The Ride1Up Roadster V3 is, for all intents and purposes, a budget-focused commuter city bike. It’s not really a gravel bike. Maybe if you step back a little and squint you could give it a slightly more gravel bike-like interpretation. But ultimately it’s a lightweight, affordable urban e-bike with decent multi-purpose tires that I mainly use for riding on bike lanes and city streets.
Naturally, yesterday I took it on a 24-mile (38 km) ride where I spent most of the time off-road.
And you know what? The little $1,295 electric bike surprised me.
My route included almost every type of surface I probably wouldn’t have chosen when taking a subway bike out of my e-bike rig: gravel roads, packed dirt, loose sand trails, muddy puddles, and even a few rocky climbs for good measure.
The trip began with a train ride north of the city, which immediately highlighted one of the Roadster V3’s biggest advantages: its lightness. Compared to the 70- or 80-pound fat-tire e-bikes that have become increasingly common, carrying the Roadster through the train station, hoisting it onto the train, and even holding it securely on station escalators was surprisingly easy. It tips the scales at 40 lbs (18 kg), although the additional luggage rack and bags I installed, not to mention the dropper seat post, probably add a couple extra pounds to that total.
Train maneuverability may not seem like an “off-road” feature, but for real-world adventures, being able to easily combine a bike with public transportation or load it onto a truck to hit the trails can open up much more interesting routes.
Once I left the train station and started rolling, I kept the bike in Eco mode basically the entire time, taking advantage of the MiVice torque sensor that provides a super natural application of power, as if the bike were just an extension of your legs.
The Roadster V3 is not an overly powerful e-bike and that is, in fact, part of what I like about it. It feels much more like riding a bike that has an electric tailwind than riding a small motorcycle with pedals.
This was especially true off-road. I was still pushing hard, but the engine was there to relieve me when things got tougher.
There were a couple of climbs where I realized, a little late, that I was in too high a gear. Instead of coming to a near-stop while trying to downshift under load, I gave the Roadster’s hidden accelerator a quick tap to maintain my momentum while I ordered myself. It gave me a chance to release my own power from the pedals for a few seconds and slow down without losing too much speed.
This is basically how I prefer to use the throttle on this type of e-bike: not as a primary means of propulsion, but as an occasional little get-out-of-jail-free electric card. It happens a lot when I need to squirt away from cars in the city, but the same benefits apply when I need a little extra help on a rocky climb or traversing a section of deep sand.
And speaking of sand, the biggest challenge was definitely all that sand.
The harder sand sections of the trails were fine, but some sections were quite loose, and the Roadster’s relatively narrow 700x45c Continental tires obviously aren’t going to float over sand like a fat four-inch tire.
I could feel the bike start to move sideways beneath me several times, which definitely caught my attention. But with a little finesse, some momentum, and perhaps a good dose of optimism, I managed to keep the rubber part down and my feet on the pedals. Then again, installing that dropper seatpost came in handy when I got to a more technical section and I wanted to make sure I could easily and safely hit the ground with my toes if needed, then raise the seat back to the proper pedal position as soon as I passed the obstacles, all without stopping or getting off the bike.
However, every time we got back onto gravel and harder dirt, the bike felt right at home. Even the occasional rocky sections were manageable as long as I remembered what I was riding and chose my lines accordingly.
It had also drizzled a few hours before starting, leaving several puddles scattered along the route. Here, the Roadster V3 had another surprisingly useful advantage over many purpose-built gravel bikes: fenders.
There’s something wonderfully practical about wading through a puddle and not immediately painting a strip of muddy water on your back.
After 38 km (24 miles) and about 1 hour and 50 minutes of driving, I returned home with about a third of the battery remaining. That was particularly impressive considering that much of the course involved sand, dirt, climbing and other conditions that tend to make an electric motor work harder.
Of course, when I stay in the city, I usually get around 70 km (44 miles) per charge, but riding in sand has a way of draining battery like nothing else. I’d say an extrapolated range of 57 km or 35 miles in off-road conditions is pretty good, at least for a relatively small 360 Wh battery.
Of course, part of that range was due to the fact that I was working pretty hard too.
My Garmin watch estimated that I burned 696 calories during the trip. I always take smartwatch calorie estimates with a grain of salt, but my legs certainly agreed with the overall assessment. This was not a trip where I sat back and let the engine carry me along. I pedaled hard, choosing gears, maintaining momentum, and using the power assist to supplement my effort rather than replace it.
And that might be my biggest takeaway from the whole experiment.
If your idea of an e-bike is something you expect to speed up without contributing much, the Roadster V3 probably isn’t the machine you’d choose for a 38km adventure on mixed terrain. It has that stealthy throttle, but it’s not a powerhouse or a motorcycle.
But if you’re an avid cyclist who likes to do a lot of the work yourself and simply wants help flattening hills, fighting headwinds, or traversing tougher sections, it works remarkably well.
Would you recommend the Roadster V3 as a gravel-only e-bike? Probably not, at least not in this variant. There is a suspended version with a suspension fork that would help a little, but there are bikes with wider tires, more aggressive geometry, and components designed specifically for dedicated gravel work.
But that’s also what made this trip so much fun: seeing how versatile my commuter bike can be when I push it.
This is the same relatively inexpensive electric bike that I can ride around town, hop on a train without straining my back, ride without looking like I’m preparing for the Dakar Rally, and then apparently spend nearly two hours bouncing over dirt, gravel, sand, rocks, and puddles.
And it took me home with battery to spare.
For $1,295, I’d consider it a pretty successful venture.
FTC: We use automatic affiliate links that generate income. Further.
