Cube Editor 2020

The Cube Editor is a fun, friendly and very practical round-town bike that's capable of much more than just getting you to work or the shops.

If you want a bike that's almost fuss-free, that you can just jump on and go ride to work, to the shops or for a day's pootling round the lanes, the Editor, with its belt drive and hub gears, is a bike you should definitely consider. That it's a friendly and appealing ride too is just the icing on the cake.

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What we have here is an aluminium-framed flat-bar town (and country) bike with an aluminium fork, Shimano Alfine 11-speed hub gear, Gates Carbon Drive belt drive, Shimano Deore hydraulic disc brakes and Schwalbe Marathon Supreme tyres.

That précis of the spec list promises a practical bike, but doesn't hint that this is a fun bike too. Note, this is a review of the 2020 Editor; there's now a newer model for 2021, which looks the same but for a change of colour and an extra £200 on the price tag.

The belt drive

The central feature that sets the Editor apart from most round-town bikes is its Gates Carbon Drive CDX belt drive. This comprises a toothed belt with matching broad sprockets instead of your usual chain and narrow pointy chainrings and sprockets. Belt drives have a number of pros and cons, so let's take a quick look at them.

A belt drive's big advantage is that it's clean. It doesn't need any lubrication, so it doesn't get grubby the way a chain does from crud sticking to oil. Rather than the rigmarole of cleaning and relubing that's necessary with a chain drive, you just give a belt drive the occasional scrub when the rest of the bike needs cleaning.

That means a belt drive bike is civilian clothes-friendly. Not only will the belt not leave oil marks on your trousers, but without the teeth of a chain drive there's nothing to snag your cuffs either.

Gates claims a belt lasts more than twice as long as a chain. If you're used to derailleur gear systems that get a couple or three thousand miles out of a chain that may not sound too impressive, but the wrinkle is that chains on single-speed and hub-gear bikes last far longer than on derailleur systems because they run in a straight line without the side-loads that contribute to derailleur chain wear. Expedition cyclists using belt drives say you can get almost 20,000 miles out of a belt.

The two biggest disadvantages are that you need a special frame to accommodate a belt drive, and the only way to get multiple gears is with a hub gear; you can't use a derailleur.

The frame requirement comes about because the belt is one piece so you need to be able to split the rear triangle to pass the belt through it. Bike makers typically put a joint in the right-hand seatstay, as Cube has done. You unbolt it and gently flex the ends apart so the belt can pass through.

You also need a way of tensioning the belt. It has to be tight enough that it can't come unmeshed from the sprockets under load. The Editor achieves this with an eccentric bottom bracket, holding the bottom bracket bearings in an extra shell that can move in the frame to change the distance between the cranks and rear dropouts. Other belt-drive bikes use sliding dropouts.

You can't use a derailleur because the belt needs to be under tension to keep it engaged with the sprocket, so to get a wide gear range you need a hub gear.

Gates still seems to be the only supplier of toothed-belt drives for bikes. Continental had a go in the early 2010s with a belt drive that was used for the Ikea Sladda bike, but problems with the belt led to a recall in 2018 and it hasn't been resurrected.

Ride

The Editor is gloriously friendly and fuss-free. The Gates belt drive is smooth and silent and the Alfine gear shifter needs just a gentle touch to pop you from one gear to another, though it doesn't quite have the light and precise feel of Shimano's top-end road bike shifting.

Tyres often make a big contribution to a bike's ride (see Neil's review of the Spa Cycles Wayfarer for a great example of the difference tyres make). Cube has got tyre choice bang on here with 42mm Schwalbe Marathon Supremes, which combine sensibly low rolling resistance, decent puncture resistance and loads of comfy, cushioning width and grip. I've used Marathon Supremes for commuting, touring and riding dirt roads and trails in dry conditions. They're terrific, versatile tyres that help make the Editor quick, surefooted and reliable.

I like a fairly long-reach riding position, even on a flat-bar bike, so I swapped out the stock 100mm Cube stem for a 120mm unit. That yielded a position that was good for everything from blatting round town to pootling round the lanes. I'm sure normal people would be happy with the stock stem.

