Tenways CGO Compact

The Tenways CGO Compact is a really likeable single-speed city bike with a good motor system and an enjoyable ride. It’s nicely put together and an ideal choice for anyone who’s short of storage space at either end of a commute… but not so short that a folding bike would make more sense.

This is a 20in-wheeled compact bike with an aluminium frame and fork. It’s designed for the city: you get full mudguards, a kickstand, a front running light in the head tube, a proper light for when it’s darker, and a rear carrier with the MIK HD system, which means a whole range of bags and child seats are click-and-go.

The rack also has an integrated rear light. One of my few gripes is that this, like the head tube light, should be a running light: on all the time. As it is, it only comes on when you turn on the big light at the front.

The addition of bottle bosses on either side of the head tube is a nice touch. It gives you an extra mounting point for water or anything else that uses the same bolt spacing, like a universal cage.

The CGO uses the company’s C9 hub motor which is rated at 45Nm, and it’s driven by a Gates CDX carbon belt; the driveside seatstay has a removable section for fitting a new belt, as it doesn’t split like a chain.

The 500Wh battery is in the down tube but it’s removable, not integrated, so you can charge the battery away from the bike if you need to.

The small remote control on the handlebars gives you access to five levels of motor assistance, and in the middle there’s a nice, clear colour TFT display which gives you all the basic information you want: colour-coded assist level, a bar showing how much the motor is doing, speed, five-segment battery state (although a more granular percentage would have been nice) and whether the lights are on.

That’s not all it’ll do. You can pair the CGO Compact with the Tenways app and it’ll give you turn-by-turn navigation on the display to your destination.

The actual execution of this when you’re navigating is very good. It uses Google Maps for routing and you get nice clear turn instructions and distances, and an estimated time of arrival.

Actually getting a route into the app is harder: you can’t just click on the map in the app, or enter an address, and hit go. You need to upload a route file of some description and have it loaded before you start, which makes it less useful for the kind of navigation you’re realistically likely to be doing on a bike like this. I did manage to do it out and about by creating a route using Komoot, downloading the GPX to my phone, and uploading that into the Tenways app, but really you just want to tap and go.

I’d describe the ride of the CGO Compact as enjoyable. The steering is on the lively side of neutral, which makes it fun when you’re darting through town, but also means it requires a bit more concentration than some bikes. For a compact bike, the weight balance is good. It doesn’t want to flip out from under you when you’re putting the power down on an uphill slope, but at the same time the riding position is upright, giving you good visibility in traffic.

This is a single-speed bike, and Bath isn’t really that single-speed-friendly as cities go. My commute home from the office is 130m of climbing over about 4km, and gets just into double-digit percentages on the hard bits.

The CGO Compact didn’t struggle though. You have to add a bit of leg power on the steepest bits where you’re moving more slowly, but even in a recent heatwave, I could easily get up from the city centre without collapsing in a heap. Hub motor assistance falls away more than with a mid motor when you slow down because you can’t use your gears to keep the motor speed high. That allows a mid motor to output more power at slow speeds, and also tends to make it more efficient.

> Hub motor v mid motor? What’s the difference? (+ video)

That being said, the CGO Compact is a perfectly workable bike even around a hilly city like Bath. I wouldn’t choose it to regularly lug a child or a big weekly shop up and down Bath’s many hills – though it would be great for that somewhere flatter – but for general commuting duties and urban errands it’s fine.

Head out into the lanes and point it up a punchy 15 per cent climb and it’ll start to struggle. I found that so long as you can keep your speed above about 12-13km/h then the level of assistance is good. Slower than that and the equation starts to be less in your favour.

It’s not a bike you really want to have to muscle up a steep hill. It’s twitchy and unbalanced if you’re standing up and the seated position isn’t designed for putting lots of power through the pedals.

The motor kicks in more or less straight away from a standstill, and at the other end of the assistance, it cuts out noticeably at the higher levels of assistance, but it’s not jarring.

All the assist modes work right up to the full limit, and that limit is a fairly generous interpretation of the standard 25km/h, with the motor still adding some juice well past the nominal cut-off. It’s a motor system designed to keep you at 25km/h, rather than get you there, if that makes sense.

