Review Delfast TOP 3.0 – Beautiful spring day out here in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I have got one on the heck of an e-bike to go over with you guys today. I’ve got the Delfast TOP 3.0. This is it right here and if you’re like me, you’re probably looking at this and thinking that looks an awful lot like a dirt bike, and it does and it feels like one too.
Review Delfast TOP 3.0
One charge range | 200 mi / 321 km | Max speed | 50 mph / 80 kph |
Weight | 154 lbs / 70 kg | Load capacity | 298 lbs / 135 kg |
Open For Full Specifications |
You know, it’s got the pedals on here, we’ve got a cycling saddle. You can put it into Class I or II modes to make it street legal if you do need to ride it in town or on a trail to get somewhere. But it’s huge, it’s heavy. It’s 154 pounds, is what they told me it weighs. And I said I’m gonna take your word for it because I don’t have a way to weigh something this heavy.
Delfast TOP 3.0 Quick Look
It is quite hefty though. It only comes in one size. So if you’re big and tall like me, 6’3, probably not gonna be a good fit for you. This is way too small for me, especially when you want to talk about pedaling and I can’t really see anything in the mirrors because of my height. But it’s still a heck of a good time. I’ve been having a blast riding it around.
It’s been tough to find a safe place to ride it because of how powerful it is. You can’t really be taking this on your bike trails and stuff like that. I have been riding it on city streets here with traffic but keep in mind, I have a motorcycle license. I have full coverage motorcycle insurance. So that is quite a bit safer for me. From what I’ve been able to find, you wouldn’t have to register this because the nominal power for the motor there is 3,000 watts.
And from what I’ve been told, anything under 4,000 watts doesn’t have to be registered as a motorcycle. It’s similar to how gas-powered scooters, if they’re 49 CC or below, they don’t have to be registered. But I’m not a legal expert, so don’t quote me on that. You’d want to look into that if you were gonna get one of these. If you did wanna get one of these, you’d be looking at a price of $6,649, USD. You can get it shipped. I know they ship to North America and to Europe and I think quite a few other places as well. Full details on that on the written review.
So yeah, it’s pretty pricey, but I mean, this thing is loaded out. It has got some excellent components on here. The suspension is from DNM, about 200 millimeters of travel. Here are an inverted coil suspension, 35-millimeter steel stanchions. The front and rear suspensions are adjustable for your preload and compression and rebound. Then really high-performing stuff and it feels like riding on a cloud. It is so smooth.
If you’re riding off-road, it’s fantastic, riding on paved streets, it couldn’t be better. You get I think I mentioned 3,000 watts power for the motor back here. This is a QSV3 hub motor, 3,000 watts nominals and it can get up to 14,000 watts peak which is, just that’s monstrous. It is very powerful, 182 Newton meters of torque which is also just insane, and tons of power here. That’s great if you wanna ride it in a bit more like a dirt bike.
Off-road, private trail, that kind of stuff, where you actually really let this thing go. You’re not gonna hurt anybody. And it’s got quite a bit of range too. They actually have a Guinness World Record for the most range for an e-bike of over 200 miles, which is quite a long way. But if you wanna ride it with the throttle and you’ll really be going fast, you’re not going to be getting 200 miles out of it. It’s gonna be more like 30, 40, kind of depends on how you’re riding.
If you’re stopping a lot to take advantage of those regenerative brakes versus just coasting at high speed, it’s gonna be a lot less though. If you wanted to get that 200 miles range, there are switches on the bottom right here. So you can switch it, as the right switch takes you from throttle over to pedal assist. If you have it in the middle, they’re both disabled, no throttle, no pedal assist. I’m gonna bump it back to throttle.
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Delfast TOP 3.0 Performance
And then this one over on the left is for controlling the max speed. So the way it’s supposed to work is class over on switch one setting there, that’s like a sort of like a Class I for Europe. Won’t go over 15 miles an hour with the assist. And if you bump it up to the center position, that should be like a Class II. For here in the US, it’ll get up to 20 miles per hour. And then if you put it over there on to the far right position there, then that will completely unlock it.
So you can get 50 miles per hour, even more. So to me, it’s a great fit as a dirt bike, right? If you wanted an electric dirt bike for riding off-road if you had some private trails, you have somewhere that you already like to ride in, this could be an awesome fit and a heck of a good time. But if you live in the city, maybe not so much. They do sell a ton of different accessories for it. There are bags that you can mount on there. So you can carry a lot of cargo with you.
