What do you get when you cross an e-bike with a supercar?
Enlarge (credit: John Timmer)
"You can let everyone know that people said it's a really nice-looking bike."
I'd never received comments like that when testing previous e-bikes, but I got compliments several times when out on the Vintage Roadster, and it's easy to see why. The bike is gorgeous, evoking classic motorcycles of a century ago, straight down to a battery shaped like a two-cylinder engine.
For me, it constantly called to mind the opening scenes of Lawrence of Arabia, which show Lawrence speeding off on one of those classic machines. Those who have seen the film know that the scenes end with his death in a motorcycle crash. This brings me to my mixed feelings about Vintage's e-bike equivalent of a supercar. I was introduced to the Vintage after I reviewed a Super73 e-bike, about which I expressed some concern over how easy it was to accelerate the bike to a very illegal (and potentially dangerous) 50 km an hour. Vintage's sales pitch for the Roadster was basically "we have one that goes even faster."