Pinnacle, the bike brand of Evans Cycles, are dipping their toe into the e-bike waters this year, and they’ve decided to start with a city bike based on their popular Lithium hybrid. There are men’s and women’s sizes available but both use the same diamond frame design and 650B wheel size.
Finished in a matt blue poder coat with full-length colour-matched mudguards, the Lithium Ion is a very nice-looking machine and practical for city riding. There’s no suspension front or rear; Pinnacle have instead gone for a bigger tyre, the excellent Schwalbe Big Ben with a 50mm carcass to take the sting out of neglected city streets. That’s as big as you’ll fit under the mudguards but there’s room for a bigger mountain bike tyre if you remove them.
The Lithium Ion is designed to be an all-purpose machine, and it’s well supplied with mounts for fitting front and rear racks as well as the supplied mudguards. The chainstay also has a standard kickstand mount, although it’s odd that Pinnacle don’t provide one: it’s pretty much the only city bike we’ve ever had that doesn’t come with a kickstand as part of the package. You don’t get lights plumbed into the electrics here either, so you’ll need to add your own after dark.
Shimano’s STEPS motor is well-established now as a reliable alternative to the more abundant Bosch system. You get 50Nm of extra push from the mid motor and a 400Wh battery that will give a claimed 100km of range, although in normal use it’s somewhere over half that. Either way, plenty for most people’s day-to-day city riding: if your commute is near the 5-mile average you’ll probably only need to charge the Pinnacle twice a week. The Lithium Ion uses the smaller of the two Shimano displays.
Pinnacle have chose a 10-speed derailleur transmission for the Lithium Ion, again from Shimano. You get an SLX rear mech with a Deore Rapidfire shifter, and the 11-36T cassette gives a good spread of gears for city and urban riding. The tyres we’ve covered: they’re running on decent city wheels with Alex FR-30 rims and Novatec disc hubs. The brakes are Shimano’s M446 hydraulic discs, with a 180mm rotor at the front for plenty of stopping power.
Aside from the frame sizing and geometry (we have a small women’s frame in for testing) the only difference between the men’s and women’s spec is the saddle. We’ll be handing it over for testing on the mean streets of Bath (they’re not that mean really) and we’ll report back on how it fares as a city workhorse.
