Orbea Wild Review | Find Out Why It Won All Those Awards

With no disrespect to what other brands offer, what Orbea is doing with their MyO program offers an uncommon degree of control over the e-bike because it allows the buyer to customize components that can make a significant different in the Wild’s performance and weight.

Once a rider has chosen the Wild’s color and size, they are presented with opportunities to upgrade many components. Upgrade choices include battery size (750Wh or 625Wh), whether to add a range-extender battery (250Wh), a better shock, a better fork (two possibilities), nicer brakes brake, better tires, dropper post travel length (from 125mm to 230mm), saddle, and the opportunity to add lights plus Bosch Kiox display.

The base model starts at $6199, but because it comes in six different build levels, buyers face a near-limitless ability to customize the Wild. Of course, all this choice does come at a price—you can drop more than $14,000 on a Wild.

While you don’t need to choose any upgrades to have a great e-bike, as our experience proved, one thing to keep in mind is that upgrading on the front end, rather than waiting six months to purchase a nicer fork or better wheels, will save you money in the long run. It’s easier to drop an extra $150 now on the fork than saving up $750-$1000 later.

Every pound you add to an e-bike will make a difference in its range. While 1 lb. might not make a noticeable difference, 7 lbs. will, which is the difference between what the Orbea Wild weighs (53 lbs.) and a Bulls eMTB we recently reviewed which comes in at 60 lbs.

I really liked how immediate the motor’s response was when I began pedaling, but it also offered just a bit of overrun, which will be handy for hitting technical sections where you might pause your pedaling for just a moment.

We performed both a maximum PAS range test and a minimum PAS test to find out just how long the Wild’s 750Wh battery will last.

In my max range test at the mid-way point with 51 percent of the battery’s capacity remaining, I’d covered 18.54 mi. in 1:34: 18 at an average speed of just under 13 mph. I honestly wasn’t sure which would die first, me or the battery.
Ultimately, the Orbea Wild covered a most impressive 37.3 miles with 3539 feet of climbing in a time of 3:01 at an average speed of 12.38 mph.

Overall, that’s really far; I was expecting something in the range of 34-35 mi. The Wild was in Turbo the entire way. The 24-mile loop included it all: fast, flowy stuff, some punchy hills, and some longer climbs.

In all honesty, if I were buying an Orbea Wild, I might order it with the 625Wh battery for everyday use and then just add the range-extender battery for those days when I want to do a really long ride.

With the Orbea Wild we took it through two different hill tests. In the first, I took it up Hell Hole, our 1/3 mile bike path that rises at a 12-percent grade. I was impressed by how quiet the motor was overall. While it made a bit more noise at higher cadences, but overall the sound level was nice.

In our second test, I took it up a double-track dirt road to get a better sense of how it climbs out on the trails.

I can say that the Bosch Performance Line CX motor is a very powerful, very punchy motor. There’s a reason why this is one of the most coveted motors on eMTBs. Bosch motors are known to favor higher cadences than some other motors, but I found that at a natural feeling cadence, the motor was very responsive.

It climbed Hell Hole in 1:29 for an average speed of 12.2 mph. On the water tower climb I saw a higher average speed—14.5 mph—thanks to a time of 3:35 to the top of the hill.

What stood out to me was how, compared to the Specialized 2.2 motor on the Levo was that while the Specialized motor offered a bit more torque, which helped it achieve a slightly faster time up Hell Hole, the Orbea Wild ascended to the water tower in an identical time.

What makes the Bosch Performance Line CX motor so great is how quickly it reacts and can provide massive power at the moment, so even though it may not offer as much torque as the Specialized motor, its responsiveness made the Orbea Wild one of the best-climbing eMTBs we’ve tested.

Worth noting: eMTBs equipped with 29-inch wheels both front and rear, as opposed to a mullet setup with 29 front and 27.5 rear, tend to be smoother, more adept climbers.

Orbea makes four different eMTBs. Two, the Urrun and Keram, are hardtails, and two, the Rise and the Wild, offer full suspension. The Rise is a shorter travel trail eMTB. The Wild is the most aggressive eMTB of the bunch, with 160mm of travel in front and rear. Orbea does offer an option to order a 170mm-travel fork that slackens the head tube angle just a bit more.

Part of the reason it has so much travel is due to the greater weight of the eMTB compared to a regular mountain bike. By going with more travel than found in the Rise, the Wild is smoother over rough trails and is better able to soak up big drops. Also, one of the realities of mountain biking is that the faster you go, the more suspension you need, so eMTBs would quickly run out of travel if they were held to the same amount of travel as non-electrified MTBs.

Orbea stresses that one of the design features of the Wild is the exceptional stiffness of the front triangle. This is important because a twist in the frame results in the front and rear wheels not staying in plane with each other, and the feeling undermines rider confidence. Most of us can’t tell when the wheels aren’t in plane, but any time an e-bike’s handling is uncertain, that’s usually a contributing factor.

Compared to the previous Wild, Orbea says that they reduced the frame mass by a third (32 percent) while securing a 51 percent gain in stiffness. That’s some exceptional engineering work. It’s rare that a manufacturer can improve a design that much on an already great-riding e-bike.

Part of the key to a great eMTB is balancing the need for stability at speed without sacrificing agile handling on tight singletrack, and Orbea executed that with the Wild. A great eMTB will respond to a rider’s input, even when it’s as subtle as a turn of the head and shoulders.

The Orbea Wild was so dang fun I didn’t want to head home for dinner. I’ll admit that coming home covered in dust after hours of riding trails isn’t the sort of hard work that gets any sympathy from my wife.

Orbea claims that the Wild is the most award-winning eMTB on the market. If it’s not, it’s at least in the running. More relevant is that we agree with the many accolades it has received. The performance of the Bosch Performance Line CX motor is the stuff of Superman fantasies. When it comes to Class 1 eMTBs, the

Performance Line CX is a stunner. It won’t do the work for you; a long climb is still a long climb, but you can go so much farther than you would on your own.

Ride length is yet another reason why the 160mm of travel the Wild offers is a great feature. All that jostling over trails, even if you’re not doling out each and every watt reaching the tires, will tire muscles out and more travel means less work on your part to soak up bumps, leaving you feeling fresh for more miles.

As I mentioned before, at 53 lbs., this is a respectable weight for an eMTB. With the level of customization that Orbea offers, the buyer who chooses enough of the different upgrades, plus downgrading the battery to 625Wh rather than the 750Wh battery that comes standard (that shaves 1.5 lbs.), it wouldn’t be hard to get the Wild down to 45 or 46 lbs., which would make it feel even more lively on the trail.

Every now and then, we review an e-bike that feels so dialed that we can recommend it without reservation. Most designs have some sort of caveat—not enough range, ponderous handling at low speed, a drivetrain without enough gear range, brakes that need more power—that makes us note an exception. That’s not the case with the Orbea Wild; we can recommend it to anyone looking for a powerful eMTB that will perform in a variety of conditions. What’s more, even if the base-level build is robust, there’s no need to think that you need to choose any upgrades in order to have an eMTB that can handle your rides.

Happy Riding! Make sure to let us know if you have any questions or if you think we left anything out in this review of the Orbea Wild down in our comments section.