At Cannondale Moterra SL’s goal is to build the lightest fully-powered electric mountain bike ever made. The barriers are many, but there’s one big one: combining a powerful motor with a wide-reaching battery can add enormous weight and stress to an agile, lightweight frame.
To avoid this contradiction, Cannondale needed to shave weight off while strengthening its frame, so the company turned to a solution it designed a long time ago that took inspiration from Formula 1 race cars. The Moterra SL uses what the company calls FlexPivot, which the company first featured on its Scalpel XC race bike. Instead of using the bearings and hardware of a traditional Horst-link suspension system, the company used thin, ultra-lightweight pieces of carbon that bend within the bike’s chainstays (the tubes that hold the bike’s bottom bracket). Not only are these flexors sleek and maintenance-free, they also allow engineers to fine-tune the suspension.
But FlexPivot technology alone doesn’t explain how this 45-pound bike makes so much power without feeling like a Sherman tank. Cannondale dug deep into kinematics, a physics term that translates to “the motion of a system composed of joined parts.”
Photo: Stephanie Pearson
Third time lucky
there is Many There’s a lot of parts that go together on this bike. The Moterra SL comes in three builds, from the top-of-the-line Lab71 to the half-price cheaper SL2 that I tested. All have carbon frames that officially fall into the all-mountain category, but the slack head angles make them feel almost like enduro bikes.
All are Mallets (29″ front wheel, 27.5″ rear wheel) that can be converted to a full 29″ bike with the FlipChip. All are powered by a custom high-energy density 601Wh internal battery and a Cannondale-tuned Shimano EP801 motor (85 Newton-meters of torque) with four power modes – Eco, Trail 1, Trail 2 and Boost – that can be further fine-tuned with the accompanying app.
One great thing about the e-design is that if you find a computer on the handlebars too cluttered or unwieldy, there’s a simple push button on the top tube that allows the rider to easily change power modes, allowing you to get rid of the computer completely and ride with a cleaner cockpit.
The SL2 build I tried comes with a mix of high-quality components, including a Fox Performance 36 fork with 160mm travel, an Acros adjustable-angle headset that’s great for further fine-tuning the fit, a Fox Float X Performance Elite rear shock with 150mm travel, Shimano XT derailleurs (not specific to e-mountain bikes, but more on that later), and Shimano Deore for the shifters, chain, rear cogs, brakes, and brake levers.
