Arriving yesterday at the front door, the production
version of the ELITE DIRETO Smart Trainer, or the
DIRETO as we like to refer to it as. I've had the pre-
production version for a few weeks now. We've done the
preview video on this. It's held up really, really well. It's
my trainer of choice for the last three weeks. We had to
give it a thorough testing, and we have, myself and my
wife Veronica. She has quite a few trainers to choose from
here. That's one been on the menu quite a bit.
So today we go to the unboxing, the building, and we'll go
for another ride on this unit, which may be a game changer
on the cheaper end of the direct drive smart trainer market.
First of all this box. It's actually pretty sturdy. So the box
test passed. Let's go to the specs of the unit first for all the
details. Flipping over to the official spec sheet, we can see
here the power major is an optical toque sensor,
accuracy between plus or minus 2.5%. We saw in the
pre-production version, this was very, very good. The
wireless transmission: ANT+ FE-C: power, speed, cadence, and
Bluetooth. One thing of note, these are also dual
broadcast at the same time. Really, really handy for a few
of us to do a few funky things indoors with multiple programs.
Maximum slope 14%, that's more than enough for anyone
climbing up a hill. Maximum power is quoted at 40 km an hour
which will give you 1400 watts. But if you can crank up
to 60 km an hour with the flywheel you'll get 2200 watts of
resistance, more than enough for anybody including André Greipel.
What else do we have here? Compatible with MyET raining
software which is from Elite themselves. We have
Zwift, Trainer Road, BikeVo, KinoMap, Sufferfest, and anything that supports those
stands would be right to go. Flywheel 4.2 kilos.
Flywheel weight is an interesting one depending on the
speed of the flywheel required, the gearing, the belts
inside. But it's good inertia. We'll talk more about that later.
Standard across the board by compatibility there, and also
142 x 12 thru axle compatibility. I've done a video on that
specifically on this trainer too, so I'll link it below to how
do you convert these with the included kit that it comes
with. Size-wise the Direto is quite a large unit. It takes the cake
for length, width and height, compared to all the smart
trainers on the market at the moment, but still much
smaller than the standard bike wheel, so no problems
there. And the legs fold up pretty easily. We'll go through that in a minute.
The claimed weight of
the unit itself is 15 kilos. The box itself as shipped came
in at 19 kilos. Another thing of note is the trainer doesn't
come with a cassette. So grab yourself one of those at the
shop or order one online when you're ordering the trainer
as well and get up and running. Today I have an Ultegra
11-25. I find 11-25 is a good ratio indoors. It gives me
everything that I need and with the 14% resistance 25
cassette on the back, good to go. Okay, let's finally get unboxing this thing.
So here's the contents of the box. You have the unit and
more boxes and all the goodies. Let's get rid of the boxes
first. Ah-ha, a leg. Here are the three legs we need to bolt
onto the bottom of this. In the bag here we have the
required bolts and the tools as well, which is super handy.
A quick release, thru axle kit, and the tools we need to
get these legs on. Let's get that done first. We have four
bolts for the three legs. The instruction manual is actually
pretty good so it's the short bolts for the center leg and the
longer bolts for the outside leg. Two short bolts for the
center leg, two very similar legs. We need to make sure
the flat section goes towards the inside, so that would go
on that way. Perfect. We have the longer bolt this time,
and the last leg. While I have this upside down, there are
adjustable feet. So if your floor isn't quite level, you've
got that covered there and we then unscrew these so the
feet then pop out and lock in.
Once they're in place, screw those in tight. Here we are
almost done. Next up is the cassette. On the opposite sides
of the cassette we need to choose the right adapter. I'm
using a standard road bike, so it's that component there,
and we'll need that spacer. Those two things there are for
the thru axle adapter kit as per my other video. We open
the skewer up, put in that spacer on there as well.
