Cervélo have become the latest bike brand to go electric with the arrival of the sleek and slightly perplexing Rouvida. While this is, on the face of it, another high-end, low profile e-road bike built around the Fazua Ride 60 mid-motor system, it can also be ridden in an e-gravel configuration thanks to some interchangeable dropouts that significantly alter the geometry of the bike.
To list the basic stuff first, the Cervélo Rouvida is available in three builds, all with SRAM components, with prices ranging from £6,000 to £11,000.
As mentioned, the motor system is Fazua's Ride 60, a lightweight mid-motor with a 430Wh battery. This is an increasingly popular option for e-road bikes as it offers decent torque (supposedly up to 60Nm) without being anywhere near as conspicuous as the larger motors from Bosch, Shimano et al.
We recently tested the Ride 60 setup on Riese and Muller's UBN 5 Touring and were mightily impressed. It's a smooth and unobtrusive motor and while the top end power might not quite match those bigger units, the flipside is that it still rides beautifully even when you're not making use of motor assistance - which isn't always the case with heavier mid-drives.
The system can provide assistance up to 28mph, but will of course be limited to the usual 15.5mph in the UK.
This ability to switch between road and gravel geometries is a bit of an oddity though. As my colleague Mat Brett reports over on our sister site road.cc, several brands already use flip chips in frames and forks to alter the geometry of their bikes. This doesn't typically require you to update firmware though, as is the case with the Cervélo Rouvida. But that's not the only additional hurdle - the update also needs to be performed by a Cervélo retailer, which surely makes switching between ride modes a bit more of a commitment.
If you want to find out more about the flip chips and geometry changes, take a look at Mat's article which goes into this in more detail.
The Cervélo Rouvida will be available in January. You can find more info at www.cervelo.com (link is external)