They shipped a lot of accessories with it that all come by default, is my understanding. You get the fender on the rear here, and it’s a pretty tiny fender. It’s not gonna provide a ton of coverage, but it is positioned well, and in my experience, it has been working well. It has been moving around a bit, just from the torque of the motor back here. It’s kind of like jumped forward and back a bit on me. So I came down here and tightened everything up. You get integrated lights so that it would be street legal to ride in terms of the lighting, right?
So, you’ve got your taillight right back here that is brake activated. It’ll get brighter when you hit the brakes. and it also has turn signals built-in. You’ve got the turn signal control up here. Anyone who’s ridden motorcycles before, this is going to be very familiar. You got your switch for your high and low beam. You’ve got your blinkers here. You flip it over to the side and then you press in the center to disable it.
The mirrors actually have blinkers built into them. Right here they light up when you turn on the blinkers and you can even see a little motorcycle or a little blinker indicator there on the corner of the mirror. I’ll power that on in a bit to show you. You got a horn on the bottom. This is a dedicated light switch right over here. So when you flip that on, it turns on the front and rear lights. There’s the front, it’s super bright.
I don’t know how many lumens this thing is, it didn’t have any labeling it. But as you can see, one side of it’s lit up now and if I hit the bright, you get them both. Super bright, it’s motorcycle-level headlight right there. And you got your rear lights lit up. You get four LEDs per side and then there’s an inner turn signal on each one. It’s positioned very low down, so it’s not super visible, but it’s pretty solid all things considered. It does a good job. The mirrors are great to have if you’re a shorter rider, but since I’m so tall, I can’t really see anything in them.
Delfast TOP 3.0 Specifications
Model | DelFast Top 3.0 |
---|---|
Frame | Patented reinforced, high tensile steel |
Fork | KKE fork with 203 mm stroke |
Rear shock | DNM RCP-2S (1000LBS) |
Battery | 72V 48AH LG 3200mah cells Lithium battery with Bluetooth smart BMS for 100A |
Motor | QS V3 205 IPX5 protection, main power 3000W (could be 14000W peak in few seconds). Torque: 182N.m. |
Power Transmission | Carbon drive (belt drive) with one gear |
Tires | 80/100-19″ (motorcycle tires) |
Brakes | 200F-180R with 203 mm disks (2pcs) |
Display | Colorful display with USB port |
Seat tube | Manually adjustable seat post |
Lights | Front light (with the ability to switch to high and low beam) + rear light |
Charger | 84V 9A (110V-220V) + waterproof gold plated connector LLT |
Controller | 72V 60A:
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Extras included |
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They’re adjustable and you can swivel them here. And then the left one I could mount right out here on the light housing, but you can’t move the other one out very far. They’re too short for me, so I have not messed with them. I do wanna take a couple of minutes to talk about the assembly here. I got it shipped to me so that I could spend some time reviewing it. This is the most difficult bike I’ve ever had to assemble. Most of that’s due to the weight. It’s huge, roughly 150 pounds. And I had to put on the front wheel there and the handlebars and the lights and the mirrors. It was a lot, the pedals.
So, I don’t have a bicycle stand that might have helped except, how are you gonna put this on the stand? It’s not built like a bicycle, the frame is not shaped the same way. So it’s difficult. I recommend two people to put it together but if you’re big and strong and really determined, then you can put it together with just one person. It’s just gonna take you a few hours. Once I got it all together, everything has worked great. The brakes lined up and were tuned perfectly.
There’s no derailleur adjust because we have a carbon belt drive over here, more on that in a bit. The lights were pretty finicky to get set up just because the cable for the headlight was not visible. Like it wasn’t protruding from the frame. So I had to take this housing off, find the right cable in there and fish that out. But I got it set up. You can see where the cables are exiting. I made it look as pretty as I could, but you just have so many cables up here.
There’s only so much that you can do. There’s another cable back here for the rear light that’s kind of just hanging out here. I might zip tie that up here or something, just to keep it out of the way. You do have to take off the housing one way or the other to connect the battery ’cause they disconnect that for shipping. And the battery is massive. I mean, it’s 72 volts, 48 amp-hour, I believe. You’re looking at about a 3.5-kilowatt-hour battery in there.