Hub gears are often criticised for being less mechanically efficient than derailleur gears. A study by Elizabeth A Casteel and Mark Archibald found the Alfine 11-speed hub to have efficiencies from 90.44% to 96.63% depending on the gear, compared to 97.69% to 99.37% for a Shimano 7-speed derailleur system and 95.79% to 99.49% for a Rohloff Speedhub. However, an earlier study by James Spicer found a much wider range of efficiencies for derailleur gears, from 80.9% to 98.6%, depending on the operating conditions. In other words, a perfectly clean and well-lubricated derailleur setup is better than an Alfine 11 hub, but the derailleur is severely degraded if you let it get clagged up with road crud, which is the way far too many utility bikes end up.

If you've got a pro team mechanic looking after your commuting bike then you're better off with derailleurs, at least as far as pure mechanical efficiency is concerned, but a belt-drive-and-Alfine system needs very little maintenance to keep it working pretty well, so it's still an attractive proposition for some applications.

Certainly, the Editor's drive doesn't feel draggy as you ride along; it feels just like, well, a really nice bike.

The Alfine 11 is the most expensive and sophisticated hub gear Shimano makes and offers a total gear range of 408%. Of widely-available hub gear systems only Rohloff gives you more range, with 14 gears over a 526% range in a hub that costs around £1,000. For comparison, a typical 50/34 chainset with an 11-32 cassette, as you might find on a modern hybrid, has a 426% range.

With a 46-tooth chainring and 22-tooth sprocket, the Editor has a high gear of 122 inches and a low of 30. Frankly, that's a bit silly. Nobody needs a 122-inch gear on a round-town bike, but if you were to venture out of town at the weekend you'd likely be grateful for something lower than that 30-inch bottom gear. One of the disadvantages of a belt drive is that changing gear range is expensive as you'll need new sprockets and a new belt, so it's important for the manufacturer to get it right in the first place.

Other details

I'm a big fan of features like the Editor's belt drive and hub gear, but I wish Cube offered a fully-loaded version too, taking advantage of bike company buying power to include a rack, mudguards, lighting system, frame lock and even a centre stand. Cube could call it the Editor-at-Large.

Lack of, at the very least, rack and mudguards is the biggest downside of the Editor. Sure they're not hard to retrofit, but a bike that's described as 'the ultimate urban assault bike' really really needs them to be fitted as standard. It's not like Cube doesn't have the capability; all its Touring models have racks and guards (and lights and kickstands for that matter).

On an urban bike, the choice of a 660mm-wide handlebar is a touch odd. Okay, it's not the 740mm of a typical mountain bike handlebar these days, but it still puts you in a stance that feels a bit splayed. And of course, if you're gap-storming through traffic it increases your chances of getting hung up on a wing mirror. Still, sorting it out is a few minutes' work with a tube-cutter. Or, if you're me, slap on one of the 580mm flat bars you've inexplicably still got hanging around from the Bronze Age of mountain biking.

Speaking of which, the Shimano Deore hydraulic disc brakes are straight out of the modern era of mountain biking where they have a reputation for providing plenty of stopping power at a very sensible price. There's plenty of braking power here for road use too, from just a single finger on the lever, and more importantly it's easily controlled power. If you're running a flat-bar bike with cable discs you could do a lot worse than replace them with these. 

As I said up top, the bike on test here and pictured is the 2020 model. For 2021 it's gone all shiny and looks differently handsome, like this:

Conclusion

There aren't many bikes around with belt drives, let alone in tandem with Shimano's most expensive hub gear, so there's not much to compare the Editor with. It's not as nippy as the appropriately named Merida Speeder that Matt raved about, but it's not intended to be; that's a flat-bar road bike, this is an, ahem, urban assault vehicle. But the Editor is just as characterful as the Speeder and in its own way just as much fun.

The 2021 Editor is a whole £400 cheaper than the Shand Leveret which only has an 8-speed Alfine hub rather than an 11-speeder, and about the same as Trek or Specialized's derailleur-geared carbon-fibre townies, which gain composite cachet at the expense of component level. The extra £300 over a Canyon Commuter 5.0 gets you Alfine 11 instead of Nexus 8, though you lose the Canyon's rack, mudguards and built-in lights.

> Buyer’s Guide: 10 of the best hybrid bikes

Judged on its own substantial merits, though, the Editor is a terrific round-town bike with a smart, balanced specification and impeccable road manners, that begs you to do more than just dash into town on it, and makes doing so very straightforward and fuss-free. It's both day-to-day practical (once you've added a rack and guards) and weekend enjoyable.

Verdict

Fundamentally great town bike and weekend cruiser that just needs a couple of practical touches to live up to its hype