Forbidden Druid CorE review: first impressions

Words and images | Justin Henehan

While Forbidden took its time conjuring up its first e-bike, most of the mountain bike world couldn’t wait. Speculation swirled like crows clacking their beaks at the promise of carrion. The media scried, keyboard warriors flailed their phalanges, forum foragers chattered, YouTubers yawned ostentatious opinions, and AI slop oozed in anticipation.

Even still, many were surprised at what emerged from those mists of conjecture—a crustacean creature with otherworldly powers, an anomaly swaddled in the language of an ill-fitting wolf-skin cliché and heralded by a pulp-horror poster that winked at the vitality of the online scene’s cynicism.

Eventually the shapes came into focus and the people began to realise this was maybe the most Forbidden-Forbidden to ever emerge from the eponymous plateau. It was a high pivot bike, yes, but more importantly the geometry was an evolution of founder Owen Pemberton’s “One Ride” philosophy—proportional geometry for all!

And that motor: the Avinox system has excited and enraged mountain bikers since it seemingly dropped from the sky into our unsuspecting laps. In a class of its own, many suspected that the Chinese donk had finally been strapped to a chassis worthy of its belligerence. 

The first shipment of the globally-scarce Druid CorE and LitE ebikes landed at 3Sixty Sports in Aotearoa at the end of the September and mostly shot straight out the door. The next shipment in November was also in high demand. I got hold of a CorE 3 from the first shipment and—spoiler alert—I’ve been having a lot of fun riding it. Here are some early impressions of what the folk at Forbidden have cooked up.

One of the many interesting things Forbidden Bike Co Founder Owen Pemberton said in our recent conversation, which you can read in full here, is that e-bikes need different geometry—they climb faster, descend even quicker and the weight distribution does things to the handling and suspension performance. 

“A lot of bikes were built around getting the geometry pretty much the same as non-e-bikes, but the more e-bikes I rode, the more I realised that that’s not what you want to do.”

The takeaway? You can’t just bolt a motor to an analogue bike and expect it to be a good e-bike. 

And that’s definitely not what Forbidden did with the CorE. The Druid e-bike is ahead of the curve in a number of ways. Forbidden’s bikes have always had size-proportional chainstays, but with this bike they’ve also increased the stack, creating an e-bike that has truly proportional geometry across the whole size range. The result is a bike that moves the rider’s centre of gravity up and back on the descents, creating a standing position more akin to a downhill rig. And when the trail points up, that geometry puts you in the middle of the bike and further forward of the rear axle, resisting front-wheel lift and increasing grip.

When it came to the linkage, Forbidden’s goal was to integrate the Avinox motor while ensuring seat-tubes were short, dropper posts were long, and standover clearance was ample. They ticked all those boxes by simply flippling the inverted horst-link suspension layout to the more conventional “crab-link” guise, a move that had the Vital MTB soothsayers in raptures. 

The kinematics remain recognisably Forbidden: the axle-path moves rearward about 18mm for its 150mm of travel, anti-squat sits in the 100 per cent zone, pedal kickback is kept low, and progression is an air-or-coil-shock-agnostic 25 per cent.

The Avinox M1 motor was a late addition to the project after Owen spent an afternoon riding an Amflow. Plenty has already been written about the Avinox motor (and this isn’t an Avinox review) but Owen said he was impressed by its power delivery, quality and reliability, and the company’s willingness to act on feedback. 

Climbing

My first rides took place at Craigieburn, Canterbury on the edge of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. It had been a wet spring, so only the Edge and Luge tracks were open at the time. For repeatability purposes, I rode the Edge climb and Luge descent for this review, a moderately technical climb and flat and relatively fast downhill with plenty of bony beech roots. It was wet, which meant sludgy beech-forest loam, sniper roots, and wheels akimbo. 

In order to get a sense of the bike’s character, I put the Avinox M1 motor in Auto, which senses your output and adapts its power to suit, and set about scrabbling up the technical climb and slithering down the descent multiple times.

