Ibis Oso: Rowdy, Beautiful, Long-Travel E-MTB
The Bosch-powered Ibis Oso looks like a trail boss, with huge travel up front and back, partly thanks to a tightly packed, asymmetrical suspension setup.
Ibis says it built the full-suspension electric Oso for “a whole new sport.” From what I can tell, that checks out: I’ve never gone on a trail ride so gnarly that I’d need a bike so mega-engineered.
The full carbon frame couples 170 mm of front suspension from a Fox 38 fork with 155 mm of travel in the back. That rear suspension rides as a super-low-profile, compact package with an efficient DW upper link. A beefy and flowy swingarm design promises trail-tracking confidence.
The linkage hugs an 85NM Bosch Performance Line CX motor with a 750Wh battery (on every size except the small, which gets a 625Wh).
Ibis packed it all so tightly together because it wanted to deliver on several key performance benefits that typically oppose. Laterally offsetting the rear suspension components made room for a fatter seat post and a beefier shock — result: a more robust frame and improved suspension damping capacity.
The configuration also helped them deliver wider tire clearance but keep the chainstays short, to make controlling the back end easier while still allowing mud clearance.
As Bikerumor wrote, Ibis treated control as one of the most (if not the most) critical parameters for riders. So the brand onboarded big, powerful brakes with 220mm rotors and four-piston calipers front and rear.
It also tuned the suspension linkage for high sensitivity at first, but a robust damping rate further into the stroke should help the ride on cleaner trails but limit bottoming out on steep drops (the bike weighs 53 pounds).
Ibis also built in enough flexibility to swap some suspension components out. You can run a 190mm dual-crown fork, for instance. That compatibility informed another asymmetrical design call: the side-mount battery. A beefy, high-travel fork exerts a lot of y-axis force on a downtube, so cutting a hole on the x-axis side is preferable.
Size-specific seat tube angles should help the ride stay consistent across the four sizes. A 64mm head tube angle suits it for e-enduro riding (whether or not I made that word up).
Ibis also built the frame to accommodate a long dropper post and a tall 26-ounce bottle on the medium. The 148mm rear spacing affords its 1×12 standard gearing and leaves room for more, should you so choose
Ibis also went long on ease of maintenance and warranties. Oversized bearings and tube-in-tube cable routing help ease annoying mechanic work, and the shock bushings come with a replacement for the bike’s lifetime. The Bosch motor comes with a 2-year warranty, and the frame comes with a 7-year guarantee.
Shimano GX components and Maxxis tires (29 x 2.5 inches on large and XL sizes, mixed wheel sizes small and medium) round it out. The Ibis Oso is available today — for whatever burly objective you may want to test its high-concept design against. MSRP: $10,999.
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