I don’t know how much it weighs because there’s just so many cables and other stuff going on inside the frame that’s gonna be very difficult to remove and then put back in. So it weighs a lot. Let’s just leave it at that. Assembly was a bit challenging, partly because the manual didn’t help me a whole lot. They have a really nice color manual. I mean, it looks beautiful. It’s got great pictures in here. We’ve got QR codes that take you to like, oh here’s how to do the handlebar, the battery, and the light.
But, well the light demo video was for a different bike and even a different light than the one that I have. And I didn’t really need the battery ’cause it was already in there. And then the rest of it, I just figured out. I’ve set up so many bikes at this point that it’s easy for me to figure out on my own. But if you’ve never set one up before, it’s gonna be pretty challenging. I would recommend having a shop help you out with that.
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Delfast TOP 3.0 Assembly
Talking a little bit more on the assembly, I ran into a couple of problems here and Delfast support was really great about getting back to me but they always… Support with various companies is always generally good for reviewers, but I still think that was a good sign. Now, putting on the front fender. Well, it was a bit difficult. Let me get the camera under here. So, there are those three bolts right there that hold it in. But I had to loosen this little housing right here. They’ve got this twin braking system on the front here.
I mean, these are fantastic brakes. This is the Tektro Auriga e-twin since they’re a linked break up there. This right here, this housing was mounted directly on the front of the fork there, but the fender wouldn’t fit. It was budding up against this thing and I couldn’t screw it in. So I had to take the screw out of this, lift it up, and then I was able to put the fender in place. The brakes still work fine. Everything’s good in that respect and the cables are held down there on the sides.
It does still look just kinda messy. I would like it if they could have mounted it up there a little bit higher. But that’s a minor gripe, I did just wanna point that out there. This is your front brake here, which is that e-twin linked brake. And then for the rear brake, this is the Tektro Auriga E-tune. And it’s basically the same brake, just one rotor in the back there instead of two. Dual-piston calipers are heavy-duty brakes. They do an awesome job stopping it. And you get even more stopping power in that because you have the regenerative braking.
If you’re going over about 10, 15 miles or so, then you hit the brakes and it automatically kicks in and Regen braking, which is handled by the motor and it will recharge the battery. It’s some pretty zesty region. You feel like you’re about to fly over the handlebars at first, ’cause you’re not expecting it. And they mention regenerative braking on their website, but it’s on the FAQ page, it doesn’t say it on the bike description page.
So, I had no idea the first time I hit the brakes on and about flew off the front. So that’s maybe something that could be added into the manual or the description and now you know if you do get one of these. One more note on the suspension fork up here, there’s no bump stops on here, which I’m surprised to see because of the size and weight of this. I mean, I’ve seen bump stops on a lot of smaller e-bikes. And if you don’t know what those are, you see them most commonly on motorcycles but a bump stop would sit on the side of the fork and it’s typically rubber or something soft so that when it bumps the frame, it won’t damage anything, right?
It’s got this nice little cushion bump stop. This does not have it. And so you can see the scratches right there already starting to happen a little bit just from when I’ve turned it to the side. So that would be a good opportunity for improvement to try to fit one of those in. It’s gonna be kind of interesting where to place it, probably just right up right about here so it’ll bump against that, keep anything from knocking together. There’s another sort of a spacing issue here with the charger. Let me turn this to the side. So this is the charge port for the battery.
And if you’ve got the front fender installed, there’s not a lot of room under here, right? Let me grab the charger so you can see what I mean. This is the charger, it’s massive. Its output is 84 volts, nine amp, which is good since you’ve got such a big battery, that way it won’t take days on end to charge. But it is pretty heavy, it’s about four and a half pounds.
So, it’s gonna be difficult to carry it with you in a bag, but hopefully, with the range, you’re not gonna need to worry about that. So here’s the end of the charging cable here. It’s good and sturdy and it will screw onto that charging port. So we can pop the cap off, connects in right here and then this will push down and screw on. So it locks into place nice and secure. It’s up high away from the cranks. So you don’t have to worry about it getting tangled down there but the fender is just like, it bonks right against it.
So, if the bike gets bumped or tipped over while it’s charging, you’re probably going to damage either the charger or the fender. So be careful about that. And you don’t have to have the front fender on there. It’s good coverage down here on the bottom so you can get it all covered with mud. Honestly, if I was keeping this, I would probably just take that fender off. So I could remount that brake cable housing and not have to worry about the charger.