Immediately noticeable on the steep and slippery start of the climb was how well the Druid CorE resisted front-wheel lift. Where other full-power e-bikes tend to get light up front, completely taking away your ability to steer, or worse, looping out in a power wheelie, the CorE felt balanced and planted, front tyre tracking while the rear tyre grubbed for grip like an excited truffle pig.

On rootier and rocky sections, the rearward axle path did a great job of getting the wheel up and over obstacles. That, combined with the lack of pedal kickback and good anti-squat figures, made the bike feel like it could crawl over anything, as long as I kept spinning. 

And there’s an interesting ally in that—the 150mm cranks. There were a few crow’s feet when I saw that number on the spec sheet, and they did feel odd at first, kind of like running with small steps, but I quickly got used to them. The 150mm-long cranks allow you to keep turning a consistent cadence with plenty of clearance, reducing the need to hack and time pedal strokes or resort to bursts of power and motor overrun to clean obstacles. That consistent cadence means consistent power to the contact patch, and that means consistent grip.

All these factors combine to make the Druid CorE feel calm and controlled on technical climbs. The geometry creates a large area to move your body in, allowing you to balance in tech sections as well as pilot the bike, and the kinematics, idler, and short cranks help to evenly lay down the Avinox motor’s power with control and precision. 

When I reviewed the Druid V2 for Spoke magazine, I was struck by how well it climbed technical trails. The CorE feels even better, but with a very good motor attached. While the crew at Forbidden set out to make an e-bike that descended well first, I think they’ve also created one of the best climbing mountain bikes out there. And Forbidden’s One Ride proportional geometry means that you’ll get the same handling experience no matter what size bike you ride.

Descending

Dropping into the descent I expected the CorE to feel a bit short, but it felt somehow more natural, like I’d been riding the wrong size bike up until then. I’m 183cm and used to riding a fairly conventional 480mm-reach bike with a 639mm stack and 35mm-long stem but the CorE’s 467mm reach and 662mm stack with a 40mm stem felt like Goldilocks-stuff from the get go. The Druid e-bikes are a perfect example of how stack and reach should be considered together. 

As a flat-pedal rider, the Forbidden geometry made dropping my heels and getting behind the pedal axles easier. I think the 150mm cranks helped here too, putting your feet in a more parallel position, squaring up your hips more in line with your shoulders, creating a bike that wants to carve like a slalom skier on a pow day. 

Ploughing into the first root ball in anger, the back end floated through with a slightly flat tyre-like feel despite the 30psi in my Minions—the terrain was there but in a kind of serenely hollowed out way. The lack of pedal kickback added to the serenity as I pummelled into stuff that should’ve unsettled my feet but just didn’t. 

At 22.6kg, the Druid CorE is far from heavy for a full power e-bike, particularly one with 105NM of torque and an 800WH battery. And while that’s also not light, the CorE still felt poppy and easier to pick up than that number would suggest, compressing and hopping with the energy of a much lighter bike.

The balance of front centre, rear centre and stack on this bike just seems to naturally coax you into a good body position, lifting your eye-line and creating a sense of composure and confidence that mutes the minutiae under your wheels and frees you up to just ride the shape of the trail. This is a bike that creates bandwidth, slowing everything down despite the extra speed you’re carrying.

Who would dig this bike?

Forbidden has created something special with the Druid CorE. In building an e-bike focused on descending, Forbidden has also made a bike that I think handles technical climbing better than anything out there. And then when things go downhill, the CorE encourages a strong body position, allowing you to steer with your hips and feet while feeling calm and composed. It’s a bike that hides its full-power weight well and even manages to feel lively and easy to get off the ground.

Riders who want a full-power e-bike that is agile enough for raw backcountry terrain, composed enough for high-speed gnar, and poppy enough to lock in Koru-Lounge privileges will really enjoy the Druid CorE. It’s an e-bike built from the ground up to harmonise geometry, kinematics, components and motor power so you can crawl over root and rock-filled features and pop, plough, and carve your way back down. And when you get to the bottom you can turn around and do it all again. And again. And again…