Amflow TL Carbon review – the Avinox M2 mid-motor is quite something

The Amflow TL Carbon is a fun bike with a powerful Avinox motor and a big range. It’s comfy and well-specced, and at £3,199 it’s a bargain. It sizes up small, and you can’t lock out the suspension on the tarmac, but I’m nitpicking: this is an exceptional touring e-bike and easy to recommend.

Amflow TL Carbon – the build

The TL Carbon came in a well-organised box with a bit of work to do to get it fully built. I had to fit the stem and bars (and one brake lever), assemble the front mudguard, add the kickstand, the front wheel and the pedals.

The instructions are clear and easy to follow, but you do get a slightly baffling array of extra bits that you don’t need and aren’t mentioned.

The front light is plumbed in and just needs to be fitted to its mount. The rear, oddly, is just a rechargeable battery unit and it came attached to a bracket that wouldn’t fit on either the rear rack or the mudguard. It wasn’t in the instructions either. It has mounting points that match with two holes on the underside of the rack and by bending the bracket to a right angle it worked fine in that position, but I’m not sure where it’s supposed to actually fit as supplied. Maybe on the saddle rails?

Sizing is a bit odd. I’m riding an L/XL bike, which is the bigger of the two sizes, and it isn’t very big.

The dropper seatpost comes set right into the frame, and the instructions suggest that you’re to use the dropper travel to set the seatpost height, but even at full extension it wasn’t high enough for me: not even close. There’s a fair bit of cable to the dropper and I’ve managed to fiddle enough through the frame to raise the saddle to a height I’m happy with, but the bike feels pretty short, even with the longer stem (that was in the box) swapped in.

So if you’re a big rider like me (1.9m) then you might find it a bit small. On the plus side, the smaller frame will probably accommodate petite riders well. The bike’s not a low-step, but the frame is pretty compact, so it’s fairly easy to get on and off. Plus you can drop the seatpost at the lights to get both feet flat on the ground.

Gearing is the new Avinox SmoothShift electronic system which has been developed in collaboration with TRP. The system controls engine torque during gear changes, so you don’t mash your chain when you’re changing under load. With 1,110W of power available, this is a welcome addition.

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Shifts from the handlebar remote are pretty crisp and fast, and you don’t notice the motor power slacking off when you’re changing gear. There was the odd ghost shift in higher power modes, which suggests that there’s enough give in the rear triangle to affect the chainline a bit when the motor’s really working.

The gear remote also controls the front light, which has a high and a dipped beam – holding the downshift switches between the two. The high beam is plenty for genuine off-roading at night, and the dipped beam is great on roads where it’s cut off to reduce dazzle. It’s a really good light.

Braking is taken care of by four-piston Tektro TKD173 callipers acting on 180mm rotors and the brakes are really good too. You get dinky two-finger levers, but that’s all you’ll need.

Amflow TL Carbon – the motor

You can’t really start anywhere with this bike except the motor. DJI’s Avinox M2 is quite something.

It’s an EU-spec motor which makes this a standard pedelec. Nominally, the motor is rated at 250W continuous power output and the cut off is at 25km/h, like you’d expect. With 125Nm of torque though, and 1,100W maximum output, you’ll spend the vast majority of your time at or around that cut-off speed.

On my benchmark commuting hill (1.5km at 5%, with a 12% corner) I only really dropped below 25km/h on the very steepest bit, and to be honest I could have easily kept it up if I wanted to. There are in fact very few hills round here where maximum assistance speed is out of reach: this bike is rapid.

It’s not rapid on the road in a way that feels overpowered or dangerous. You just get up to cruising speed quicker and it’s easier to stay there. However, it does raise questions about what the EU standard is actually measuring, because the M2 seems to me to be putting out well north of 250W in Turbo mode for basically as long as the battery lasts.

Where the line falls between this EN15194-compliant motor and motors that are classified as L1e-A (1kW maximum continuous rated power, 25km/h max speed) always seems a little grey to me. That latter classification would make it technically equivalent to a moped, with all that entails: motorbike helmet, insurance, type approval, et cetera. But this, legally, is just a bike like any other compliant bike.

I put a few people on it – people that are and aren’t used to e-bikes – and the response was some laughs, the odd scream, and some well-chosen swears. It’s punchy alright.

Mostly that power is handled really well, but it starts to feel choppy when you approach the assistance limit in the high modes, especially when you’re stood up. The motor accelerates you so quickly that the sudden lack of it can pitch you forwards. The lack of a lock-out on the fork doesn’t help. It’s less of an issue sat down, but still noticeable.

Off-road you need to be careful with all that power. If you’re attempting a steep and rocky climb in the highest assistance modes, you have to be wary not to let the bike get away from you. If it kicks up off a rock or root at the front, it’s easy to wheelie the bike out from under you, and it happened to me a couple of times. Should that happen, the bike’s not insubstantial 23kg weight suddenly becomes very noticeable (when most of the time it’s not an issue).

I tended to stay in Trail or Auto mode for more technical terrain unless I felt I really needed the power of the top settings. The response is nice and progressive, and you can give yourself a boost by dropping a gear and spinning the pedals a bit quicker as this gets you an instant uptick from the motor.

