone won’t take you past 20 miles per hour—you have to pedal to engage the electric motor that’ll bring you to the top speed. But on all these ebikes, there’s so much power available that you could pedal to the highest speed with barely any resistance from the pedals at all. You’re just going through the motions.
There’s a trick, though. You can use the Segway app to unlock the bike’s true top speed. Because doing so ups the max speed to 35 miles per hour, Segway says to only use it off road—but there’s no way for anybody to enforce that. People with particularly powerful ebikes (because not all class-three ebikes are capable) unlock their ebikes’ “off road” top speeds for a trip to the café all the time.
The most standout features beyond the performance spec sheet are twofold. First, because it has Bluetooth built in, the Xyber shows up in Apple’s Find My location-tracking app. That’s the same app you use to locate AirTag trackers or other Apple devices. It’s accurate, and it’s widespread. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they parked their bike (me) or worried about a thief making off with it when it’s parked (also me), it’s a godsend. No more having to hide an AirTag somewhere in your bike where the metal doesn’t interfere with the signal.
The other big feature that’s music to my ears is the inclusion of automatic electronic and mechanical locks that engage when you drop the kickstand. Without the ability to unlock the bike (which you do through your phone), a thief can’t just roll it away, because there’s a mechanism that physically blocks the rear wheel from turning.
Lights, integrated rear cargo rack, and an LCD display screen are to be expected in a premium, mid-priced ebike, such as this. And yes, the Xyber’s $3,000 price is considered mid-priced in the ebike market. Prices are falling at the same time that quality and performance are rising because it’s still an immature market, but they’re still fairly expensive. The entry-level ebikes—the ones that aren’t dodgy shit that’ll rattle apart and catch your home on fire while charging—only just reliably dipped below the $1,000 mark in the past couple of years.
try bringing it upstairs, though
Downsides? It weighs 138 pounds. That’s without the second battery, which costs $799 and weighs 27 pounds. With one battery, the Xyber can go for up to 56 miles if you’re economical with the power setting. With two, it’ll reach up to 112 miles.
For a bike with these capabilities, it’s not the $3,800 price tag for the dual battery Xyber that gives me pause. There are ebikes this expensive (and far more) that don’t have the intriguingly thick features list of the Xyber. It’s the total weight of 165 pounds.
Once upon a time, I test drove the Cake Ösa+ electric motorcycle. No pedals, no pretensions of being anything but a city motorcycle, even though it can reach a (slow) highway speed of 56 miles per hour. With its battery, it weighs in at 215 pounds. Its range is roughly half that of the dual-battery Xyber, and it can’t legally ride in bike lanes. Here’s the kicker, though: It costs $9,500.
The Xyber isn’t the first ebike to post up weight and speed specs like this. The Juiced Hyperscrambler is another dual-battery, long-range ebike that stretches the plausible center of the Venn diagram between electric bike and electric motorcycle.
But I’d still drop everything to ride the sexy, seductive Xyber. Not in the bike lane, where such a powerful machine doesn’t belong, but out in traffic where I can let loose with the throttle. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll even give the pedals a few turns, for novelty’s sake.
