2008 Bionicon Edison Review
In the winter of 2009, I was in Afghanistan. As part of my tour, I got a two week long leave period, which I elected to spend on Tenerife, Canary Islands. While I was there, my wife and I decided to go on a mountain bike tour of the local volcano.
The fine folks at MTB-Active provided the tour guide and the bikes, a pair of Bionicon Edisons.
The Edison is a trail-center bike with a hidden feature; it doesn't use off-the-shelf suspension parts like most other bikes. Instead, it connects the front fork and the rear shock to each other via hydraulic lines that pass through a handlebar-mounted button (the orange thing in the photo). The button is normally closed, but when it is pressed, one can change the travel on both the front and rear suspensions at the same time.
Press the button, rock the bike forward, and the whole bike steepens up for climbing. Press the button, rock the bike backwards, and it transforms into a slack downhill bike. The front fork adjusts from 70mm to 150mm, and the rear shock has 140mm, but the sag changes to sit deeper or higher in the travel range. Head angles go from 67.5 degrees in "downhill mode" to 73 degrees in "climb mode" - and rocked back, the seat drops nearly 3 cm!
This isn't just a gimmick - it really works, and works very well. It takes maybe a second to reconfigure the bike for climbing or descending. If you are an "earn your fun" all-mountain rider, this lets you have a bike that climbs as well as it drops.
I took this bike up a 3374' ascent in 11km, which makes Mt Ventoux (2500' in 26 km) look like a speed bump. I wasn't in great shape at the time, so I put the bike in "climb mode" and ground my way up the mountain in the granny (averaging 7 km/h). For a heavy bike (roughly 32lbs), it climbed astonishingly well - as long as I kept the pedals moving, it kept climbing.
And on the way down - all 8577' of it, half on fireroads and singletrack, the other half on twisty island two-lane highway - I just rocked the bike back, pointed the nose downhill, and took off.
This was, admittedly, my first time ever on a good full-suspension bike, and I was simply blown away by how well it handled and how smoothly it rode. The travel felt bottomless and linear, and soon I was looking for stuff to run over to see if I could upset it at all - and it never got out of shape. It would steamroll over anything and everything, and my confidence level skyrocketed. Soon I was drifting through 55km/h fire-road turns like I had been doing it my entire life.
The only black mark on the whole ride is we had to take a break about 2/3rds of the way back down the mountain to let the front brakes cool. The repeated efforts of stopping 245lbs of me eventually set the brake pads on fire and the brakes faded pretty badly until they cooled back down.
If I lived anywhere near an actual mountain, especially one that didn't have a lift shuttle, I would own this bike. Never mind U-Turn or dropper posts or lockouts or any of the other hacks used to provide a "climb and descend" capability; the system on the Bionicon is idiot proof and really, really works. If you get a chance, try it!
Very highly recommended.