Delfast TOP 3.0 Suspension
There’s that rear suspension here. It’s DNM as well back here, the RCP-2S mono coil suspension, fully adjustable compression, preload, rebound. I mean, fantastic stuff here. It rides so smooth. And then here’s the drive train. Gates carbon belt drive train. You’ve got a 48 tooth ring up on the front here and then a 22 tooth cog on the back. If you’re pedaling this, then you can get up to a right around 20 miles per hour before your cadence starts getting too fast and you’re not able to really keep up with it. So it’s a really interesting choice to drive the train here.
I’ve been giving this a lot of thought over the last few days. For a bike this big and heavy, you’re not gonna be pedaling it very much. And if you do have to peddle it at low speeds, hopefully, you have the pedal-assist ’cause peddling it without that, it’s a workout. I’ve tried it, it’s not pleasant. I thought why to put such an expensive premium belt drive train on here, but given the weight of the bike, if you had a derailleur set up with a standard bicycle chain, you’d probably break it. This thing’s so heavy. It’s just not gonna be a good fit, right?
So, this is stronger, more durable. I mean these carbon belts are crazy tough. So yeah, I get it, but it does definitely add some price and I have not used pedaling on it very much at all. It’s way more fun to ride on the throttle. And if you have to ride around town and pedal a lot, you probably want a different bike. But if you need to peddle it, you can. It’s got full size, 170 millimeters cranks on there. You can see the cadence sensor inside right there.
That inner ring is the sealed cadence sensor. It’s interesting… It’s a big ring and those are typically unsealed, but it does have plastic around, so the magnets are sealed inside. The cadence sensor for pedal assist, how should I say this? There’s a very high response time. So when you start pedaling, you can get four or five revolutions around on the cranks before the motor kicks in. And then when you stop pedaling, it’ll be maybe even two or three seconds before the motor cuts out. It is not tuned very aggressively compared to most electric bikes.
Does that matter here? No, to me, the human power drive train is more, I don’t know maybe just so they can say, hey, technically it is an e-bike. And yeah, also, it’s nice when you have an electric bike ’cause if you were riding this like a dirt bike and you ran out of battery and you just need to get home, you can use it. And you know, maybe you live in a city like this and the place you want to go riding is a little way out of town and you have to ride through town on the bike path to get there.
So, you can put it into Class II mode, pedal your way out there, and then once you get to the trail, you’ve saved most of your battery, so you can really hit it and have fun. I can see this being a really great fit just kind of depending on your use case and where you’re gonna want to ride. You’ve got a fairly standard saddle here, Seller Royale Gel. This is the freeway saddle. It’s comfy, I like it. You can’t get the seat up very high or very low. and some of that’s just me complaining because I’m tall so it doesn’t fit me very well.
But if you want to lower the saddle, you run into a different problem. Let me loosen this up. One thing I’m not a fan of while we’re here is that the light is mounted right here on the clamp for the seat post. So whenever you adjust the seat post, this kind of gets thrown out of alignment, you got to get it back. And then if you lower the seat post too low, it bumps right into your rear frame suspension there which obviously is not good. You don’t want to be damaging that.
So, you would want to pull it back up there a little bit. So you can’t lower it all the way down. You know, if you’re really short, that could potentially be a bit of a bummer. So let me get this, lift it back up here. Now, one nice thing here is that if you did get some kind of registration for this, this is basically like a license plate holder.
So, you could stick that right on the back there. Let’s talk a little bit more about the electronics and display up here. I couldn’t figure out how to adjust the brightness on the display. If you turn the lights on and off then it will kind of brighten. When you turn the lights on, it dims it a little bit, and then when you turn them off, it brightens a little bit, but it’s just not very bright. But there doesn’t seem to be any settings that you can get into on the display.
I tried a bunch of stuff to get into it. And you know, they have the switches on the bottom of the bike for changing your top speed and throttle versus pedal assist. So I think they decided to go that way. A bit more manual and then for controlling your lights, this is kind of your master light switch and you can turn the lights on regardless of whether the bike itself is powered on. And then once the lights are on, you can turn on your high beam, low beam. You’ve got your blinkers.