Final box is the power supply. They have the different
adapters for which country you're in so universal adapter
here we'll have to choose the Aussie one, which this one
here. Done. We now have an Aussie adapter. And finally,
a few bonuses in the packet as well. So, we have some
voucher codes. We have a 12-month subscription to Elites
My e-Training software. Some data about that, info
about their real video series and also everything else Elite
do as well. They do a ton of other stuff here. They've got
some pretty cool bottles, bottle cages, and also all the
Pro Teams they support. A common feature on Elite trainers
is their little s-bend for the power cable. To measure that
up correctly you should plug the power in with a bit of slack there
and feed it through reverse for the first time. There we go,
at the back, and if I was to pull on that, that's not going to
fall out mid-session. So, we're done and ready to roll.
So there we have it, the specs, the unboxing and building
of the Diretos Smart Trainer. It's all pretty
straightforward. I have the manual in my hand for an
important reason. There's one number here on page 16
that says 173 millimeters. That's the wheel circumference.
If you're using an Elite Smart Trainer such as this one
with a head unit on your bike to track laps or other data,
you have to set the wheel circumference for speed and
virtual distance to 173, not 2096 like we're used to else
your numbers will be all out of whack, very important. So
with all that covered, it's time to get the bike on here and go for a ride.
With that hour of power now out of the way, let's head over to DCRainmaker's Analysis Tool
and have a look at the data we've
collected from that. Okay, I put the Direto up against the
power tap P1 pedals that I have. They're always very,
very good. So, first 10 minutes always an experiment out-
of-the-box, no calibration whatsoever, no zero offsets, so
bit of a separation there. Forget that for now. That's
normal. Right here at the 10-minute mark, I did the spin
down/calibration and it takes a few seconds with the My
e-Training app on the phone. Once that was done, have a
look at this. This is my 20 minutes at 200 watts through
here, bubbling it up to 220 and again as we saw with the
pre-production version of the Direto, it's brilliant. It
really, really tracks well. It's one of the most accurate
indoor smart trainers that I've got in the collection. Hands
down. They say 2.5%, I'd bet it's probably closer to
probably 1% but 2.5, let's go with that. Kicking into some
sprints, you can see here the response time kicked straight
up. You're always going to be a bit different in the pegs
given the sprints are only short. We've got a separation
there of probably 40 watts at about 1,100 watts. That's not
a problem. The come back down is the same, just riding
along, another kick sprint there. A small separation
between the pedals and the Direto, but again, to be expected.
Compared to everything else, this is brilliant. You get
what I'm saying here. Into ERG mode, now for the ERG
mode test, it was 150 watt for 20 seconds, 345
for 20 seconds, back down to 150 watts for 20 seconds.
Now, 20 seconds is not a real good test for ERG
mode I've explained ERG mode in another video.
ERG mode itself has trouble with humans.
Humans are very inefficient in their pedal stroke and
they're very sensitive to change.
Let me explain what goes on here. So, for this session, it
doesn't quite hold 150 watts. It's a little bit too low for it,
but then when I punch up to 345, it punches up. It doesn't
quite bring it back down. So the only criticism I can have
for ERG mode, it's not bringing the power down
at the same cadence to 150 watts. If I was to change gears,
yes, but I was trying to keep the same cadence.
ERG mode is a bit finicky, but the effort was still there.
You can see there when I kick up to 345 it kicks in hard
and stabilizes and then kicks in hard again. That's just the
way ERG mode works. There's always a delay of
about 10 seconds before things stabilize in ERG
mode across all trainers. It's just the way it is.
Same thing happens there at about 445 to 450. It kicks in
really hard, stabilizes, comes back down. It just needs to
oscillate to stabilize. You can see on the last interval there
it punched up a little high, come back down and I was as
smooth as I could be and it held the required watts. So
this is just how ERG mode works. It's not really a
failure of the system as such. ERG mode is a bit
of a beast, especially when it comes to the shorter
intervals. As we saw with the 200 watts at 10 minutes and
220 at 10 minutes, spot-on. So just something to be
mindful of ERG mode for short efforts, maybe go free
ride mode. That's what I use for the sprints.
