In the Honbike’s mission to fix the rather large issue of wear parts on electric bicycles, I think the designers may have gotten a bit carried away and started fixing things that just didn’t need fixing.
I’m talking about the seat and those backwards brake levers.
Seats are obviously a very personal thing — not two butts are exactly alike — but I feel confident in saying that the Honbike’s golf club-shaped noseless saddle will probably not be comfortable for most riders. The nose of a bike saddle serves the very important function of supporting your body as you’re leaning forward on a bike. Yes, that means it’s likely applying pressure to sensitive bits of your undercarriage, but that’s why saddles are interchangeable and come in all shapes and sizes — they’re meant to be swapped out if uncomfortable.
Remove the nose, as Honbike has, and there is nothing preventing you from sliding off the front of the saddle. For me, this meant continuously scooching back as I slid forward and putting considerable pressure on my hands. There are also several slits in the saddle, which I’m assuming are for airflow (no arguing with a little breeze), but the unintended side effect is they also serve as little inconveniently placed troughs for your sit bones — the little pointy parts on the bottom of your pelvis that support most of your weight when sitting on a bike seat — to fall in to. For me and my butt, the spacing between these slits meant I had one sit bone in a trough and one on the foam; leaving me a bit cockeyed and uncomfortable on the seat.
It’s rare I ever write this much about the saddle of a bike we review, but here’s the kicker: the Honbike’s weird 5-wood of a bike saddle can’t be replaced. It’s integrated into the seatpost, which is also proprietary to the bike. If you buy the Honbike, you’re committing to its saddle. More than its weird design; more than its discomfort; I think this is the Honbike saddle’s fatal flaw — you can’t swap it out.
While the seat is a pretty big sticking point for me, the brake levers are not. They’re just kind of bizarre and I’m not sure they warranted a redesign. The levers on the Honbike are backwards, with the hinges on the outside ends of the bars and the end of the levers pointing inward.
The ergonomics of this work surprisingly OK, and the lever feel is fine, you’re again going to run into replacement issues. Brake levers often bend in falls or if the bike gets tipped over, and I’d wager the likelihood of finding exact replacement to the ones on the Honbike are fairly slim.
As for the rest of the bike, its handling is fairly on par with other small electric folders we’ve tested — agile and light. But one last thing we noticed is the bike has a considerable amount of lateral flex in the frame. This could be due to its size, the spindly spokes of the cast magnesium wheels or, very likely, the fact that it uses a single sided front fork and the only thing supporting the rear wheel is the drive shaft.
Under load, such as in corners or in the bottom of a drainage culvert, this frame flex manifests as a sort of squishy or wallowy feeling. It’s a sensation I got used to, but one that likely impacts handling.
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