Let’s turn on the right one and we’ll see. We can show, so there’s that little indicator on this side of the mirror, and then on the outside, of course, they light up right there. So good to have those turn signals. You press in on this center button here to disable them. You’ve got the horn. It’s loud. And speaking of loud, this thing has an alarm system built into it. It’s when you turn the bike off, the alarm system activates and it’s motion-triggered.
So, you turn it off, you hear this really loud sort of a beep from the alarm system, and then if you start moving the bike around, it goes off and boy, it’s loud. I set it off on accident in my garage ’cause I didn’t realize it turned on automatically and about blew my eardrums out before I could find the remote to turn it off. Let me grab that. So, you can see the remote. This is it right here. So you can arm it or disarm the alarm. And then you can turn the bike on with that little lightning symbol there. And then the one over on the bottom left, the little bell, that basically will set off the alarm.
You use that to find the bike. I thought I could turn off the sound or something with that and set it off again. The alarm is super obnoxious. Just all the beeping and stuff that the bike does is incredibly obnoxious. I’m gonna show. We have it powered on right now, right? And so, when you turn it off, it’s gonna arm the alarm. So you get that little chirp. And if you wanna turn off that, then you can hit the unlock here and it’s going to do it two more times.
You guys can’t hear how loud it is since it’s the camera picking it up here but when you’re standing right next to it, it’s incredibly loud. And then when you turn the bike on, you get that again, super loud beep. It’s just a lot. And if you’re in a public place, I rode this into town to ride it around, rode it to a coffee shop, and stuff. And I love having the alarm because you can just park it and activate the alarm and not have to really worry about locking it up since it’s so heavy.
But it’s just so loud and obnoxious. People are sitting outside at tables and keep looking over like what the heck is that loud beeping noise? So I would like to be able to turn off the sound for when you power on and power off the bike so that it doesn’t make any chime and leave the sound on for the alarm obviously. But that is kind of a minor gripe and most people I think probably won’t care too much about it. Now that we’re back in the darkness of the garage, here’s a good look at that display here.
Delfast TOP 3.0 Motor Power
So, you’ve got your speedometer going around the outside there and it’ll show you what speed can be used for the regenerative brakes. The first part of the bar is blue and then it’ll switch over to pink. Once you’re going fast enough, you can then get some regen back. There’s the assist level on the right. You change that by just using the plus and minus over here. You can go all the way down to zero completely off, all the way up to five. And then there’s your battery readout right up there. So it’s a pretty accurate infographic.
It slowly goes down and it’ll go back up as you can regen. So it can be a little bit hard to gauge just how much range you have left. But if you’ve got it down in pedal-assist mode, Class II ish speeds, then you can get a long way on it. There’s your trip and odometer right there. And so you can press the M button over on the control pad there and that’ll change your top one, sorry.
So, press M for your speed stuff. Now we’re on average speed, and then you can go over to maximum speed, 47.1 miles per hour, and then real-time speed. So if you press the power button on the top, it’ll change your trip and odometer right down there. So you can see there is an odometer 26 miles on it. There’s the time that it’s been powered on here. There’s you, I think that’s the trip timer for the ride home, 6.2 miles today, and then back out to the odometer.
And then there’s your motor power right there. It will show how many watts the motor is putting out and you got a clock right down there. And as I mentioned, I’m not sure how to get into the settings on here. I’m going to ask Delfast if I can get into those settings and configure anything and I’ll update this and put some instructions back in the written review.
So, we’re gonna do a little bit of riding just on the city streets here first. I want to demo the pedal assist and what the pedaling experience is like just so you can get a feel for that. And then we’re going to ride on some trails out this way. I found some trails that not a lot of people on them, especially this time of day so that we can let it out a little bit and see what it can do, right? How it’s meant to be, a little bit more dirt bike style.
All right. It is powered on. I can’t even see the display ’cause I’ve got polarized sunglasses on. If I take them off, I can see them well enough during the day, but in this direct sunlight, a little bit more brightness would go a long way. So I’ve got it in level or like mode two, which is Class II basically, for riding in the US. So I’ve got in pedal-assist mode.
I should be able to get up to 20 miles per hour. I’ve got it all the way up in pedal assist level five. So we’ll get the most out of it. And so starting out, it’s pretty difficult to get started, ’cause it’s heavy, especially with one hand. So there’s one, two, three cycles around, there we go. So, you gotta do a few cycles to get it going, but once you get moving, it’s a pretty comfy pedaling experience. You don’t feel the weight of the bike much at all. We’re getting on up to about 15 miles an hour right now.
