Hiya! I’m the accounts girl at Bicycle NSW and thanks to Bosch eBike Systems and Omafiets I was lucky enough to road test a Riese and Muller Tinker 2 e-bike with the Bosch Smart System.
E-bikes just continue to get better and better! One of the key things driving this is the development of smart technologies to make things easier for riders. The Bosch Smart System does this really well and I was impressed. The key components of the system I tested were the Flow App, Kiox 300 display, LED Remote, Performance Line drive unit and A PowerPack 545 Wh battery.
To make full use of the Bosch Smart System you need to use the eBike Flow app and register an account with Bosch. It’s easy peasy and I was on the cycle path in no time. If you don’t register the e-bike to your Bosch account, you can’t take advantage of the full suite of features.
First feature of note is the Bosch eBike Lock which allows you to use your mobile as a digital key to “unlock the drive unit” via Bluetooth. Or you could use the Kiox 300 display as your key instead. Just unclip the display and take it with you and the drive unit is 'locked' which means there would be no power to the drive unit. This doesn’t replace the need for a physical lock, but it does provide further security.
Route planning was a very pleasant surprise, with the Kiox 300 showing you the route after setting it up in the eBike Flow app and it behaves like you would expect any navigation app would. You can still flip through the other screens of the display, and you’ll still get turn notifications overlaid on the screen. Or you can leave it on the navigation screen to show the route and cross streets and turns ahead. Thankfully it does send you to cycle paths where available.
Ha! I thought the Kiox 300 wouldn’t show me current speed and cadence on the same page, except it does! You can personalise the display on your Kiox 300 to show you exactly what you want. For me that was Range, Current Speed and Cadence. You can also reorganise the screens on the display into any order that works for you.
Riding Modes can also be set up to default to your preference of: Eco, Tour, Tour+, Sport, Turbo or my favourite, Auto. Auto was great and felt like it was using Eco on the flat, Sport on mild inclines and turbo for the steeper stuff. I really didn’t feel like I needed to change my pedalling, the auto just took care of that. I did still have to change gear though.
A nice touch is that the battery levels are expressed as a percentage instead of bars. Thank you so much! The smart system also provides a Range forecast for the various riding modes, which I thought was a little on the conservative side.
Activity tracking is easy with the Flow app. Without doing anything additional, the Flow app records my rides and they can also be synced with some other third party apps like Strava or Komoot.
Software updates were painless and over the air. Just remember you need to be stationary when installing them!
The Bosch Smart System is great. It’s a significant improvement over the previous Bosch Systems I’ve tried and they were no slouch either. The winner for me here is the Auto Mode. It really does make things a lot simpler, efficient and effective. Power kicks in exactly when you need it and it comes on hot and strong. Just like the shower you want after your winter morning ride.
If I was in the market for a new e-bike right now, one with the Bosch Smart System would be at the top of my list.