Amflow TL Carbon – the ride

The suspension is a lot better than I’d expect at this price. Both the Fox AWL front fork and the Fox Float rear shock lack a lockout, but they’re smooth in operation and they’re tunable both for rider weight (through air pressure) and for rebound damping, so you can set them up to suit your riding.

I went for a bit more air in both and a fairly slow rebound so that they were less bouncy on the tarmac, and the bike was still pretty responsive off-road on the more technical stuff.

The fork can be a bit wallowy, especially if you’re standing up, but really both units are good, and they’re well-matched. 120mm/105mm of travel front and rear isn’t loads, but realistically for the expected uses of a bike like this, it’s plenty. I’ve taken it down the local trails that I’m normally tiptoeing down on a gravel bike and the TL Carbon is a lot of fun even on quite technical stuff.

Let’s be honest though, that’s not really what this bike is aimed at. It’s more of a comfy tourer. The big Maxxis off-road tyres are overkill for most people, and they’re also noisy and a bit draggy on tarmac. I swapped them out for the IRC Boken Plus tyres that I reviewed a few years back and which were still in the shed, and for most use cases – town riding, touring, some light trails – they’re a much better choice.

The bike isn’t set up tubeless out of the box and although it looks like the rim tape would be amenable to a tubeless setup, I found it needed an extra wrap of tape to seal effectively. Again, this is not really an issue. The motor more than compensates for the slow tyres, but you’ll extend your range a fair bit with something faster rolling if you’re not planning to head up or down anything testing.

The screen on the Avinox system is sunk into the top tube, where it’s visible but not really in your line of sight. It’s not as good as an out-front display, but all the information is there if you want to see it. It’s a touchscreen and gives you access to a wealth of settings, including the ability to tweak the power modes to suit your needs.

You can also pair the bike with the Avinox smartphone app for more options, over-the-air updates, and the ability to navigate routes.

You can upload a GPX file to the phone app, or pair with a Komoot account, and transfer routes to the bike, where you’ll get a line to follow on the screen and turn-by-turn directions. It’s usable. I navigated solely using the screen to a place I wasn’t familiar with, with only one wrong turn: the wrong road at a fork, which wasn’t that obvious. If you leave the route there’s no real re-routing, just a red line to follow (if you can) to get back to the green one. It’s not a highlight of the system but if you have no other navigation options then it could be useful.

Amflow TL Carbon – range

An 800Wh battery is a significant unit, and if you’re using the assistance modes wisely you should get a good range out of the TL Carbon. The flipside of that coin is that with 1,100W of peak power available, it’s pretty easy to run down if you’re booting around in Turbo the whole time.

For testing, I completed a 35km loop of Bath (50/50 road and trail, with 750m of climbing) and deliberately used high assistance modes most of the time, and that sucked up about 70% of the battery. I’m a big lad, and that was an objectively hard loop, so really 50km of range is the minimum you should expect. On easier terrain with less assistance, you should be able to easily double that.

The longest ride I’ve completed on the TL Carbon is 80km with 800m climbing. I arrived back at the ranch with about 20% of the battery left, and that was me making minimal effort to eke out the range and smashing up the hills in Turbo on the way home when there was no danger of running out of juice.

If you do run low then the battery is removable, so you could bring it into a cafe mid ride and ask nicely for some power. The 4A charger is pretty efficient and took me from 15% to full in about 5hrs. It does get quite hot though.

Amflow states the ‘standard range’ as 172km. As usual, all the best hitting that. If the 800Wh capacity isn’t enough for you then the TL Carbon is compatible with the 480Wh Avinox range extender external battery. 1,280Wh is a lot of capacity.

Point-to-point touring then is a realistic option, taking the charger with you and replenishing the battery at overnight stops. The power available means lugging large loads is not an issue. The bike is rated to 200kg maximum load (rider + cargo) with a 27kg limit on the rear rack and 20kg on the front mounting points in the head tube. You could easily tow a trailer too, if you wanted. Maximum rider weight is 125kg.

Amflow TL Carbon – value and overall

In terms of value, this bike is more or less in a class of its own, so far as I can see. Most bike-savvy people I asked to guess how much it would cost put it at five grand or more. To get a carbon frame, the Avinox motor, a huge 800Wh battery, dual Fox suspension, electronic gearing and full city spec for £3,199 is, frankly, extraordinary. This is so much bike for the money.

There’s nothing about it that suggests any corners cut, save for the decision not to plumb in the rear light. If I compare it to the Moustache Xroad 4 I’m also reviewing – a really good bike itself – that has a rigid alloy frame, a less powerful motor, a less capable fork, cheaper gearing and a smaller battery, and it costs £200 more.

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The Avinox motors are pretty new, and we don’t know as much about the longevity of them versus the more established systems. The service and warranty networks also aren’t as built out. DJI isn’t a fly-by-night player though. This is a motor from a big company, and I don’t have any specific concerns. The current feeling seems to be that the Avinox units are pretty reliable.

All told, as a do-it-all leisure and touring bike, it’s hard to see how the Amflow TL Carbon can be beaten right now. You could happily just boot round town on it all the time, and you could also stick some panniers on it and head off into the wilds – not too far, but far enough. It’s capable over some fairly technical terrain and the motor is an absolute gem.

If you’ve got three grand or so to chuck at an e-bike for mixed adventures then right now this would be top of my list, by quite a margin.