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  • I used to work for Pedal me, the bikes have a mixture of Bosch Gen2 CX and Gen4 Cargo. Although I think at this point they were all Gen2 CX..

    During lockdown they were doing a lot of deliveries for food banks.

    When fully loaded there were some hills that were literally impossible to get up, you had to go around. I'd say we effectively hit the limit of what the motor would assist. We couldn't gear any easier as it would risk breaking the rohloff hubs (and voiding warranty). Shame I can't tell you which hills... but with this sort of weight they wouldn't have to be very steep.

    The bike unloaded is 60kg, the (stupidly heavy!) trailer was about 100kg, rider could be around 80kg and the food boxes were 5-15kg each. Hopefully this gives you a rough idea of where the limits start to appear.

  • Carla XL? It would be nice if they made them not from girders, given the £4.8k they cost now you'd kind of expect them to be not made from girders.

    Theres a few Dutch + German trailer (and a belgium guy!) producers who all emphasise on the lightweight/high quality angle. Kind of a shame that carla's marketing is so strong its walked all over the others. 'Busy bike' were a stand out, spoke to the guy a few times about getting just a hitch for my 'fietskaXXL' trailer (which the hitch was total garbage) made, guy really knows his stuff and quality of his work is very high. But as far as I know he's never shifted many trailers.

    The three wheeled approach is great for low to medium speed stability, loading/unloading and means the hitch doesn't have to be amazing as it has less wild tongue weight forces acting on it, but many have commented the third wheel often hits road defects that they can't plan for in a corner (wheels of bike easy enough to figure out, wheels on side of trailer you get used to, but the third wheel kind of sits between the others during a corner), and when you hit a good enough pothole causes mayhem.


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  • We use a Carla at work, it gets smashed in to bollards etc fairly regularly by careless couriers (including myself from time to time) misjudging gaps. I'm glad it's so overbuilt! Total bike, trailer, load and rider weight is probably close to 300kg so even saving 10kg on the weight of the trailer doesn't seem worth it.
    I can definitely see a lighter trailer being useful with different use cases though!

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