Skip to main content

Exclusive: Ubco FRX1 electric dirt bike pre-orders go live at $8,999

Electric trail bikes are the future of off-road fun, and Ubco’s new FRX1 is the latest machine to hit the market. Helping to build out a fledgling segment, the FRX1 is an electric trail bike that hopes to hit the sweet spot of build quality, power and price.

The FRX1 is priced at $8,999 in the US, with pre-orders available now and shipping expected to start in July of this year. While that’s a substantial investment, the FRX1 will put itself in a competitive position between its rivals, the Segway Dirt eBike and Cake Kalk OR. They start at $2,999 and $13,000, respectively.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Ethan Ralston, CEO of Ubco US, says the FRX1 is aimed at the heart of the new electric dirt bike market. “The emerging market for a lightweight electric trail bike is a really new category we are very excited about,” said Ralston. “It blends the agility of a mountain bike and the power of a motocross bike.”

Lightweight, indeed. At 132 pounds, the FRX1 is almost half the weight of traditional trail motorcycles, and about 18 pounds lighter than the more expensive Cake Kalk OR.

But don’t think that because the FRX1 is a lightweight, it doesn’t pack a punch. On board is a liquid-cooled brushless motor that puts out 15kW of environmentally friendly power. This translates to 20 horsepower and 280Nm (about 206ft-lb) of torque, numbers that exceed the Cake Kalk OR and Segway Dirt eBike. You’ll be cruising up to the FRX1’s top speed of 50 mph in no time.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Once you’ve drained the 2.2kWh Lithium-ion battery, which has an estimated range of 62 miles, charging will take six hours to move from 0%-100%. That may have you wishing for the pedals seen on last year’s FRX1 prototype. Either way, 62 miles is solid in terms of range for this lightweight.

Ubco’s app can keep track of the bike’s range and speed. While we haven’t tested it alongside the FRX1, it impressed us during our review of Ubco’s 2×2. The FRX1’s Bluetooth capability will make monitoring a breeze for riders, and helps future-proof the bike for additional improvements as they’re rolled out with firmware updates.

Speaking of firm, the FRX1 has a proper dirt bike suspension with 250mm of travel at the front and rear. The inverted forks are fully adjustable, while the rear shock has both high and low speed compression, rebound adjustment, and spring preload. The suspension, along with four pot hydraulic brakes with 220mm rotors, will be Ubco-branded.

On paper, the FRX1’s specifications certainly stack up, but we’ll wait till we’ve had a chance to ride before any real judgements are made. Visit Ubco’s website for more on the FRX1.

Editors' Recommendations

Mitchell Nicholson
Mitchell comments on the current happenings in the motorcycle world. From the latest advances in wheelie control to noise…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more