Bianchi E-Oltre — Lightweight Ultegra Di2 Road E-Bike | Bike Review

A lightweight e-road bike that’s a bicycle first and an e-bike second. The Bianchi E-Oltre weighs just 26 pounds 5 ounces, runs a Mahle X30 rear-hub drive with pedal-assist up to 20 mph and no throttle, and comes in at a little over $6,000 — a genuinely unique bike in a category that’s mostly raced to the bottom. Maklin doesn’t stock many e-bikes anymore, but this is the kind of one worth special-ordering.

A Bicycle First, E-Bike Second

Maklin sold a lot of e-bikes in its first few years, then pulled back — most of those were hybrid e-bikes, and that market got cannibalized by a race to the bottom: throttles, moped-style builds, and cheap parts you can’t even identify. The shop stepped away from stocking much of it, sticking to the road, gravel and mountain bikes it can actually get service parts for.

The E-Oltre is the opposite of that. It’s definitely a bicycle — light assist to help on the hills, not a speed machine. At 40 Nm and 250W, it’s deliberately not a high-torque unit. Steve draws the comparison to the mountain-bike world: on one end the heavy, high-torque, big-battery e-MTBs built to shuttle you back to the top; on the other, lighter cross-country e-bikes (like Salsa’s Fazua-equipped bike) with smoother engagement that still feel like the bike you’ve been riding, just with a boost to keep up on the group ride. The E-Oltre is that second kind, for the road.

Who It’s For

This one was special-ordered for a longtime Bianchi rider in their 70s — someone who’d been on the same Bianchi for 20 years and wasn’t planning to replace it until damaged, unrepairable dropouts forced the issue. They weren’t quite ready for an e-bike, but saw it coming: friends in their group rides are migrating to light assist to keep pace, and as they put it, none of them ride 20 mph anyway — so a fast “speed” e-bike was beside the point. What they wanted was a real bike with just enough boost to handle the hills and keep the two-hour rides from getting shorter with age. That’s exactly the E-Oltre’s brief.

The Build

It’s very close to a full Ultegra Di2 build. Ultegra Di2 shifters (with the handy programmable buttons on the hoods for scrolling a Garmin), an Ultegra crank, and an Ultegra derailleur — paired with a 105 cassette for its wider range and a 105 chain to match. The 53/40 chainrings make sense here: with assist capped at 20 mph, there’s no need for a 52/36. Carbon wheels round it out. The cockpit is integrated — brake lines route through the headset and up into an aluminum, semi-aero bar — and there are assist-level adjust buttons on each side of the bar, so you can dial the boost up or down without reaching back to the main unit.

Built on the Oltre Platform

Set the E-Oltre next to a Bianchi Oltre Pro and an Oltre Comp and the family resemblance is clear — the seat-stay junctions are very similar. The differences: the fork is a different mold, and the rear end is naturally its own thing to house the hub-drive unit. The color, which Steve was unsure about from the website photos, looks fantastic in person — the photos don’t do it justice. It’s a low-volume bike, so there won’t be many out there.

Serviceability

Steve’s single biggest gripe with e-bikes over the years has been serviceability — plenty of them make you drop the whole mid-drive unit or pull batteries just to run a shift cable and tune the shifting. Going Di2 sidesteps all of that: no shift cables to deal with, just brake lines. For a shop that wants to be able to service what it sells, that’s a real point in the E-Oltre’s favor.