Tern Orox R14 review

The Tern Orox just can’t be pigeonholed. In fact, Tern describes it as a bike designed for adventure and utility, be it personal or commercial.

The long wheelbase frame hosts a Bosch Performance Line CX mid-motor and twin 800Wh batteries (the second is an optional extra). This is claimed to give a range of more than 200km on a single charge (load and terrain dependent).

The carrying capacity is defined by how you specify the bike – our test sample came equipped with Tern’s Stow Decks on the rear triangle.

The bike was equipped with the massive Cargo Hold 72 panniers, which as the name suggests, can hold 72 litres of luggage per side.

In combination with the Stow Decks, that equates to a massive 20kg/44lb of load per pannier on the road, or 10kg/22lb per pannier off-road.

At the front, the Trail racks can take a further 25kg/55lb per side on tarmac, or 12kg/26lb on dirt.

With these accessories alone, it equates to a potential 90kg of load-carrying potential. However, the bike has a gigantic maximum carrying weight, including the rider, of 210kg/462lb.

Tern Orox R14 build

Tern offers the Orox in two builds – this premium Rohloff-equipped version and a Shimano XT model for £5,900 / $6,499 / €6,799.

The bike will come in two wheel-size options – a yet-to-be-released 29in version with 2.6in Schwalbe tyres or with wide Atlas 27.5 wheels and huge 4in Schwalbe Johnny Watt tyres, as on my demo bike.

The Atlas X70 rims are described as an ultra-heavy-duty cargo construction, designed to take tyres the size of the 27.5x4in Schwalbe Johnny Watts.

Up-front, a Tern Atlas boost hub with disc-cooling fins is suitably burly. Within the front thru-axle is a Tern tool with a 5mm hex key and T20 Torx bit.

The Rohloff-based drivetrain combines the 528 per cent range 14-speed Rohloff rear hub with a twist shifter.

The Rohloff is driven by a Gates belt that runs through a long path, complete with sprung tensioner at the chainring end, and at the rear dropout too.

Up-front, the stem and bar both come from LevelNine, with a wide 800mm eMTB-rated riser bar and a short stem – 45mm on this size-medium test bike. Sculpted Ergon grips finish off the front end.

A bike that weighs in at 33.8kg, not including the additional racks and panniers, is going to need some serious stopping power and the Orox doesn’t disappoint, with Magura’s four-pot MT-5 hydraulic discs and their huge 203mm rotors.

Syntace provides the seatpost and Ergon the saddle, rounding off what is very much a premium build.

Tern Orox R14 ride impressions

The Orox could have been a ponderous slogger of a bike, and I could easily forgive it if it was. The huge load-carrying capacity is more than enough to justify its existence.

It came as a huge surprise and a welcome one that the Orox is an absolute blast to ride. The Performance CX motor provides an impressive amount of power and more than enough torque.

Combined with the Kiox head unit and remote controls, it enables you to switch quickly through the modes and take advantage of all that power on tap when you need it most.

The massive Schwalbe Johnny Watts tyres look as if they belong on a motocrosser or agricultural vehicle, but they provide a huge amount of comfort, simply rolling over anything in their path.

Where I thought the massive mass of the Orox would suffer was uphill, but it's impressively dogged, especially on off-road climbs. The neutral ride position enables you to sit in and really hammer down on the pedals, working in unison with the Bosch power to ascend slippery singletrack or rise up rocky fire roads.

The Bosch drivetrain makes use of Bosch’s eBike Flow system, which enables you to change many of the modes to suit, adjust the support and maximum torque through the modes and much more.

In conjunction with the app, you can also record rides through your phone's GPS and the bike's many layers of data.

The Kiox head unit and remote can also be used to control the integrated lights and a dip-beam switch is a welcome addition for on-road safety and courteous trail riding.

The front end feels smooth, stable and surprisingly light, considering you're turning a tyre more than 4in wide.

I felt confident riding on tight, twisting singletrack and taking the Orox, which let’s not forget is an electric cargo bike, onto trails it really had no place being on.

Such was the light, somewhat nimble-feeling, front-end handling that on occasion I forgot about the amount of hardware in my wake and clipped more than one tree with the wide-load rear.

This premium model, with its Rohloff 14-speed hub and belt drive, looks great on paper, but I found the quirks of the Rohloff more irritating than helpful.

The grip-shift gear shifter is fine and easy to use, but the need to stop pedalling to allow the complex internal hub gear to shift breaks up your rhythm when climbing.

The sheer power on tap from the Bosch unit renders the need for 14 gears somewhat redundant too.

On most electric bikes, there is an element of using the motor modes to take up some of the velocity changes you instigate with gear shifts.

I think the Orox would be a superior bike with a rear-hub system such as Enviolo’s stepless-shifting Automatiq hub, as found on the Canyon’s Precede:ON. With a 510 per cent range, it's a close match for the Rohloff’s 528 per cent.

The only other issue I had on my demo rides was a rear puncture. You’d imagine a massive tyre such as the Johnny Watts would be somewhat impervious to penetration. However, a good old British bramble thorn was its undoing.

The bike had been set up with inner tubes, even though the Schwalbe tyres and huge Atlas X70 rims are tubeless-compatible.

Changing the tube isn’t an easy job. Unhooking the Rohloff dropout array and removing a hefty wheel was made slightly easier, as with all of Tern’s cargo bikes, by standing the Orox on its end (on the rear rack).

But removing the tyre was a two-person job, such was the tight fit exacerbated by the inner tube. I’ve fed this back to Tern and hope the brand will instruct dealers to make the Orox tubeless for customers.

Rest assured, the sort of puncture I suffered would have been sealed easily by a tubeless setup.

The Orox has ample range. Over my few days with the bike, I maxed out at 65.9 miles/106km on a mix of off-road and tarmac with 3,881ft/1,183m of climbing in cold December conditions.

Those rides were only depleting one of the two 800W/h batteries, which depending on load, rider, and topography, points towards a maximum range with both batteries of potentially in excess of 130 miles/210km.

Tern has cleverly created a frame pack to house the main battery. Any long-term ebike users will know batteries suffer a drop in performance in cold conditions and the frame pack is designed to offer insulation for the oversized external 800Wh battery the Orox uses.

Tern Orox R14 bottom line

Despite the niggle with the tyre setup and the unconventional shifting of the Rohloff, I’ve found the Tern Orox a massive amount of fun.

I’m not sure what the market is for a long-wheelbase utility haulage bike that's built to go off-road.

Tern gives examples such as a parent looking for all-weather family transport; a fisherman needing to get to a pristine spot that’s too far to hike, inaccessible by car, or too tough to cycle; an urbanite seeking a car replacement; or even an adventure tourism company buying support vehicles for singletrack bike tours.

What I am sure of is I’m certainly glad Tern made the Orox.

In fact, it has earned a spot on my perfect bike garage wishlist.

Because you never know when you’re going to need to go off-road, cross-country, even through the snow to pick up a month's worth of groceries or more.

However, think I’d opt for the simpler and cheaper Shimano XT option over the complexities and quirks of this Rohloff-equipped version.