Mountain Bike or Motorcycle? – Bonnell 775 MX Review – National Powersports Distributors
This is the new Bonell 775 MX. This is basically a downhill mountain bike with a motor. If for any of you that are into mountain bikes or into dirt bikes and motorcycles, if you’re like me, the first time you ever got an ebike, you couldn’t help but thinking, “Wow, it would be pretty sick if I had a downhill mountain bike that had a throttle. That would be like the best of both worlds.” Well, Banell has done exactly that. So, it’s a really interesting mix of bicycle like thinking but with a motor. So, it feels like a motorcycle. So, for those of you that have um like a Sauron lightbe or e-ide, this is sort of a category right between one of those small motorcycles and a downhill bike. So, uh it’s getting confusing as to what to buy. If you want an ebike, you can get a ebicycle. Uh, and then you can get e- motorcycles, things of that sort. But this is a class 3 ebicycle. So that means it it’s categorized as a ebicycle, but since it has a throttle and goes more than 20 miles an hour, it is categorized as a class 3. Now, I’m not going to get in this video to the the ramifications of where to ride this. Let’s just talk about the bike and how much fun it is. I have it right now in race mode and I’m on level two. Uh right now I’m just pedaling. You can see just light easy pedaling. It’s got tons of motor when you’re pedaling. Um of course this is the magic. That’s the magic right there. The throttle. Um so I’m just heading over towards a fun trail. Just pedaling. Just trying to conserve on battery a little bit. Uh last time I was here out here, I rode on uh level one in race mode and I found the battery life lasted pretty good. So that’s probably what I’m going to do again today. I’ll put it down on one. All right, so let’s drop down and have some fun. Ah, the brakes on this thing are so good. Um, this is this section that Doug always hates. It was pretty techy out here in bow. I’m on level one again, the the lowest power settings in race mode. Um, and I found for riding single track, it’s so good. Um, the suspension on this bike needs special mention. Uh because like especially in this stuff like this, this chunky, crazy, rocky stuff, this suspension is so good. Let’s go this way. So, this is normally a downhill that uh comes ripping down. And the nice thing about this bike is it makes everything a downhill. You look at like this is steep. Again, I’m in the the uh the lowest power setting, and I’m goofing around right now. I’m not trying to go fast, but you can see it has plenty of power to uh so much fun. So, all right, let’s open this up a little bit. This is so sick. Wow, look at this. Boom. That’s new out here. So sick. It’s so much faster than you would normally ride these trails. Boom. Oh my god, it’s so much fun. Okay, I’m going to take you on one of my favorite local downhills on the bike. Usually takes a couple minutes to pedal over there. But if we put this thing on three and just rip through it car send mode. Jesus. So sick. All right. Wide open. All right. We’re about to go drop in. Yo, whoa. Don’t normally go this fast. Pull the power back to one because I don’t don’t need it. Okay, here’s where the suspension on this thing is so good. There’s a super sharp right hand coming up. If you don’t know what’s there, you can really get in trouble right here. Right across my neck. How fun. Rocks. The sickest suspension just goes through them. This is so crazy. Boom. God, that’s not that’s a lot faster than I usually go in there on my bike. Here comes another gnarly section. And if you get this wrong, you’re off the side over here. Boom. Saw a wolf one day or coyote came right across the trail right in front of me here in the winter on my fat bike and the woods trail. Way faster than should. This is so sick. You got to be careful. You have to act way faster than on a mountain bike. Boom. I try to send that on my bike, but I never have enough speed. Not a problem. Now, you hear the suspension just eating everything up. So sick. It’s sticky. rocks for lunch. Oh, that was a good hit. Wide bars. All right. sections. Here we go. Yes. [Applause] Boom. Nothing to say. It’s just fun. That was fast, too. God tacky. So, let’s go over a couple components on this bike and talk a little bit about it. The bike is set up uh with a mullet wheel setup or an MX wheel setup. That’s a 27.5 in the rear and a 29 in the front. Bike comes with Sunour suspension, which I was not familiar with at all. Um, I’m obviously familiar