Great bike, except for display
This is a review of the Vorsa (standard, step-thru) from the perspective of also having a Roadster v3 (step-thru) for the better part of the last 2 years, and before that 2 Giant eBikes since 2004, over 20 years ago. I have put about 10,000 km on each of the Roadster and the 2 Giants combined. I got the Vorsa recently for riding on "less than smooth" gravel trails. In a nutshell, both Ride1Up bikes are absolutely great, especially when compared to my ancient Giant eBikes, with one big exception discussed below. The Roadster is by far my preferred bike, primarily because it is much lighter and therefore much more responsive. It truly feels like you are riding a road bike and you are just flying along but with less effort. The Vorsa, as I anticipated, is somewhat of a tank by comparison, especially when lifting it onto a car rack, but it admirably does the job of eating up those gravel trails more comforably (and faster) than the Roadster does. With either bike, I ride almost entirely in Tour mode, class 1. I reckon either bike gives me in practice about 50-60 miles from a full battery with rides that typically have considerable elevation gain, up to 2000 ft at times, and purposely not running the battery down to less than 20% if I can avoid it, 10% max if I can't. Kudos to Ride1Up for that. Battery life is great, at least for the Roadster. I only have a few rides in on the Vorsa, so can't comment on it. However, for the Roadster I have a standard ride that I do to measure the miles I get from the battery. After 13 months and 6500 km, the Roadster battery lost less than 2% of capacity, which, based on my experience with the Giants, is extremely good and very acceptable. The ONLY downside of both bikes is the display. As a programmer I wish I could modify the software to make it much more useful (or perhaps useful period) to someone who is actually riding the bike at the same time as trying to read/use the display. I suspect the software was written by someone who never actually went out and beta-tested it while riding and/or was trying to maximize battery use/longevity. One example is distance traveled. It is on the Roadster main page but in a font so small it is unreadable in practice. It is a big enough font on the Vorsa, but it is not on the main page so it is never visible w/o pressing a button! Unbelievable. Which brings up another issue. While riding, both displays revert back to the main page after a mere 5 seconds, which while riding is way too short a time to read. The user should be able to set this timeout, including the option for no timeout at all. Another serious issue is display of battery voltage, or more correctly, lack thereof. On the Roadster you can get to it fairly easily but on the Vorsa it involves a tedious series of somewhere around a dozen or more button presses. Neither of these can be done safely while riding. Battery voltage should, in my opinion, be on the home page, not buried at all and always visible. The State of Charge (SoC) percent display depends on whatever algorithm the programmer decided to use. On the Roadster it is a terrible algorithm: typically SoC will not drop off 100 % until after 15-20 miles or so and I have learned never to start a ride below 50% because it drops like a rock on the lower half. Ride1Up seems to have done a better job with SoC on the Vorsa. Based on only two 45-mile rides it seems to be much more realistic but only time will tell. The Vorsa will also display amp-hours remaining (but unfortunately after the same tedious button presses needed for voltage), so that is one improvement over the Roadster. But for goodness sake, why not also display the actual battery voltage on the home page? There is plenty of screen real estate to fit it in on either display. The speed is in a font so big you can read it from the proverbial mile away; that font size could easily be cut in half to allow the main page to be much more useful, with readable distance and battery voltage (both using 2 decimal places) among many improvements that could be made. The only other comment I have on both bikes is I wish Ride1Up would allow a better choice of tires, even if they charged more for it. My Roadster got a flat on the front tire after 1 week, on the rear tire after 1 month. I replaced them with Schwalbe Marathon Plus and 10,000 km later have not had another flat, doing the same ride much of the time. Even though the Vorsa came with entry-level protection Schwalbe tires, I am in the process of upgrading them to the industry-standard best protection, the Marathon Plus. My second Giant has those tires too and no flats yet on it. If it were not for the display issues, I would rate both bikes 10 stars, on a scale of 5. The display, however, is the all-important user interface to the bike, and it is so bad I knock 2 stars off because of it. I truly wish I didn't have to do that.
By steve