Giant Escape 0 Disc 2021

The Giant Escape 0 Disc is functional but fun, good value and versatile. Its quality frame, full-carbon fork and decent weight make it a very attractive proposition for £899, whether you're sticking to the traditional commuting, fitness and day-to-day riding duties that hybrids are known for, or loading it up for bigger, longer and more adventurous days out, because the Escape part of its name isn't a misnomer. It's comfortable on the roughest of roads and will cope with a variety of unsurfaced routes without complaint.

The hybrid has for many years been seen as the runt of the cycling world. Road bikes and mountain bikes are the picks of the litter; gravel, bikepacking and touring bikes can lead you to a world of adventure, but the hybrid? A more humble commuter, ride-about-town and leisure riding sort of thing. In other words, exactly the sort of cycling that most British riders do most of the time. Which is probably why Giant prefers to call its Escape 'a versatile flat-bar all-rounder', a bike you can use for your 'commute to work, ride to class' and to find new adventures on'.

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But exactly as with the hybrid's more exotic brethren, the quality of hybrid bikes has improved over the last few years, gaining trickle-down technology – including hydraulic brakes, 1x transmission and tubeless-ready wheels and tyres – that should improve performance and add to the enjoyability of the ride.

Ride

Ah, Giant's Escape is a dull-as hybrid, so it'll be boring and functional, then? Well, it's certainly functional – I fitted a rear rack and carried half a week's shopping in a couple of rammed panniers. But don't forget the Escape part of the bike's name…

I took this for a Sunday afternoon spin along the canal towpath – okay, the whole trip was only 35 or so miles, but then again it was about 30°C. The bike proved faultless on the dry and dusty surface, the tyres gripping well, and the saddle – aided by the flex-giving carbon seatpost – proving comfortable.

The Escape coped equally well with loose gravel and, of course, tarmac on longer days out. My usual proviso with a flat-barred bike is that I'd fit forward-facing Ergon bar ends, or similar, for the extra handhold over longer excursions, as the Giant's flat bar limits your options and fatigue will set in earlier, but that's an inexpensive and easy-to-fit option.

The Escape has a good weight for a hybrid bike at this price. Okay, so 10.5kg isn't road-bike light, but it's not that weighty either – it's similar to the Tour de France-winning bikes of Miguel Indurain and Joop Zoetemelk – though those bikes would be rubbish on canal towpaths and for carrying your shopping... And most of the time, unless you're on a steep climb, a few grams here or there make very little difference.

The geometry is casual, with a laidback 71-degree head tube angle and a stretched-out 107.5cm wheelbase. Throw in 38mm-wide tyres and you'll find the Escape comfortable for both short commutes and longer leisure rides.

Its low bottom gear will get you up even steep or challenging climbs and excellent braking helps when you're descending. It's not a bike to go hurtling down Alpine descents on, but for the sort of hills most of us ride, it behaves perfectly, with good grip from the tyres and smooth, powerful and controlled braking from the hydraulic discs.

Frame and fork

Few companies in the world have more experience at producing high-quality frames – at all sorts of prices and also under names other than Giant – and unlike virtually every other large-scale bike manufacturer, Giant even makes the aluminium that it then forms into frames.

The Escape frame is made from what Giant calls Aluxx, the name for its own 6061 aluminium that's similar to that used to make most road and hybrid bikes at this sort of price, as it's reasonably inexpensive and easy to work with. Giant's Aluxx is single butted, which means the ends are thicker for greater strength where they're welded, but with narrower, lighter walls between them.

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The frame itself is compact – well, this is a Giant – with a flattened top tube and slim, slightly curved seatstays for maximum rear-end comfort.

The seat tube is narrower at the top to house Giant's own D-Fuse 'self-align' composite seatpost. Yes, another standard, but this being Giant I don't think you'll struggle to find suitable posts for the foreseeable future. Its unusual shape does require two seatclamp bolts, but tightened to 5Nm the post stayed secure with no slipping over bumps.

The Escape has a full-carbon fork with Giant's own tapered oversize 'OverDrive' steerer, which it claims has up to 15 per cent more torsional stiffness than a straight steerer. It certainly feels solid and controlled when riding.

I always like to see a full complement of fixtures and fittings on bikes designed for day-to-day riding and Giant doesn't disappoint here. The Escape has front and rear rack mounts and mudguard mounts, complete with a rear 'non-brake' bridge drilled for a full-length mudguard, and its practical credentials are rounded out with a kickstand plate.

There's bags of clearance too, with frame and fork accommodating 45mm tyres. I even found a use for the two plastic washers on the seat tube's bottle bosses – they stopped the struts of my old Tubus rack making contact with the frame welds where the stays meet.

And while it may only be a hybrid (sorry, a 'versatile flat-bar all-rounder'), the Escape does have neatly internally routed gear cables and hydraulic hoses.

It does have quick-release levers rather than thru-axles, but this didn't seem to have any negative effect on the braking.

About the only absentees if you were being picky are a third set of bosses (no bento box on the top tube or third bottle cage under the down tube) and a dynamo cable drilling for the fork, but that's being ultra fussy.

Groupset

Not that long ago your bog-standard hybrid might have had a triple chainset inherited from early mountain bikes, but more recently the double chainset – usually in the form of a 50/34 compact – reigned supreme. But the last few years have seen the steady incursion of single-ring chainsets, this time inherited from the more recent generation of mountain and gravel bikes.