Alternate Hunting eBike
Delfast TOP 3.0 Test Ride
Review Delfast TOP 3.0 – So, I’ve got a pretty brisk pedal cadence going. So, you’d be able to when you have it in Class II mode like this, you’d be able to maintain 15 to 20 miles per hour pretty easily. You wouldn’t have to be doing a whole lot of work, and it’d be great for getting through town to the place you want to ride or if you’re using it for a little bit of commuting here and there between having fun with it on the weekends. Here, you can hear that a delay from the cadence sensor system here.
And it’s interesting, it’s just that first time getting started that has the most noticeable delay. Let’s get turned around here. Well, once you get a little bit of speed going, it’ll kick in more quickly but when we’re going slow like this, one, two, there we go.
So, once you’re up in speed, it’s fairly responsive. That may just be a safety thing so that when you’re at those lower speeds it’s not kicking in too quickly, especially if you’ve got it up at a fairly high level. So, it’s honestly, if this was a taller bike, a bit bigger to fit my height, this would actually be a pretty comfortable riding experience. And the belt drive system, just incredibly smooth, and all things considered, it does feel pretty comfy.
Just like a little bit of a forward riding position here, feels very stable. Can no hands it without a problem. So presumably when they set the world record for range on this getting over 200 miles, they probably had it down in Class I or II mode like this. Yeah, you could get a long way on this if you need it to. I wanna see if I can get… You have to begin going fast enough to kick in the regenerative braking. I’m gonna pedal on up here, we’re up at about a 16, 17, let’s see.
Yeah, I felt it a little bit. When you’re at lower speeds, it just feels like regular brakes and if you get up, definitely once you get up over 20 or so, as soon as you squeeze those levers. it really kicks in. One downside to having the switches for speed and pedal assist and everything on the bottom under here is that if you wanna switch that stuff, you have to stop, and you kind of get off of the bike to do it. You could feel back there, just from muscle memory and knowing where they are at some points, but not a super convenient location for it, but it’s all right.
So, what I’m doing now is I switched it. So we’re no longer in pedal-assist mode, we’re now in throttled mode. So we’re gonna hit up this little trail here and I do still have it in level five for the assist level. So whether you’re in pedal-assist or throttle, you can change that from one to five to just control how much you’re getting from the motor. So we are still in Class II, which limits us to 20 miles per hour.
And you can see it’s reasonably zippy on the throttle here in Class II mode. It does seem to top out right around 15 miles or so, 15 miles per hour. It says it’s supposed to be able to get up to 20 but that has not been my experience. It might just depend on your riding conditions, but on this dirt trail, it feels incredibly smooth. Suspension does such an awesome job, even going off the trail, going over all kinds of bumps, no problem. Now to put on my chest mount and come back through here.
The 182 Newton meters of torque is such a treat. This thing can handle any hill you throw at it. You’re not even going to have to pedal, help up if you don’t want to. All right, so I am going to switch it over to my chest mount and we’re gonna unlock it here. It’s like a BMX sort of a dirt bike track right back here. And I see, it’s like one person out there on a mountain bike but not a whole lot of people out here. Usually, during the day during school, it’s fairly empty.
So, I fell, it’d be a good chance to get all the riding in, so we can just show you what it can do top speed-wise. So, we have it on the throttle and then we’re gonna flip it over to II on the left switch which will unlock the speedfully. I’m gonna switch over to the chest mount and see on the other side. So, I’ve got it fully unlocked.
We have it all the way up there in level five. and it is on throttle mode instead of pedal assist. So yeah, I mean, as soon as we hit the throttle, it just takes off. So, we can avoid at least some of the mud here. So, yeah, this is the kind of place that this feels more at home, right? Little more dirt bike, mountain bike kind of thing. Got to adjust my seat here ’cause it’s a little bit lose.
We’ll go back up this hill, just on the throttle here. So you can see what I mean by the power of this thing. I mean, it just goes. Feels great, so stable. It’s nice to have the weight at times just ’cause it does feel a lot more stable. And some of these bumps and hills. I’m sure you guys can tell, but I don’t do a lot of riding like this. A little bit out of my element here but it is a blast I can tell you that much. You can hear quite a bit of rattling coming from upfront just from the fender right up there.
