The Lotus Type 136 is a £20000 e-road bike inspired by an Olympic gold-medal winning track frame - BikeRadar

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Published: November 1, 2023 at 2:00 pm

Lotus has launched the Type 136, a £20,000 electric road bike with a carbon frame that mimics the shape of the Great Britain cycling team’s world-beating track bike.

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The Type 136 is equipped with the HPS electric bike motor system, which the French brand says is the world’s lightest at 1.2kg.

Its frame draws inspiration from the Hope HB.T track bike, designed in collaboration with Lotus, for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The first-edition run of the Type 136 will be limited to 136 bikes. Individually numbered and painted in Lotus’ signature gold and black colours, they will cost £20,000 / €25,000.

The standard version will go on sale in spring 2024 (pricing TBC).

Handmade in Italy

Enormous fork and seatstay clearance is claimed to save watts.

Lotus

Lotus’ involvement in cycling dates back to the Type 108 track bike ridden by Chris Boardman to gold at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

By 2019, that bike had morphed into the Hope/Lotus HB.T. The radical frame took advantage of UCI rules permitting fork and seatstays to be up to 8cm wide in a bid to vastly reduce drag.

The Type 136 replicates the Hope HB.T’s wide fork stance.

Mick Kirkman / Immediate Media

With its wide fork stance and chainstays, the new Type 136 imitates the frame that helped Great Britain’s cyclists dominate on the track at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The Type 136’s V-shaped handlebar bears close resemblance to the cockpit on the Cervélo S5.

The Type 136 is claimed to be aero and light, for an electric road bike.

Lotus

The high-end build includes a SRAM Red eTap AXS groupset, DT Swiss ARC 1100 wheels and Pirelli P Zero Race TLR tyres.

Lotus says the Type 136’s carbon frame is handmade in Italy and claims the full bike weighs 9.8kg in an unspecified size. That would make it one of the lightest electric road bikes on the market.

‘World’s lightest ebike motor system’

Despite its motor and battery, Lotus says the Type 136 is a performance road bike.

Lotus

Weighing a claimed 1.2kg, HPS says its Watt Assist Pro electric bike motor system, used on the Type 136, is the lightest in the world.

The Monaco-based brand says the system was developed by FI engineers and ex-Team Sky professional Phil Deignan.

The system provides up to a “35 per cent advantage” on climbs, with minimal impact on the weight distribution, balance and handling of the bike, according to HPS.

The battery looks like a water bottle and slots into the bottle cage.

Lotus

The motor integrates into the bottom bracket shell. The 193Wh battery (300g, claimed weight) can provide up to three hours of assist while climbing, according to HPS.

It looks like a water bottle and can be removed from the ‘Domestique’ seat tube bottle cage for charging.

The HPS system has ANT+ connectivity so it can connect to bike computers and display the assist mode.

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HPS claims the Watt Assist Pro can be calibrated to increase assistance when your heart rate rises to keep you within certain training zones.

Jack Evans is a digital writer for BikeRadar.com Jack learnt to ride on rough Cotswold trails before switching to tarmac in his teens. Gravel riding and cyclocross racing (badly) has since taken him back to his roots. Most at home scaling south Wales climbs, Jack more commonly escapes his home in Birmingham via the lanes and bridleways of Worcestershire, riding either his Canyon Ultimate road bike or Canyon Grail gravel bike. He wishes he was as good at riding as he is drinking espresso. But he has completed the 296km Dragon Devil sportive in under 10 hours and finished in the top 100 at the 2022 UK National Hill Climb Championships. Jack is an NCTJ-trained journalist and a former press agency hack with bylines in The Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mirror. He was once electrocuted for a Sun frontpage exclusive and taste-tested camel milk for The Times.