Specialized Turbo Tero X
 

Specialized just launched this full suspension e-bike. They give it a familiar SUV sort of pitch. Here is your do it all bike for MTB and commuting and "adventures." But it's a pretty weird bike.

It's a full suspension e-mtb with fenders and racks. That's weird enough to begin with. The rack and fender form a unit so the fender forms a rack stay. That puts the payload on the unsprung side. That's weird - you usually want to minimize sprung weight and also keep the payload suspended. This is on a single pivot swingarm, which is a primitive approach compared to the four-link designs that have dominated MTB for twenty+ years (and especially for a Specialized whose trademark FSR has been on all their bikes for so long). It looks like they did it this way to have the fender-rack attach to the swingarm and stay concentric with the wheel, which would not be possible with their usual Horst link / FSR setup. And to cap off the weirdness it's got no shock linkage, so it's not even a "faux bar". The seat angle and head tube angle and stupidly mismatched wheel sizes would be familiar to anyone recently buying a MTB but pretty shocking to anyone riding a road bike or hybrid.

130 mm fork / 120 mm rear travel, aluminum frame, 250W (1/3 hp) motor, lights and fenders and a rack and a bell and a kickstand. Three trim levels $4500-$6500, the biggest difference is torque from the motor

https://assets.specialized.com/i/spe...h=900&fmt=auto

Apparently there’s still some room even at a big, soulless company like Specialized to be really, really weird. This will either be a complete flop or shockingly successful.

Edit: pretty sure this isn’t a URT, though. The pivot is just above and behind the bottom bracket, so the rear axle will move around the BB. A URT would have the BB and rear axle locked together, with the pivot in front of the BB.

Francis called it a URT in his MTBR review but you're right, it's normal olde fashioned single pivot