The Reign’s motor is the Yamaha PW-X3 motor with customized tuning by Large, utilizing what they name Sync Drive know-how. It has 250 nominal and 500 max watts and a pleasant 85Nm of torque. At 6.06 lbs, it provides you an 82.5 Watts per pound power-to-weight ratio, which is stable.
Yamaha designed it to output between 80-400% help, which we discovered very pure and highly effective on the paths.
It is rather helpful, particularly when beginning – it has extra energy than most when pedaling at a decrease cadence.
What’s the good thing about that? In case you’ve slowed down a bit, popping out of a nook and going straight right into a hill, you’ll discover it has a large amount of push when beginning the climb. It all the time helps to be within the acceptable gear, nevertheless it looks like this one is even a bit extra forgiving because you don’t want a better cadence to entry increased energy ranges from the motor – it simply begins with extra.
Against this, it feels rather less highly effective than different motors when pedaling at a better cadence or as you progress by means of an extended climb. Due to this, it took a little bit apply to search out the required gear, however general, as soon as I discovered how the motor labored, I nonetheless considered it as an incredible climber.
It does have some noise/whine to it, however general, we got here away very impressed with what Large has achieved with Yamaha right here. We expect that Yamaha deserves to be talked about extra within the eMTB house.
The motor has 5 totally different energy ranges. Every felt pretty distinct from the others with out making any changes, however there’s an app that lets you tailor every degree’s energy output.
One quirk of the setup we seen was what I’d describe as twitchiness.
You discover it essentially the most when monitor standing or if you happen to push down on the pedals whenever you cease to relaxation on the facet of the street or examine your telephone.
In case you press the pedals in any respect, you sense the motor actually needs to have interaction. It’s virtually like a vibration when doing a monitor stand or a bit lurchy when at a standstill.
If this feels like a giant deal, it’s not. It should take a while to get used to, and you may play with the programming inside the app to get rid of it if you happen to’d like, so it’s simply one thing to concentrate on if you end up beginning out.
One of many few true points we had with the entire system got here right down to the PAS controls. This isn’t our favourite interface, because the buttons had been laborious to hit precisely on the fly. I typically hit the center one or hit up once I meant to hit down. It’s laborious to tell apart with out wanting and particularly troublesome in gloves, so we’d welcome a special management panel with extra distinct buttons.
On the battery slide, large Reign fashions provide a number of totally different sizes. This 2022 mannequin comes commonplace with a 625Wh battery. There’s additionally a 750Wh battery, and current-gen reigns begin with large 800Wh batteries.
Clearly, pay attention to your personal battery wants. Greater isn’t all the time higher since there’s a weight penalty, however if you happen to’re trying to maximize your journey time and take longer journeys, it’s good to know there are measurement choices.
