Back to Trento: Neverempty meets Bosch CX
Two weeks ago I was back where it all started: Torbole, Lake Garda. Same mountains, same trails, same reason for going — but this time a different bike and a different motor.
The Trento trip back in the autumn ‘25 proved the core idea of Neverempty on Shimano. But Shimano is only one player in a market where Bosch arguably has the bigger share, especially on higher-end e-MTBs. So the question going into this trip was simple: does the prediction model work on Bosch, and how much does it differ from Shimano?
Same Trails, New Bike
I went back to exactly the same three rides as last time, on purpose — I wanted a like-for-like comparison, not a new variable on top of a new variable:
The Monte Velo Trail — 47.6km, 1390m of climbing, just under 4 hours
The Bocca Fortini Tour — 44.1km, 1360m of climbing, 3h33m
The Challenging Monte Baldo Tour — 47.1km, a much bigger 1780m of climbing, 4h29m
Three rides, roughly 139km and 4,500m of combined elevation gain — enough to properly stress-test a huge 850Wh power pack.
This time I was on a Santa Cruz Vala AL (Thanks Torbole Cycling), running a Bosch CX motor with a 600Wh internal battery plus a 250Wh Bosch range extender — 850Wh all in. For context, that's noticeably more capacity than the 720Wh Shimano setup from the last Trento trip. Also a mullet setup was a first for me:)
This wasn't a test of the automatic assist control — as Bosch doesn't give third parties write access to the system, there's no equivalent to the Shimano MVP dialling in the assist level for you. Instead, this trip was about two things: validating how accurate the model's predictions were on a Bosch system, and field-testing the web route planner, which is actually live now: https://neverempty.bike/.
What I Found
850Wh is a massive battery. That's the first, most obvious thing — even on the same climbs that emptied a 720Wh Shimano pack, this bike had plenty left in reserve.
The more interesting finding: the Bosch CX system didn't feel hugely different from Shimano out on the trail. I went in expecting more of a contrast in how the power delivery felt, and honestly, the two systems are closer than I assumed. Lots of people would probably argue on that, but for a weekend warrior not riding anything extreme the CX felt quite similar to the EP8.
On the model side, I found the predictions were running a bit too conservative — the app was more cautious than it needed to be, especially once I factored in how I actually ride. Which led to the real insight of the trip: I like to use more assistance than I predict I'll want. When I know I've got battery to spare, I want to "spend" it — dial up the assist, enjoy the climb, not ration for the sake of rationing. That's a rider-behavior input the model didn't fully account for.
That also confirmed something I'd already suspected: the more assist levels you have, the more you end up fiddling with them — and the further you drift from the actually-optimal assist for the terrain in front of you. A rider chasing "which of 7 levels is right for this gradient" is doing exactly the kind of manual, distracting calculation Neverempty is supposed to remove. This confirmed the instinct I already had, that a linear assist system — smooth and continuous rather than stepped — would be the better target to design around, not a finer-grained version of the stepped model.
Two Things I Didn't Expect to Care About
A couple of small things bugged me enough to write down:
Bosch's own Flow app doesn't let you see what assist level you were using, when, or where. For a system that's supposedly advanced, that's a surprisingly basic gap — and it's exactly the kind of data Neverempty wants to surface.
My iPhone's location awareness occasionally beat my Garmin Edge. Not something I expected to notice, but it came up more than once on technical, switchback-heavy sections.
Where This Leaves Us
I got everything I came for out of this trip. There's still a long way to go before there's an app that actually controls assist on Bosch the way the MVP did on Shimano — that access just isn't there yet on their side. But a simpler, read-only app is coming, and the web route planner is already live and validated against real Bosch (and Shimano) riding.
Two trips to Torbole, two different motor systems, feels like getting closer of what Neverempty needs to be. Onward to beta.