The Bike Industry Is Having Its iPhone Moment – and Nobody Ordered the Small One – MTB Report

Published by Radical Life Studios / MTB Report

Motor-gearbox units, stepless shifting, bikes that get better via firmware update: after a decade of what felt like standing still, bike tech is suddenly sprinting. But the push isn’t coming from inside the bike industry – and it’s dragging a problem along with it that riders on both sides of the Atlantic should care about.

Let’s be honest about the last ten years. For most of that time, “innovation” in mountain biking meant a new axle standard, a renamed bottom bracket, and half a degree off the head angle. Then this year’s Eurobike happened: two rival motor-gearbox systems with stepless, electronically controlled shifting facing off across the hall, plus regenerative braking, fast-charging batteries and drive units that change character overnight with a software update. We’ve already covered the Avinox MG and Gobao X1P gearbox story in depth. Today we’re asking the bigger question: why is all of this happening right now – and who’s actually holding the steering wheel?

The big bang came out of Shenzhen

The answer starts in mid-2024, when a drone company crashed the party. DJI’s drive brand Avinox showed up with 1,000 watts of peak power and 120 Nm of torque – numbers that made the established figures from Bosch and Shimano look like they came from another era. And it wasn’t a one-off. Barely two years later, the second-generation motor added another fifty percent of power at essentially the same weight. For context, Bosch’s current flagship CX-R tops out at 750 watts and 100 Nm – and until recently, that was considered the benchmark.

Here’s the thing, though: the wattage isn’t the real story. The cadence is. Avinox teases new platforms while bike brands are still waiting for deliveries of the current motors. That’s consumer-electronics pacing dropped into an industry that has always thought in automotive cycles – Bosch engineers thoroughly, certifies globally, builds dealer service networks, and takes years doing it. A Shenzhen electronics giant iterates like it’s shipping smartphones. If “sure, the specs are better, but the incumbent has the dealer network” sounds familiar, that’s because it’s exactly what people said about Nokia in 2007. We know how that movie ended.

The real headline isn’t the product – it’s the release cadence.

The revolution is coming from outside

The second reason for the sudden burst of creativity: it isn’t homegrown. The stepless eCVT – if the term is new to you: motor and transmission merge into one sealed unit that adjusts the gear ratio continuously, with no perceptible shifts – runs on a principle Toyota has used in the Prius for decades. Owuru, the Belgian pioneer now owned by Decathlon, was founded by engineers out of the automotive world and has been selling eCVT drives on production bikes since late 2023. Nobody in the performance scene noticed, because they were bolted to city and trekking bikes.

It took the e-bike to make bicycles interesting to electronics and automotive giants in the first place. Motors, batteries, sensors, software – that’s their home turf, not the traditional bike industry’s. DJI is simply transferring its drone expertise in power density and energy management onto two wheels, complete with over-the-air updates and an app ecosystem. The bike industry opened the playing field the day it electrified the bicycle. Now guests are on the pitch who happen to be better at this particular game.

The crisis paradox

Which leaves the question of why the established players are sprinting along – in the middle of the deepest industry downturn in decades, between discount wars, bankruptcies and warehouses full of unsold stock. The uncomfortable answer: precisely because of it. E-bikes are just about the only segment still showing meaningful growth, so that’s where all the remaining innovation capital flows, and differentiation becomes a survival strategy. If your spec sheet doesn’t stand out, your bike ends up in the clearance rack.

Behind that sits an even bigger shift: vertical integration. Avinox no longer just builds motors – it builds batteries, displays, cockpits, and with its house brand Amflow, complete bikes. If the motor-gearbox unit reaches production, the rear derailleur disappears from the frame entirely. For SRAM and Shimano, this isn’t a side quest; it’s an attack on the core business. No wonder everyone is suddenly inventing things. It’s the creativity of the cornered.

So where’s the “less”?