The whole of the drivetrain is effectively silent. Both the belt and the motor make so little noise that you’ll not hear them at all if there’s any urban background noise. Even beyond the city limits in the quiet lanes, the tyres on the road make more noise. Overall the motor system is excellent: it’s quiet, it’s easy to control and there’s plenty of oomph on tap.

Tenways says the range of the CGO Compact is “up to 100km” and I’d wager that with a light rider and some flat terrain and warm weather you could get somewhere near that in low-assistance modes with the nice big 500Wh battery.

I’m not light, and it’s not flat round here, so the realistic range for mixed use is probably around half that. I don’t have any concerns about the range, really. For the things you’d do on this bike – running about town, commuting, doing the shopping, taking a child to nursery – you’re unlikely to need to plug it in more than about once a week.

The longest ride I did on the CGO Compact was a hilly 25km loop, with 400m of climbing and an unsurfaced section. I wasn’t being especially frugal with the assistance and the bike finished with two out of the five bars of battery left, having just ticked down to two on the last climb, so the effective range for that sort of riding for a big (100kg+) chap like me is probably about 35-40km.

That’s entirely reasonable, and to be honest just over an hour in the saddle on a bike like this is plenty. It’s not uncomfortable, but neither is it designed for long-distance travel, and with a very upright position a lot of the weight’s on your rear.

The saddle is decent enough. I found the suspension seatpost a bit stodgy though, and I wasn’t a big fan of it. I’d rather pay a bit extra and have a decent parallelogram seatpost like a Cane Creek Thudbuster. I like the idea of a suspension post but a lot of them are ordinary.

It’s certainly not an uncomfortable bike. The handlebar grips are decent and there’s plenty of air in the big-chamber CST city tyres to smooth out the worst of the potholes. Those tyres are fine on unsurfaced bits too, and they have plenty of grip.

This bike, like a few others I’ve had recently, comes with Tektro hydraulic disc brakes, which are really excellent: lots of power and a nice lever feel.

Tenways says the bike is fine for riders “between 160cm and 190cm”. I’m at the top of that range and I can ride the bike fine, although the maximum seatpost height is below where I’d normally have it, so maybe 185cm is the limit for an ideal fit.

The position is good, and the Byschulz Speedlifter twist stem gives you a nice range of up-down adjustability at the front. It also allows you to twist the bars through 90° and this, combined with the folding pedals, means you can store the bike in places you normally wouldn’t be able to: a narrow hallway, for example.

If you have to bring your bike inside either at home or at work then it’s not quite as space-efficient as a folding bike, but it’s pretty good with its short and narrow footprint. Even if you do have plenty of space, the fact you can minimise the footprint is really helpful. There’s nothing sticking out to catch yourself on.

Tenways describes the CGO Compact as ‘public transport friendly’, and it is, up to a point. You can more easily find room in one of those terrible cramped bike compartments on a train if you fold everything up. It’s not a folding bike though, so most bus services won’t take it. If your commute is mixed-mode, then it’s fairly easy to fit in a normal-sized car if you put the back seats down – although it’s a fairly hefty thing at 20kg to be lugging in and out of your boot.

For £1,799 you’re getting a very nicely-considered bike here. Comparing it to bikes we’ve recently reviewed, the ADO Air One Pro (£1,599) is more cargo-oriented, and has a two-speed motor system, for similar money. It has a smaller battery though, so the range isn’t as good.

Many of the other small-wheelers we’ve had in recently are folders. We liked the MiRider 20 (£1,795) and the ADO Air 20 Ultra (£1,499) did well too.

All of those are in the same ballpark price-wise, while the Tern Vektron P5i is twice as much at £3,800, but a great option for deeper pockets. The non-folding Raleigh Modum is another, pricier, Bosch-equipped option, although it’s getting a bit harder to find of late.

I think Tenways has done well here. I have the odd gripe, and probably living somewhere as topographically-challenging as Bath, a single-speed wouldn’t be top of my list, but for many people this is going to be an ideal runaround, and it’s fun to ride and easy to like.

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