with the Fox suspension and rock shock suspension, but when I found out that these bikes had Sunour, I thought, “Okay, I’ll throw my Fox 40 on it right when I get it.” But frankly, I’ve been blown away at how good this suspension is. This feels like a fullbore downhill bike, and all I’ve done is just play with the spring rate and the sag, and it’s been amazing. It’s been actually the the biggest surprise of the whole bike. suspension. Incredible. We move up a little bit. We’ve got uh a really trick throttle. It doesn’t even look like a throttle. It’s a CNC aluminum throttle. Uh so it’s slim design. Uh uses regular size grip so it feels just like a normal mountain bike. Uh the brakes are Mura hydraulic uh four pistons and they’re incredible. The the brakes are really really good. like I’m going to throw a set of these onto my Suriron because they just have incredible power and and feel. Great brakes. Um bike has a dropper post obviously for those of you who are not bicyclists only motorcycle. That’s so you can drop the seat and get out of your way on descent so you can get further over the rear rear of the bike. Um couple interesting things. There’s no derailer on this bike. On the MX, the other model, the AM does have gears. This bike is designed primarily sort of to do more motorcycleyy things. So, it has a single gear and you can actually get different sprockets, different size sprockets. So, if you want a higher top speed, uh you can get a uh a smaller sprocket and if you want more acceleration, you get a larger sprocket. As it sits with the recent update they did to the firmware, the bike will do about 38 39 miles an hour with the stock sprocket. Uh, and when you think about that, you know, almost 40 miles an hour through the woods, it’s a it’s a pretty exhilarating experience. It’s pretty awesome. Uh, the the pedals that come on the bike are pretty good. I thought I’d have to throw a good set of pedals on the bike, but no, these have good studs. Uh, if you ride flats and you wear these kind of shoes, these pedals work great. You won’t even have to put on a set of your mountain bike ones. Um, this one was their first out of their first batch, their pre-production bikes. Had a couple little things that uh that I had to do. The spokes came loose on the rear wheel and from what they’ve told me, they now have uh different spokes. I don’t know if they’re double butted or larger or what they did, but they were aware of that issue and that’s been addressed. Um, besides that, uh, it’s been really easy to maintain. You have a dual chain system here. This is regular mountain bike chain. And then you have the motor chain here. It’s really easy to tension when this chain gets too loose. There’s a 3mm Allen bolt under here. You can just tighten up and keep that in right tension. Um the battery isn’t hot swappable. It removes with a couple bolts. Uh and one of the things that I’m going to be doing very shortly is doing a range test of this bike. and we want to compare it to the lightbe, a stock 25 lightb to see like what sort of battery life can you expect out of this. I’ve used it in a lot of different scenarios and I can tell you if you put it in the full power mode in mode three, the absolute full power, everything you get, you will eat this battery up pretty damn quick. You’ll probably have some of the most fun you’ve ever had in your life doing it, but it will drain the battery pretty quick. Um, couple days ago I took it out to some single track, local single track, and I used it on race mode in the lightest setting in setting one, and I got 18 miles out of it, and I still had 30% of the battery left. I found that was a real sweet spot. Um, but just like a Suriron, uh, if you ride it in areas that are sandy or have lots of hills and you’re using a lot of throttle, you’ll find that it it eats the battery up uh, a lot quicker, just like any electric bike. So, we’re hoping to do a series of videos on this bike. We will be carrying these in stock. They’re on their way. We should have them hopefully within a week or two. Um, we’ll do some uh some shooting and hopefully I’ll get a range test very soon so you can see like what’s real life usage on this battery. But if you have any questions, we’ve got them coming into the shop into National Powersports. You can give us a call at 603-410-4120 or you can check them out online at nationalpowersports.net. Thanks. [Music]
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00:00 – Intro
01:27 – POV Ride
03:57 – Full Downhill Run
08:08 – Component Breakdown
