You’ll enjoy the Specialized Turbo Vado SL 2 6.0 Carbon even without assist

I’ve been spoiled by the automatic assist available on Bosch mid-drive motors. The next best thing is probably something like the Shimano Devore XT/SLX shifters on this Carbon, paired with the power monitoring. The 12-speed system, with a 10-51t cassette range, shifted at the speed of thought. Your handlebar display gives you a color-coded guide when you should probably shift up or down, based on your cadence and wattage output.

The controls for the Carbon’s display, power, and switch are just this little switch, with three places to press and an up/down switch. Sometimes I thought it was clever and efficient; other times, I wish I had picked a more simple unlock code.

Credit:
Kevin Purdy

That battery range, as reported by Specialized, is “up to 5 hours,” a number that few people are going to verify. It’s a 520-watt-hour battery in a 48-volt system that can turn out a rated 320 watts of power. You can adjust the output of all three assist levels in the Specialized app. And you can buy a $450 water-bottle-sized range extender battery that adds another 160 Wh to your system if you sacrifice a bottle cage (leaving two others).

But nobody should ride this bike, or its cousins, like a juice miser on a cargo run. This bike is meant to move, whether to speed through a commute, push an exercise ride a bit farther, or tackle that one hill that ruins your otherwise enjoyable route. The Carbon felt good on straightaways, on curves, starting from a dead stop, and pretty much whenever I was in the zone, forgetting about the bike itself and just pedaling.

I don’t have many points of comparison, because most e-bikes that cost this much are bulky, intensely powerful, or haul a lot of cargo. The Carbon and its many cousins that Specialized sells cost more because they take things away from your ride: weight, frame, and complex systems. The Carbon provides a rack, lights, three bottle cages, and mounting points, so it can do more than just boost your ride. But that’s what it does better than most e-bikes out there: provide an agile, lightweight athletic ride, upgraded with a balanced amount of battery power and weight to make that ride go faster or farther.