About The Bike Cave
Last updated: August 16, 2026
Every review on this site comes from one person actually riding the bike. Not a spec sheet. Not a press release. Ben builds the bike, films it in the studio, then takes it out and measures what it really does — top speed on GPS, how it climbs, how fast it stops, how far it goes before the battery quits.
Who is Ben Labrecque?
Ben is the guy behind The Bike Cave, an e-bike review channel on YouTube. He started out on a mountain bike channel called Top To Bottom MTB, wrenching on bikes and reviewing gear. E-bike companies kept emailing that channel asking for reviews, so in March 2024 he spun off The Bike Cave and pointed it at e-bikes only.
Since then it's been one full review a week, filmed in a home studio built to look like a bike shop and finished out on the road, the trail, and whatever hill he can find. The most-watched review on the channel — the Wired Freedom — has passed 732,000 views. The Motor Goat V3 review is past 600,000.
How does The Bike Cave test an e-bike?
Same backbone every time, so the bikes stay comparable:
- Unbox and build it. Assembly quality is part of the review. If the box fights you, that goes in the video.
- Studio walkthrough. Close-ups of the motor, controller, battery, brakes, suspension, display and the small parts most reviews skip.
- Ride and measure. GPS top-speed runs, acceleration, hill climbs, braking distance from a known speed, and real-world range on a real ride — not a lab number.
- On-road and off-road handling. How it behaves at speed, in corners, on gravel, loaded up.
- Find the perfect rider. The whole point. No bike is right for everybody, so the verdict names the rider this bike is actually built for — and the rider who should buy something else.
Anything measured on camera is labelled as measured. Anything that comes from the manufacturer — claimed range, claimed peak watts — is labelled as a claim, because those two things are rarely the same number.
The one rule: nobody gets to change a verdict. When a brand pays for a review slot, they can see the video before it goes live and flag a factual error — a wrong spec, a wrong price. That's it. Nothing gets added, nothing gets reshot, and the opinion is not up for discussion. Bikes arrive as free samples or paid projects, and neither one buys a good score.
What do the scores mean?
There are two scoring systems, and they are not the same scale. Don't try to convert one into the other.
The Cave Score (this site, out of 10)
Reviewed bike pages carry a Cave Score out of 10, plus a breakdown across power, comfort, value, range and components. It's Ben's overall read on the bike after riding it — how well it does the job it was built to do, at the price it's asking. A 9.8 e-moto and a 9.8 commuter aren't the same bike; they're both excellent at completely different things.
The Top To Bottom MTB score (out of 21)
Electric mountain bikes reviewed on Top To Bottom MTB use a different rubric. Seven categories — motor, climbing, descending, suspension, handling, fun, and the small things — each scored from −3 to +3. Add them up and you get a total out of 21. A negative in one category is real: it means the bike is actively worse there than the average bike in its class. This score is never converted to a mark out of 10, because a −3 has no honest equivalent on a 10-point scale.
Which bikes has Ben actually ridden?
Not all of them, and the site says so on every page. Roughly 30 bikes in the catalog carry a full video review: an embedded video of Ben riding that exact bike, a Cave Score, and his verdict. The other pages are spec pages — real specs pulled from the manufacturer, current pricing, and the discount code, with a "review is in the works" note where the video would go.
Spec pages never get a score and never get a fake opinion. If you're reading a verdict on this site, Ben rode the bike.
How does this site make money?
Buy links are affiliate links. If you click through and buy, the manufacturer pays us a commission, and you pay exactly the same price you'd pay going direct — often less, because the discount codes on this site are the same ones handed out in the videos. This is the same disclosure you'll find in our terms of service, and it's the whole business model: we don't sell bikes, hold inventory, or process your order.
What that money doesn't buy is a verdict. Plenty of bikes on this site pay us nothing. Some of the harshest lines in the reviews are about bikes we're an affiliate for. If a bike is wrong for you, the review says so, because a returned bike earns us nothing and a burned viewer never comes back.
Which brands make it into the catalog?
Only established manufacturers with UL-certified bikes and batteries, a real support operation, and a track record long enough to honour a warranty. Cheap no-name brands that appear on a marketplace one month and vanish the next don't get reviewed and don't get listed, no matter what they offer. Batteries that aren't certified are a fire risk, and there's no discount big enough to make that worth it.
Why trust this over the manufacturer's page?
- There's video proof. Every verdict on this site links the review it came from. You can watch the GPS run, the brake test, the hill. Nobody can fake a 45-minute ride video.
- Claims get separated from measurements. "Up to 90 miles" is what the brand says. What the bike did on Ben's ride is a different number, and both appear on the page.
- The drawbacks are printed. Every reviewed bike page has a "what to know" list. Weight, legality, hard speed caps, upgrades you'll end up buying — the stuff a brand page won't tell you.
- No bike is called perfect. The job here isn't picking a winner, it's matching each bike to the rider it fits.
Found something wrong?
Specs and prices change without warning, and sometimes we're the last to know. If a page is out of date or a code has stopped working, email thebikecave.yt@gmail.com and it gets fixed. Brands and press: same address.