The Ride1Up Roadster V3 is, for all intents and purposes, is a budget-focused daily driver urban bike. It’s not really a gravel bike. Maybe if you stand back a bit and squint, you could give it a bit more of a gravel bike interpretation. But ultimately, it’s a lightweight, affordable urban e-bike with decent multi-role tires that I mostly use for cruising around bike lanes and city streets.
So naturally, yesterday I took it on a 38 km (24 mile) ride where I spent most of the time off-road.
And you know what? The little $1,295 e-bike surprised me.
My route included just about every type of surface I probably wouldn’t have chosen when pulling a metro bike out of my quiver of e-bikes: gravel roads, hard-packed dirt, loose sandy trails, muddy puddles, and even a few rocky climbs thrown in for good measure.
The ride started with a train trip north of the city, which immediately highlighted one of the Roadster V3’s biggest advantages: it’s light. Compared to the 70- or 80-pound fat-tire e-bikes that have become increasingly common, getting the Roadster through the train station, onto the train, and even holding it securely on escalators in the stations was refreshingly easy. It tips the scales at 40 lb (18 kg) stock, though the extra rack and bags I installed, not to mention the dropper seat post, probably add a couple of extra pounds to that total.
That train maneuverability might not sound like much of an “off-road” feature, but for real-world adventure riding, being able to easily combine a bike with public transportation or lift it into a truck to get to the trails can open up a lot more interesting routes.
Once I left the train station and got rolling, I kept the bike in Eco mode basically the entire time, taking advantage of the MiVice torque sensor that provides super natural power application – like the bikes is just an extension of your legs.
The Roadster V3 isn’t an overly powerful e-bike, and that’s actually part of what I like about it. It feels much more like riding a bicycle that happens to have an electric tailwind than riding a small motorcycle with pedals attached.
That was especially true off-road. I was still putting in plenty of effort, but the motor was there to take the edge off when things got tougher.
There were a couple of climbs where I realized a little too late that I was in too high of a gear. Instead of grinding nearly to a halt while trying to downshift under load, I gave the Roadster’s hidden throttle a quick blip to keep my momentum while I sorted myself out. It gave me the chance to let my own power off the pedals for a few seconds and downshift without losing too much speed.
That’s basically how I prefer to use a throttle on this kind of e-bike: not as the primary means of propulsion, but as an occasional little electric get-out-of-jail-free card. It happens a lot when I need to squirt out away from cars in the city, but the same benefits apply when I need a little extra help on a rocky ascent or to power through a section of deep sand.
And speaking of sand, the biggest challenge was definitely all of that sand.
The harder-packed sand sections of trails were fine, but some sections were fairly loose, and the Roadster’s relatively narrow Continental 700x45c tires obviously aren’t going to float over sand like a four-inch fat tire.
I could feel the bike starting to wander sideways underneath me a few times, which definitely got my attention. But with a little finesse, some momentum, and perhaps a healthy amount of optimism, I managed to keep the rubber side down and my feet on the pedals. Though again, installing that dropper seat post was quite helpful when I got to a more technical section and wanted to be sure I could easily and safely tap toes on the ground if it came to that, then pop the seat back up to proper pedal position as soon as I passed the obstacles – all without stopping or dismounting the bike.
Whenever back on the gravel and harder-packed dirt, though, the bike felt right at home. Even the occasional rocky sections were manageable as long as I remembered what I was riding and picked my lines accordingly.
It had also drizzled a few hours before I started, 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 blasting through a puddle and not immediately painting a stripe of muddy water up your back.
After 38 km (24 miles) and around 1 hour and 50 minutes of riding, I rolled back home with roughly a third of the battery remaining. That was particularly impressive considering how much of the ride involved sand, dirt, climbing, and other conditions that tend to make an electric motor work harder.
Granted, when I stick to the city, I generally get around 70 km (44 miles) per charge, but riding through sand has a way of eating battery like nothing else. I’d call an extrapolated range of 57 km or 35 miles in off-road conditions pretty good, at least for a relatively small 360Wh battery.
Of course, part of that range came from the fact that I was working pretty hard, too.
My Garmin watch estimated that I burned 696 calories during the ride. I always take smartwatch calorie estimates with a grain of salt, but my legs certainly agreed with the general assessment. This wasn’t a ride where I sat back and let the motor haul me around. I was pedaling hard, choosing gears, maintaining momentum, and using the electric 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 throttle around on without contributing much yourself, the Roadster V3 probably isn’t the machine I’d choose for a 38 km mixed-terrain adventure. It does have that stealth throttle, but it’s not a powerhouse and it’s not a motorcycle.
But if you’re a cycling-friendly e-biker who likes doing much of the work yourself and simply wants some assistance to flatten hills, fight headwinds, or get through tougher sections, it works remarkably well.
Would I recommend the Roadster V3 as a dedicated gravel e-bike? Probably not, at least not in this variant. There’s a suspended version with a suspension fork that would help a bit, but there are bikes with wider tires, more aggressive geometry, and components specifically designed for dedicated gravel riding jobs.
But that’s also what made this ride so much fun, seeing how versatile my daily driver urban bike can be when I push it.
This is the same relatively inexpensive e-bike I can ride through the city, carry onto a train without throwing out my back, commute on without looking like I’m preparing for the Dakar Rally, and then apparently spend nearly two hours bouncing through dirt, gravel, sand, rocks, and puddles.
And it got me home with battery to spare.
For $1,295, I’d call that a pretty successful adventure.
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