It is a plastic fender, which that’s kind of one of the hallmarks of plastic fenders, that they do rattle quite a bit, but minor just a little bit of noise. Gonna do a little loop on the road here, just to kind of demo the speed potential for ya. I’m gonna keep it to a minimum, but yeah, let’s give it a try. (bike motor revving) We hit 47 miles per hour there, so plenty of speed.
We’ll do a cold start here again just to show the acceleration. Of course like any electric vehicle, with the full battery, you’re gonna get a lot better acceleration and we’re basically at full here, aside from a little bit of riding we’ve been doing around here. For a hub motor, I’m amazed at the acceleration. Hub motors, you don’t get any kind of mechanical advantage or anything, so they’re not as good as say like a mid-drive motor but this one’s still, it’s just got so much power.
And 25, it just zooms up there. The acceleration does pick up as you get faster too which is typical for hub motors. Off the bat, acceleration is gonna be a bit lower, and then once you get a little bit of speed going, they peak really high. So once you’re up around 20 miles per hour, and so if you hit the throttle, you can get a real nice mid-speed kick, really take off.
The back on that same trail but this time throttle so you can pan chest mount, have a little bit more fun with it. (bike motor revving) Suspension just does such a great job. (bike motor revving) Very good traction from the tires out here too. Feels incredibly stable and smooth. Of course, curbs are no problem at all, at least jumping down.
Jumping up, a little bit harder, just from the weight. So, I’m just trying to pedal it right now without any pedal assist active. and yeah, this would be a terrible thing if you had to pedal it home with absolutely no battery left. So you’d wanna make sure you keep an eye on that so you don’t get stranded somewhere. Going to do a little bit more with the pedal assist.
So, when I first tried the pedal assist, I was kinda bummed with it. It seemed like it wasn’t very powerful at all. I was only getting up to 10 miles an hour. So, even when I had it in Class II mode, you’re supposed to limit it to 20 miles per hour. But then I found out you just have to make sure you turn up the assist level all the way up on the display here.
So, I’m gonna bump that all the way up to level five, turn around here. Ah, so you do get to pedal a few times around here to get it to kick in. There we go. So, in Class II mode and level five-assist, I’ve found it gets to right about 15 miles per hour pretty comfortably. That’s where we’re at right now, 14, 15. You can cruise here and it feels pretty good. I’m not putting very much effort into it. So, you could even ride across town like this if you had to commute or something like that.
It’d be pretty easy to get the luggage cases back there and load them up. So it’s not very fast, but it’s fast enough. If you want it to get a little bit more zip out of it, then what you can do, just come back here. I do wish they had these switches somewhere else so you didn’t have to get off to do this. But I’m gonna switch it up to unlocked speed. It’s still in pedal-assist only mode.
So, right now it’s in level five. If we were to start pedaling in this mode, you wouldn’t want to ride it like this, it’s way too powerful. But if you do, you start pedaling, get a few revolutions in, and then, wow, it kicks in full throttle and you just take off. But you know, pretty soon you can’t keep up with pedaling. It’s way too fast for what we’re doing here.
So, I’m gonna drop that down to a, let’s try a two, level two on the pedal assist. That’s more like it. It feels very similar to how we had before. Just enough, just enough help to maintain now around 15 or so. If we bumped it up to, let’s say bumped it up to three. Okay, three is too powerful. So it’s just level two is right about where it’s at, but to go 20 miles an hour, if you look at my knees here, I’m pumping crazy. I’ve got a really high cadence.
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Final Words Review Delfast TOP 3.0
Review Delfast TOP 3.0 – So, that’s starting to get pretty uncomfortable for me. In terms of ride comfort, the suspension is fantastic. The seating position is decent. It’s right in between forward and upright. So all things considered, it does feel pretty good as far as pedaling goes. As long as you’ve got a battery to compensate for the weight of the bike, so that you’re not having to put that much effort into it, then yeah, you could ride this around like a bike in between having fun off-roading adventures with it, nice and stable, easy to no hands it, which makes sense just from the frame and the sheer weight of it.
And of course, you’re having all of the lights, the mirrors, brights and the turn signals, horn, all of that. Definitely a plus if you are gonna be riding it around in town or in the city. Great for safety, making sure that people can see you and hear you coming. All right guys, that’s a wrap for the Delfast TOP 3.0.
I can say with confidence that this is the most fun e-bike that I’ve ridden as well as the heaviest that is for damn sure.
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