A Little Help From Our Friends

There’s a bit of tension when you think of an eBike. The very thought can bring to mind images of bikes you would not normally associate with performance, grace. We might say, design. And worse, most eBikes ask the frame to swallow a battery: to fatten its tubes, hide a brick in the down tube, and carry the weight of being electric everywhere it goes — even on the days you'd happily ride unassisted. So we were naturally a little wary of the whole area - until our friend Herman asked for a Pegoretti with a little lift. Which led us to MAHLE. And then we were rolling.

The new Pegoretti — not so much a new model, but an option — retains its clean silhouette. The MAHLE XS battery looks like a water bottle (albeit one sized for longer days) and lifts off when you don't want it. The motor lives in the rear hub, where the work happens. Everything else stays a bicycle.

We had been circling the idea of making a Pegoretti with a little lift for a few years. At shows and events across Europe, we kept finding ourselves in front of these compact electric systems, and the modularity of the work impressed us. But it was an existing client, Herman, and the design and performance of MAHLE's XS system that helped pull the idea out of the work drawer.

Herman had been a friend of Dario and the Bottega for many years. In espresso time, think hundreds of cups. He and his wife wanted to travel, to put their bikes on the car and go abroad. But the electric bikes they had were too heavy. What they wanted was something that still felt and moved like a high-performance bike, light in the hand, with the assistance there only when they reached for it. And they wanted it in time for their next vacation. As Cristina put it, "Herman told us, 'This is what we want, and we want it from you!'"

It was, Pietro will tell you, a real challenge. The thing that made it possible was trust. Building your very first of anything for a paying customer is a risk; building it for two is a bigger one. But Herman asked to be prototype number one — he and his wife both. So Pietro was less concerned. If it was completely wrong, we knew we had their support. In truth, Pietro was excited about the project and the idea of melding a bespoke bike with the very latest advancements in the e-field. A frame made by eye, by hand, drawn before the blue flame, meeting a system light and modular enough not to argue with it.

The bike we built our working concept around is, as shown, an integrated Duende Rock & Roll — the first one we have built with internal cables, and the first to accept the MAHLE system. To the casual observer, it's a Pegoretti, but there are some differences, like the fuller 3D-printed dropouts designed to face the MAHLE hub. However, pull the wheel, drop a standard one in, and these same dropouts hold the wheel like a straight muscle bike — albeit one with a T47 bottom bracket, big enough to hold some of the wiring within.

The XS Smart Controller mounts on the outside of the frame, just below the battery bracket. Because it does, a compatible Pegoretti with the MAHLE system onboard can live two lives — muscle or electric — with the motor and eX1 battery connecting directly to that controller. There's no internal battery to build a frame around, nothing buried in the tubes, nothing to compromise. The frame is made the way we'd make any integrated, disc Pegoretti. The electric part simply arrives and just as easily leaves. And that suits us down to the ground. The XS system is small and tidy enough to co-exist.

THE RANGE FINDER

Assistance is range — in every sense. The Duende Rock & Roll is an all-surface bike to begin with: tarmac, gravel, the road that turns to track and back again. Give the cockpit a squeeze, and you might need another map. From turning the commute that was too long into one you can ride every day, to keeping the wheel of your club mates through the early season while your legs catch up, to coming back from injury without going back to square one, all with the freedom to leave the battery at home on the days you want the bike to fight back — riding with an element of assistance is a far more nuanced road than may first appear. A Pegoretti has always been built to be ridden hard and often, no matter how pretty it might be. The XS option only widens the circumstances in which that's true.

If you'd like to talk about a Pegoretti with the option of a little lift, come and find us in Verona.