The EcoBike Forest is a fun, free-rolling drop bar e-bike that’ll make light work of day-to-day commutes and will also be viable for getting out and about exploring at the weekend. It’s not without its foibles, but it’s affordable as these sorts of bikes go and I certainly enjoyed my time with it.

EcoBike is a Polish company offering a pretty broad spread of urban and leisure e-bikes, ranging from lightweight folders to hardtail mid-motor eMTBs.

We’ve previously tested the brand’s capable electric cargo bike, the Cargo. The Forest is listed as a gravel e-bike, but it’s probably a little less sporty than that label suggests. It’s more of a fast commuter/leisure bike that's unafraid of a bit of off-roading.
 

The bike

The Forest’s most striking features are its flared handlebars and angled shifters. This is a pretty common setup on gravel bikes, offering a little more control. Many years of road riding mean I’m accustomed to a more conventional position, but I did feel it offered more reassurance when riding off road.

Ecobike Forest, by Alex Bowden

Also of gravel provenance are the Microshift Advent X 10-speed gears and 45mm Schwalbe G-One Allround Evo tyres. The latter, in particular, are a great choice. While not intended for full mountain bike level off-roading, they provide enough traction to get through those unwelcome stretches that prove to be way rougher than you'd guessed when looking at the map, yet they then roll very nicely indeed when you return to the asphalt.

Depending on how you’d use the bike, mudguards might feel like an omission, but the bike does at least have mounting points to add some.

All of this is driven by a Bafang rear hub motor, which is allied with a 350Wh battery concealed within the frame. While the bike is listed at 16.8kg, it came up as 17.5kg on the ebiketips scales, which is still a long way from being weighty in e-bike terms.
 

The motor

The benefit of a lighter e-bike – particularly one that rolls well – is that you don’t need quite the same brute force from the motor. While the torque of this Bafang one is rated at a somewhat piffling 30Nm, I felt like I got plenty out of it, even when the assistance was set at lower levels.

There are five levels on offer. According to the output numbers you see on the (overly reflective but fundamentally clear) display, Level 1 peaks at about 200W, while at Level 5 you’ll see it touch 500W. (Usual reminder here that peak power can exceed the 250W rating, which is only the legal limit for ‘continuous’ power.)

Whether those numbers are entirely accurate isn’t too important. What matters is that it feels like you get a nice tailwind effect on the flat with a decent bit of clout when the road tilts uphill. As a hub motor, it'll wilt a bit on protracted steeper gradients, but the bike's times on my various test climbs were above average and in some cases right up there.

At the opposite side of the display to the motor's watts, you’ll also see 0W displayed under a little icon of a cyclist. When used in conjunction with e-bike systems that make use of a torque sensor, this would show your own contribution to forward momentum. You may however infer from that sentence that the EcoBike Forest uses a cadence sensor, so that will only ever say 0W, no matter how hard you pedal.

There’s no two ways about it, cadence sensors are less sophisticated. They are a cheaper, blunter way of triggering the motor and no matter how well they work, somewhere or other you are going to notice this. On the Forest, motor assistance ramps up steadily and smoothly, and mostly this works nicely and unobtrusively. There are however times where it simply isn’t responsive enough.

The clearest manifestation of this is on a short down-then-up, such as when the road drops to a bridge over a stream. In these situations, you’ll hit the climb above the 15mph assistance limit, but your speed will then drop significantly below before the motor’s contribution rebounds to a meaningfully helpful level. The upshot is that you may well start and finish the climb at a decent speed, but there’ll be a dip in pace in between.

Aside from being a little frustrating, this is also inefficient. The system is working to accelerate you back to a speed it could more easily have maintained and will most likely still be operating at full power as you near the top, when the road’s levelling out.

Despite this – and in large part because the lower power levels are usable – I found I got decent range. EcoBike suggest you’ll be able to get “up to 80km” but I actually managed 85km (53 miles) on my first charge. While that only included about 400m of climbing, about 10% of the distance was off-road, varying from gravel to thick mud. That's a very good return. On my next charge, using the motor a little more freely, I got 65km with the same amount of climbing.

I also found that I got meaningful assistance right the way down to 0% which isn’t always the case. 

Nor is riding the battery all the way down ordinarily an option, but the Forest is actually a perfectly viable bike without the motor. I did one 40-minute ride entirely unassisted and while I was a few miles per hour slower than on my road bike, I was able to maintain a decent enough pace without killing myself and didn't at any point feel like it was dragging me back.
 

The ride

The single gear shifter is pretty conventional. I haven’t used Microshift gearing in a few years, but while the Advent X 1x10 system isn’t as lumpen as some of its forebears, I wasn’t wowed. I found I sometimes needed to change up twice and down once to successfully execute a single gear change. Mostly it worked fine, but ‘mostly’ isn’t incredible.

Both the shifter on the right and the opposite brake hood (I can't exactly call it a shifter as it doesn't contain one) came loose. It was easy enough to tighten them again, but without extensive experience, I suspect this is possibly a bit more likely when they’re angled inwards.

The smallest gear is a dinner plate sized 48T, which combined with the 44T chain ring ensures a low enough gear for almost any occasion.

The motor controls are a bit of a mixed bag. It’s a nice touch that there are two sets – on the tops and on the drops – but they don’t have a particularly nice feel and the latter require a slightly awkward thumb press. This isn’t too big a deal though because you won’t be changing assistance level too often.

EcoBike only do the Forest in one size. At 1.85m I wouldn’t have minded a bit more seat post on the road, but I quite liked the lower saddle height on more dubious surfaces. The saddle itself was fine, particularly combined with those 45mm tyres.
 

Value

While ostensibly an electric gravel bike, it’s not too obvious what to compare the EcoBike Forest to because most bikes in that category are massively more expensive.

The first version of Cairn’s BRAVe was in a similar price bracket, but the Cairn BRAVe 2.0 is only available as a flat bar bike, and it’s also unavailable at the time of writing.

Like the Cairn, the Boardman ADV 8.9E (£2,799) is a mid-motor option – specifically, the Fazua Evation system. Billed as an ‘adventure electric bike’, it’s a good fit for the kinds of knackered-up back roads on which a lot of leisure riding is done, but wouldn’t quite get to the same places as the EcoBike without a change of tyres.

Ribble’s CGR AL e (£2,799) is also worth a mention. Unlike the previous two, it uses a hub motor (Mahle X35) with a cadence sensor.

Decathlon's Van Rysel E-GRVL AF (£2,500) is another Mahle X35 option, but we haven't yet tested it and at the time of writing it's also out of stock in any size smaller than XL.

If those are all too dear and you don’t consider drop bars a crucial element, the Ebco Adventure 3R might be worth a look, having come down to a bargain basement price of £1,399.

If your emphasis is far more weighted towards commuting, your options open out even more – but I think that’s to miss the central joy of this bike. I really enjoyed heading out to explore bits of bridleway I’d normally steer clear of, safe in the knowledge that even if they were horrendous (and mostly they were) they wouldn’t derail my plans. This bike enables that kind of exploration.

If you make allowances for the cadence sensor and don’t pine for anything beyond adequacy when it comes to shifting gears, the EcoBike Forest really is a lot of fun.

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