Aventon makes a variety of compelling electric bikes that it sells direct to consumers. The company previously concentrated on commuter and adventure bikes like the capable Aventon Level.2 commuter bike we looked at earlier in the year, but the new Aventon Abound is a full-fledged electric cargo bike aimed at families who want to carry children or anyone who wants to haul amounts of gear that would otherwise require a car.
To find out if the Abound can cover your commuting, hauling and kid-carrying needs, we took the bike out and around Chicago, putting it through its paces as part of our daily routine. The Abound might not be your first choice as an everyday commuter because of its size, weight and some challenges in locking to bike racks, but if you need a hauler for grocery trips and errands, the Aventon Abound is exceptionally well equipped and worth a look if you’re considering a cargo or utility bike.
The Abound gives you plenty of capacity, power and range to handle any sort of cargo or passenger load you’d think of carrying by bike.
What we liked about it
It can really haul a load
The Aventon Abound may be compact, but it’s no slouch when it comes to carrying cargo. The sizable rear rack supports up to 143 pounds; there’s also a front rack available that can carry another 33 pounds of gear. Overall, the bike’s rated to carry 440 pounds, including passengers, and there are plenty of mounting options and enough space to load the bike to capacity.
As with most leading cargo bike makers, Aventon offers a bunch of accessories to modify the Abound to suit different needs. There are foot platforms that made it easy for an adult passenger to ride on back with me, even without the special seating accessory Aventon sells. An extra-large rear basket offered me enough space to bring home a massive haul of groceries from Costco.
The panniers Aventon makes for the bike provide considerable storage for grocery runs and commutes, plus they do a great job keeping rain out. The panniers also use Ortlieb-style quick-release connectors and attach to a rung of standard rack tubing that sits just below the top of the rear rack so they can still be used even if items are on the rack. This arrangement avoids one of the complaints we had about the similar Velotric Packer 1’s difficulties mounting standard panniers or just getting into panniers with the rack top loaded. Also, since the panniers can fold flat when they’re empty, they can tuck out of the way if you have a passenger riding on the back. The tubing of the racks is also well suited to bungee cords, making it easy to strap things down.
Like the Packer 1, the Aventon Abound also has a small storage compartment attached to the bike that sits just behind the seat tube in what is effectively the rear triangle. It’s a little zippered container that’s handy for small items, like your lock, all the bungees you’ll carry with this bike or any other small items.
It has solid power and range
To carry the considerable loads it’s designed for, the Abound has a 750W hub-drive motor backed by a battery that’s up to the task. The single-horsepower motor isn’t the most powerful I’ve ridden on, but it’s more than up to the task of zipping along at the bike’s Class 2 limit of 20 mph, and it has enough torque to get me, the bike and my cargo up to speed in just a few seconds. Even going up hills or into some stiff headwinds, the motor powered along. Thanks to the bike’s use of a torque sensor, the motor comes on promptly and smoothly, giving assistance right when it’s called for.
The 720Wh battery is a UL 2849-certified unit — always good to see and something we’ve been seeing from more and more e-bike manufacturers as they have responded to rider safety concerns. Some brands offer bigger batteries, but 720Wh is plenty for even major commutes, comfortably offering over 20 miles of range even when tasking the motor with the vast majority of the work. In my testing, I got 24 miles with some hefty cargo hauling and a lot of throttle use before the battery was worryingly low (around 10%). In a subsequent ride, I went 28 miles with lighter loads before the battery had dropped to the point that it wasn’t giving nearly as much power to the motor. It was able to putz along, slowly reaching a peak of 15 mph, for another two miles before the bike shut down completely. Conservative use (i.e., pedaling in a lower power mode and not using throttle) should easily net you over 30 miles of range on a charge. That’s not too shabby for a big, heavy e-bike like this. Big batteries like this do take a while to recharge, though. After five hours of charging from empty, the battery still wasn’t quite full. The charger slowed down significantly toward the end of charging. It completed charging at five hours and 18 minutes
It’s geared out for effective commuting
The Shimano seven-speed derailleur and shifter may not be a premium setup, but it’s capable of getting the bike moving along with a heavy load even if you run out of battery. You wouldn’t want to ride the bike without power regularly (it could use a couple of lower gears or a smaller front chainring to help with acceleration from a standstill), but the motor more than makes up for this when enabled.
Aventon has gone with hydraulic disc brakes that have a great deal of both stopping power and fine control. I had to slam on them more than a few times — as is typical of city riding — and they stopped me in short order. This is our preferred setup for a heavy bike and gives the Abound an edge over the Rad Power RadWagon 4, which uses mechanical brakes.
The thick, 20-inch tires and suspension fork with 50 millimeters of gravel give the Abound a smoother ride than some similar bikes we’ve tested (some front suspension helps with the smaller wheel sizes).
The long dropper seatpost and height-adjustable handlebar stem, plus the low, step-through frame design makes the Aventon Abound a decent one-size-fits-all model, fitting riders who are 4 feet, 11 inches tall to six feet, three inches tall, though even at full extension?I found the seat just a hair low for a six-foot-three-inch rider. Again, this is perfect for a cargo bike, which is likely to be shared by members of a household.
While many of the accessories for the bike are optional extras, Aventon kits it out well for commuting by default. It includes a two-legged kickstand to prop the bike up perfectly straight for loading. Front and rear fenders prevent water, mud and slush getting on the ride. Aventon even attaches little side panels around the back wheel, presumably to protect passengers from reaching into the wheel or chain, but it has the added benefit of further protecting the rider from splashing.
