Aventon Aventure.2 Step-Through Review, 2023 | Electric Bike Report

If you’re new to the Aventure series, here’s a quick takeaway of what made this bike so popular: it helped normalize a lot of the features you find on most e-bikes in the $1500-$2000 bracket you find today. It upped the ante of the time by using a color LCD screen, integrating the battery into the frame, offering multiple frame colors and sizes to choose, and stopping on hydraulic disc brakes. Common place now, not so much the case in 2021. And that makes mention of nothing of the hallmarks of a fat tire e-bike: powerful 750W motor, massive 4″ wide tires for cruising down the street comfortably or for prowling over your nearby fire road.

So what is the new Aventon Aventure.2 Step-Through trying to normalize now? Well, a torque sensor and some more integrated features is a nice sight on fat tire e-bikes.

Torque sensors present some advantages for riders. It helps the motor engage better with the rider because it identifies how hard the rider is pedaling, and this carries over to better power output management (on the high and low end), more efficient battery use, and better hill climbing performance in lower PAS setting.

Aventon could have just added this one key component and decided that was enough of an update, and riders would probably still be pretty happy. But Aventon didn’t stop there. In order to help increase power output efficiency, they also redesigned the pedal assist system by dumping the old PAS 1 -5 levels and instead setup a 4-level system that actually gives you more at the low and high PAS modes.

One example, the Eco mode that replaced PAS 1 now runs at a more robust pace, making it more rider-friendly, we found when we used this mode for the long range battery test. With the old version PAS 1 was too slow and ineffective for constant use. We’ll go into more detail on this in the Range Test section that’s coming up, but this says something about the added benefits just from adding a torque sensor to this bike.

Further improving your ride experience was a switch to a larger 48-tooth chainring, giving the rider more pedal power while also reducing incidences of ghost pedaling at higher speeds. Changing to a larger chainring does make uphill pedaling a little more difficult, but any setback this might cause is also countered by the much-improved motor power output on hills, because the torque sensor now tells the motor you’re pedaling uphill and need more power. The cadence sensor on prior models couldn’t do that. We like how Aventon listens to its riders, and gives them what they want.

Aventon focused on power changes with this new edition, and they also addressed stopping power. Gone are the lesser-known Bengal brakes of the past. Now the Aventure.2 ST comes with the proven Tektro HD-E350 hydraulic disc brakes, which give the new Aventure.2 ST greater braking ability, and they are more common to find when you need new brake parts