This has several advantages – with only one ring you save the weight of the second chainring, front derailleur and the front shifter – which makes for fewer things to go wrong too. The disadvantage is a more limited range of gearing, but with the cassette's side plate-sized 46-tooth large sprocket (listed as 42T on Giant's website) paired with a 42T chainring, the Escape's bottom gear is a fair bit lower than the 34x34 pairing of a compact with an 11-34 cassette – 24.58in compared with 27.01in. That may not look like much, but is roughly nine per cent lower, a significant difference if you live in a hilly area.

It does mean a slightly restricted top gear, but the Giant's 42x11 (103.17in) is pretty much identical to a 50x13 (103.98in). Is that especially limiting? Not for me. And probably not for most potential buyers, most of the time.

If you're riding at a cadence of 100 you'll be powering along at a shade over 30mph, and if you up your cadence to 110 you'll be hitting nearly 34mph. Okay, if you're riding down an Alpine or Pyrenean col you may spin out, and even on some of my local climbs my legs reached a speed at which they couldn't keep up, but I'd suggest that not only is this a price worth paying – for the weight loss and drivetrain simplicity – but for all but the very strongest riders it's bordering on an irrelevance.

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While the Giant doesn't boast SRAM's 'Narrow Wide' chainrings, I couldn't get the chain to misbehave with the cost-cutting ProWheel RPP chainring and Shimano cassette. Even trying to get it to jump by spinning the pedals backwards violently or multiple rapid shifts resulted in not one single unshipping of the chain; if you are concerned you could always get a chain catcher.

The only other downside is that if you've spent years riding bikes with multiple chainrings, you might find yourself reaching for the non-existent left-hand shifter. It's a habit that takes a while to shake.

While the rear mech is a higher-spec XT and the cassette Deore, the brakes are from Shimano's more budget Altus groupset, but though less expensive, the performance of the brakes is far from entry-level. They have a light two- to three-finger action, with bags of power and control.

There was occasionally a little bit of noise when you start braking but this never translated to full-on screeching or squealing. So, budget, yes, but these brakes belie their modest price.

Wheels and tyres

The Escape's wheels and tyres are both tubeless ready, and while many bike brands economise to a lesser or greater degree when it comes to tyres, these CrossCut Metros come in at £40 each – which is a pretty hefty chunk of the bike's cost. Presumably one of the advantages of speccing your own components throughout. They worked without issue on every surface I tried them on, comfortable on tarmac, and grippy on grit and towpath dirt.

The wheels, too, coped with poor (make that very poor) road surfaces, and going up and down kerbs, and the rims' 45mm maximum tyre width allows you to go wider for even more comfort or for greater off-road grip.

Finishing kit

It's pretty much a full lineup of Giant-branded kit for the Escape, from the alloy stem and bar to the handlebar grips, seatpost and saddle. And all of it is perfectly functional and well chosen for their various purposes.

The bar is wider than that on similar size bikes from Trek and Specialized, measuring a lengthy 660mm, which offers great control on climbs and on poorer surfaces, though it can make it harder to get through narrow gaps in traffic. I found the rubber grips comfortable, too.

I had no problems with the Giant Sport Comfort saddle, and the full-carbon D-profile seatpost is a useful addition to the kit, with most of Giant's competitors at this price offering round aluminium posts.

While this bike doesn't come with a kickstand, rack or mudguards, it's good to see fixtures for fitting all of these extras.

Value

Giant's Escape scores pretty decently for value against similarly specced bikes from its main competitors, though as they vary their kit it's hard to compare exactly. Cannondale's Quick 2 is based around a Shimano Sora 9-speed setup with a double chainset. As with the Escape, the Cannondale has thru-axles and hydraulic disc brakes – albeit from Tektro rather than Shimano – and has similarly laidback geometry, with a shallow head angle and long, leisurely wheelbase. But at £950 it's that bit more expensive than the Escape. That said, I think the gold-coloured Canny outscores the more sober Giant for looks, Giant seeming to have no other paint than black or grey on its shelves this year...

Specialized's Sirrus 3 also has a lot in common with the Giant, including a muted, mainly black colour scheme. Disc brakes, thru-axles, shallow head angle, long wheelbase... there's a familiar theme developing. But as with the Cannondale Quick 2 it's a twin-chainring 9-speed Sora setup and Tektro brakes, and comes with a £950 price tag.

The three bikes that really challenge Giant's Escape for value are Trek's FX Disc 3, Pinnacle's Neon 2 and the Merida Speeder 200, all at the same price of £775. The Trek does have a lower-spec Acera groupset than the Giant, though they share the same brakes and very similar geometry.

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Evans's Pinnacle brand has gone for a road-biased groupset for its Neon 2, but a predominantly Shimano 105 drivetrain is very, very good at the Pinnacle's modest price, especially when paired with Shimano's hydraulic disc brakes. Pinnacle does cut costs with its fork, however, plumping for aluminium rather than carbon.

When I tested the Merida Speeder 200 earlier this year it really impressed me, easily living up to its billing as a sporty and comfortable bike. As with Giant's Escape, I found this pretty much ideal for all sorts of urban and suburban riding, and as with the Giant, it has an aluminium frame, a carbon fork with a tapered steerer and wide – or wide-ish – 32mm tyres, though they weren't that impressive on wet roads.

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All told, though, I think the Giant is well worth the money, especially considering the all-round quality of its ride, its simple 1x shifting and well-chosen components. I found it such an really enjoyable ride it's one I would turn to even after I'd finished testing it.

Verdict

Great comfort, quality braking, good gears and bags of all-round practicality – Giant shows there's life in the hybrid yet