I’ve had a go on the new Tern Orox, and what a hoot that turned out to be. We’ve published a launch story on the Orox which will give you all the technical information. This is about my personal experience of the bike, what I think it’s good for, and maybe some misgivings generally about the way vehicles of all kinds seem to get bigger these days…
Well, let’s start with a bit about that. This bike is huge. I have a Tern GSD, which I think anyone would agree is a sizeable unit – ours is nicknamed Bikezilla – and the Orox makes it look like a child’s toy. There are none of the usual claims by Tern that this thing will take up the space of a normal bike. It’s enormous. Fat bikes generally are, but this is a cargo fat bike with four-inch tyres on 27.5” wheels, as opposed to the usual 26”, and a long tail, and a 210kg maximum gross vehicle weight. It’s a big old thing and you’ll need a decent space to store it in. The wheel size can be changed, but whatever you fit it's going to be a chunky old thing.
The pitch here is very much that this is a bike for carrying stuff in the great outdoors, and you can get a really quite surprising amount of stuff on it. Our bike came with a front pannier rack – there are 14 mount points on the fork and various ways to configure it – and also the cavernous Cargo Hold 72 panniers, half as big again as the GSD’s bags, which can easily swallow a weekly shop for four.
Trying out a camping pack I managed to get a 3-man tent, two sleeping bags, two mats, a full-size stove and gas bottle and my crate of camping essentials onto the bike without even touching the front rack, leaving that for clothes and food. So you could probably carry an entire family’s worth of camping kit on the Orox with a bit of judicious packing, leaving everyone else free to cycle unladen. If even that isn’t enough, there’s a dedicated trailer hitch at the back. Bottom line: you can carry a LOT of stuff.
The bike is heavy, and the tyres are huge and not very efficient, so the Bosch Performance Line CX motor doesn’t have quite the bite it does on something like a touring bike, but there’s still plenty of grunt to propel you up the steep stuff, and off-road with about 10psi in the tyres there’s plenty of grip too. On the road you need to pump them up a bit harder, and like all fat bikes the Orox is rather vague on those massive air chambers. It’s not a bike you’re going to be pinning to the apex of a tight bend at speed, but that’s not really the point of it.
It’s at its best on mixed surfaces away from the beaten track: if you’ve got a bumpy, muddy field to traverse then this is probably the best bike I’ve ever used for that: you can roll over pretty much anything. On tighter, more technical stuff its sheer size – and especially length – means that you can’t proceed at the speed you would on a mountain bike, but it’s still very capable, more so than I expected.
Our S12 bike came with a single 625Wh battery, and there’s a second battery slot inside the frame bag. Now that Bosch has released its 800Wh frame-mounted battery, that means that you can have up to 1.6kWh of capacity on hand. Tern says that could propel you over 300km, which is a range I would describe as fanciful, and actually unhelpful. This is just is a number lifted directly from Bosch’s own PR; there may be ebikes that will cover 300km with two 800Wh batteries on board, but this definitely isn’t one of them. Given that this is a bike specifically designed to head off into the wilderness, you’d be lucky to get half that on the kind of ride that you'd do aboard it. On a cold day of testing on the Mendips, 50/50 on- and off-road, being pretty sparing with the higher modes, with no luggage, I managed 42km out of the single 625Wh battery, suggesting I'd have got about 110km out of the maximum spec. Realistically, speccing a second battery is probably a good idea. Anyway, no matter: that 42km loop was an absolute blast, and everyone I met wanted me to tell them all about the bike, which I sadly couldn’t do, because it wasn’t released.
In general, there is a lot to like about this bike. It’s incredibly capable and well specced. It’s fun to ride. You can fix most of Tern’s huge range of existing accessories to it, and some new Orox-specific ones. It can carry more stuff off-road than any other bike I can think of. And, considering the build quality and the fact that it’s inevitably going to be made in pretty low numbers, it’s not even really that expensive.
And yet… I find myself conflicted by a bike like this, almost entirely because I just don’t think that the numbers of well-heeled backcountry folk that were looking for a bike to take them to that remote fishing spot are anywhere near big enough to justify rolling one out of the factory. Maybe I’m wrong. But most people that buy a big 4x4 or a stupid enormous pickup never venture anywhere near the wilderness, and that, I fear, is likely to be the fate of most… Orox? Oroxes? Orices?
I would love one of these. It’s a giant bike that's a giant laugh, and actually very capable, and a talking point. But I live in a city, and realistically for 99% of its life I’d be going to Lidl on it, or giving one of the kids a backy down into town, or heading into the office. I currently do those things on my GSD, which is by almost every metric a better tool for doing them, just like an estate car is by almost every metric a better option for most people than an SUV or 4x4 or pickup. That doesn’t stop those people buying those cars, though. If you’re actually going to ride across the muddy wilderness carrying fifty kilos of outdoor gear, then it’s hard to imagine a better bike for the job. If you’re not, try not to get one just because it looks cool. It does look cool though. It'll be hard.
