A partial car substitute? Trek’s new cargo bike, reviewed

Enlarge (credit: John TImmer)

As I watched a few berries I had just carted home roll gently down my driveway and into the road, it was hard to escape the sense that my plan to use nothing but a cargo bike for two weeks might have been overly ambitious. Several weeks filled with Canadian wildfire smoke and tornado warnings later, it was pretty clear that I had greatly underestimated the complexities involved.

The e-bike I used for my testing, the newly introduced Trek Fetch+ 2, is very good, and it readily hauled whatever I asked of it. But using a cargo bike is very different from any other biking experience I've had—and that's saying something, given the large range of bike styles I've now had the pleasure of sampling.

So this review will be divided into two parts. In the first, I'll talk a bit about the cargo bike experience; if you already know what that's like, you can skip ahead to the second half, where we'll go in-depth on the Fetch+ 2.