So far, so fascinating. Now for the catch – and for us it’s the most important part of this story. We’ve said it many times in these pages: the future of the eMTB lies in light, efficient drive systems with moderate power. More bike, less moped. You’d hope that a creative phase like this one would produce exactly those concepts. So we went looking, specifically, for any manufacturer translating the new Avinox power into a deliberately down-tuned, lightweight bike. The result: nothing. Not a single such bike exists – and neither does the motor you’d build it around.

Even the smaller of the two current Avinox options still peaks at 1,100 watts and 125 Nm – more than the flagship units of the established competition. For a rough historical yardstick: a 1970s Puch moped made about 1.5 horsepower, which is roughly 1,100 watts. The “entry-level option” from tomorrow’s market leader is playing in a league that used to come with a license plate.

What bike brands are doing instead is telling: they’re building light full-power bikes. There’s a new eMTB that weighs just over 20 kg (about 45 lb) – while carrying the full 1,500 watts around. There’s a model variant badged “SL” at an impressive 19.5 kg (43 lb) – except the badge refers to travel and battery size, not power. The only concession is a software slider that lets you tame the torque in an app. For the trail-access debate, that’s a fig leaf. Land managers, agencies and landowners judge what a vehicle can do – not which mode it happens to be in. In the US, the entire Class 1 framework that riders spent a decade negotiating access around assumes e-bikes are, at heart, bicycles with modest assistance. A 20 mph pedelec with the peak output of a small motorcycle is precisely the image that gets that assumption – and with it, hard-won trail access – re-litigated.

The industry’s answer to “less moped” is “a lighter moped.”

And here the gearbox story comes full circle. The eCVT, of all things – a system that can hold the motor permanently in its efficiency sweet spot and would be the perfect partner for moderate, long-range drive systems – is being deployed as an argument for even more power. The manufacturers themselves concede that their systems technically need strong motors to work properly. A bike brand buying into this ecosystem today isn’t just buying a motor. It’s adopting a power philosophy wholesale – having your own position on the matter isn’t part of the kit.

What riders are actually saying

What’s striking is how clear-eyed the riding community itself is about all this. In the big MTB forums, one sentiment keeps surfacing that you might not expect: for plenty of riders, the e-bike gave them classic mountain biking back – the heavy e-enduro for after-work hot laps, and next to it a light XC or trail bike that suddenly gets ridden most of the time. At the same time, voices from inside the industry openly warn that the new drive suppliers from overseas simply don’t have local trail-access battles on their radar, and deliberately recommend systems from established manufacturers who have spent years engaged in access advocacy.

Prominent voices are getting louder too. Trials legend Hans Rey published an open letter to the bicycle industry this spring, urging manufacturers, media and riders to define power limits and terminology clearly in order to protect Class 1 e-bike access. Avinox responded to the mounting criticism in May with a statement defending its philosophy: power, the company argued, is about capability rather than speed, and speed – which remains legally limited – is what determines risk. There’s a kernel of truth in that, whether it’s restarting on a steep technical climb, supporting heavier riders or enabling adaptive athletes. But it misses the point. The trail-access debate isn’t conducted in watts; it’s conducted in images. And the image of a speed-limited pedelec with small-motorcycle peak power is devastating – regardless of how legal the rated continuous output looks on paper.

What needs to happen now

The good news first: the technology for the better path is sitting right there on the table. A stepless transmission that keeps the motor at its efficiency optimum is tailor-made for light drive systems with moderate power and honest range – instead of the next round of peak-power poker on the spec sheet. What’s missing is a manufacturer with the nerve to run that equation: an eMTB well under 20 kg (44 lb), with an efficient eCVT and a power output that still lets a bicycle look and behave like a bicycle. The first brand to sell restraint as a feature would own a story nobody else can tell – and build a bike that will still be welcome on legal trails five years from now.

In parallel, the sport needs what Hans Rey is calling for and what advocacy organisations like IMBA in North America and DIMB in Europe have long pushed toward: binding, comprehensible definitions that give agencies and landowners a clean way to distinguish a bicycle from something else – so that the entire mountain bike community doesn’t end up liable for the power spiral of a few. The industry is more creative right now than it has been in decades. It just needs to find the courage to invest that creativity not only in “more,” but in “better.”