And then for the rest of the session it was a free ride mode on Zwift.
So you can see the power accuracy there. It is very, very
good very good. There's an effort-- I sped up to about 430
watts or so for just under a minute there. Tracking on very
well, a bit of separation for a few seconds there but you
can see once it stabilizes you can hardly tell the difference
and then just riding along just riding along. It's damn
good. Given the accuracy of the power meter on the pre-
production unit that I had, I thought there might have
been a bit of a tweak made to that unit to make it look
really good. Well, it wasn't the case. The production unit
has the same accuracy and it is brilliant.
Just prior to making this video, I put the question out
there on the Zwift Riders Facebook page. If anyone had
any questions or queries about the trainer they want to
include in this video, send them through. So, here's a list
of the questions that I've picked out from the bunch. First
of all, calibration on the Direto, is it required every ride?
No. You saw with my data there I did a single calibration
at the start and from then on it was fine. With the pre-
production unit that I have as well, I calibrated that once
and it's been fine for the last three weeks. So in the
manual itself it doesn't state how often you have to
calibrate. I'm guessing probably once a month, maybe, but
definitely not every ride. The next question was Freehub
compatibility. It comes with a Shimano SRAM
compatible free hub if you want Campy, you have to buy
an extra add-on, but it is compatible once you get the add-
on for Campy. Next up, noise. How noisy is this thing?
Well, it's not obnoxiously loud and it's not silent. It sort of
sits in between. Let me play a small clip here of a test that
I did in this environment keeping everything the same
based on flywheel speed.
So as you can hear, not obnoxious, but not silent. It's
somewhere in between. It's not too bad. Next question is a
fantastic one from Fernando he asks, on a scale from one
to ten, ten being the most positive, does it have that road
feeling? This is a really interesting one. It comes down to
my impressions and my interpretations and not real data,
not yet anyway. This is how I answered that one on the
forums as well, but this is a difficult one, but I'll give it a
shot. One being sitting on the couch and not doing
anything at all, 10 being out on the road riding on a flat
road enjoying yourself on a bike. So there's our scale
parameters. This sits at about a seven. To throw other
trainers into the mix for reference there on my scale of 1
to 10, the LeMond Revolution sits at about a nine. That's
buttery smooth. It's beautiful wind-up and beautiful spin
down. It feels like you're riding on a nice, smooth flat
road. So that's at about a nine out of 10. Again, this one's
around about a seven. Okay, so the Kickr for 7.5, the
Neo 6.5 to 6. That's software-controlled as well. So, we're
talking about the inertia here. The road feel and I guess
down the other end you'd have the Rev Box which is
probably about a two, the Bushido probably around a
three. I'll talk more about this soon.
The final question from the forums that I'll pull out here
was is there any lag in delay when you hit the ramps on
Zwift? Yeah. There is. There are two to two and a half
second lag when I hit the ramp on the London stairs
which really separates the immersion that you have with a
smart trainer. You want to hit that hill straightaway and
attack that hill and as soon as you're over the top, you
want that to let go. Whether there needs to be more or less
latency or more predictability built in the Zwift, I'm not
sure if that's the case. It'd be a much better experience if
what you saw is what you get, but we'll see what they can
do with software in the near future with this. Now, under
pricing and availability, indications are the US, Euro, and
UK markets will have these around mid-September. The
AU market, Australia here and New Zealand, will be
October early November. Pricing wise, 899 US, 849
Euros, 749 UK Pounds, and 1299 Aussie dollars.
So there it is almost everything you need to know about
the Elite Direto Smart Trainer. I'll link below to DCRainmaker's
Deep Dive so you can knock yourself out with
all the tech details and Ray's perspective as well. Thanks
for watching another one of my unbox, build, and ride
videos of these indoor trainers. Your comments, likes, and
subscriptions are much appreciated. We'll see you soon.
(Captions by GetTranscribed.com - Thanks team!)