Aventon includes a small headlight that runs on the bike’s battery, but it’s unexceptional. The taillight is hooked up to the brake levers and gives you car-style performance, getting brighter as you apply the brakes. It even includes turn signals you can activate on the bike’s control unit. The computer displays speed, odometer, battery level, power usage and other metrics on a colorful LCD display that’s a good match for the quality of the rest of the design.
Easy assembly and minimal, sustainable packaging
The bike took 45 minutes to assemble — that’s quick and easy, in our experience — though your mileage may vary. Once we opened the box (it’s heavy, so get help if you can’t manage a huge, almost-100-pound package alone), it?was a relief to see just how much of the packaging Aventon had made using recyclable materials. Many direct-to-consumer bikes ship with loads of zip ties and Styrofoam, but the Aventon Abound was almost entirely packaged in cardboard or paper. It took about four minutes to free the bike and components from the wrapping.
Assembly was very straightforward, with everything laid out clearly and packaged in a way that made it was easy to get to what you needed. The only hitch for us was that it took a good deal of time and care to correctly seat preinstalled bolts that had threadlocker pre-applied to them. Since they have some resistance to them and you can’t start them easily by turning them hand-tight, you need to take care to thread them back in straight. Given all the accessories that need to be mounted, you’ll be tightening a lot of bolts.
What we didn’t like about it
You’ll need to take care when loading the bike
If you aren’t used to small wheels, you may find the Abound more difficult to maneuver than a larger-wheeled bike, and especially so when it’s loaded — you won’t want to try riding no-handed, at least at first. If you load up cargo atop the rack and make the bike top-heavy, you’ll find the Abound can be a little bit unwieldy.
When I loaded this bike with a giant tub of Costco finds atop the rack, I struggled a bit to get it going straight. It wanted to wobble to either side. Cruising at speed, it stabilized considerably, and it helped to have the suspension fork locked so there was no extra play in that front wheel.
Ultimately, I may have stacked my cargo a little too high in that instance, but in subsequent rides, I could feel the hints of that unsteadiness. You’ll be better served loading up the panniers and keeping heavy loads low. This is true for any heavyweight bike hauling, but if you’re new to the concept, you’ll want to keep it in mind. Riding with a 100-plus-pound passenger on the back proved more stable, as long as they didn’t move around a lot.
Its size, weight and design can pose some challenges
Like all cargo bikes, the Aventon Abound is big and heavy: It’s a long bike and weighs more than 80 pounds unloaded. If you don’t have a garage or somewhere easily accessible on a ground level to park this bike, instead of a full-on cargo bike you’ll likely want to consider a more compact, lightweight utility bike like the REI Co-op Cycles Generation e1.1.
The design also poses difficulties for locking the bike. When you’re locking up an expensive bike, it’s important to make sure your lock is going through one of the main triangles of the frame. That’s a bit tough to do on the Aventon Abound, though, as it doesn’t have any of those triangles. The single-beam step-through design leaves nowhere to lock up in what would be the front triangle. The rear portion of the frame has some good mounting points for a lock, but they can be hard to access with accessories mounted, and with the foot platforms mounted, it can be difficult to get the bike close enough to a bike rack to even begin locking.
On my outings with the Aventon Abound, I often found I couldn’t park where I would normally have parked any other bike. Crowded racks offered almost no room for the wide load of the Abound, and sometimes getting the Abound close enough to a rack left so much bike between me and the rack that I couldn’t reach to install my lock. Locking through the front fork works for a quick and semi-secure setup, but it is not as secure as locking through the frame. The most consistent success I had was finding a street sign pole or empty bike rack where I could get the bike’s seat tube near enough to run a lock around both.
Repairs and maintenance are also more difficult with a cargo bike. The rear wheel and derailleur are thoroughly tucked away behind cargo-hauling hardware that the process of changing a flat or re-indexing the gears will entail getting past quite a few extra components.
Taller riders may find the saddle interferes with rear cargo
The Abound may specialize in cargo, but the seat angles back enough that extending it to its limits can overlap with cargo on top of the rear rack. As a 6-foot-3-inch rider, I found that a comfortable position conflicted with a large container on the rear rack, which otherwise would have had plenty of space.?I had to lash down the container farther back than I’d like, potentially sacrificing the security of the cargo for the ability to actually sit on the bike and ride it home. If you’re a larger rider with big feet, you’ll also have to content with the rear rack encroaching on your feet as your pedal if you use that accessory. The rear panniers fortunately avoid this issue.
Bottom line
The Aventon Abound offers clear value for anyone looking to haul a lot of cargo, whether that’s getting the kids to school, handling errands, or both at the same time. It’s built well, has great specs and is designed for flexibility in how you equip it. What’s better is that it comes at a fair price for all that’s on offer. It may not be as decked out as the Tern HSD S+, which offers an automatic transmission and belt drive, but it costs less than half as much, has more capacity and offers plenty of similar capabilities and features. The Abound has some clear advantages over the similarly-priced RadWagon 4 and Velotric Packer 1 as well. If you’re looking for the best electric bike to be a car replacement, one that can tackle the varied tasks of everyday commuting and shopping, the Aventon Abound could be the answer.
