Pairing is simple, and since there's no calibration needed you can just set it up, hop on and ride. Getting it from the box to rolling round Watopia only took about 10 minutes. Like most of this generation of direct drive trainers, the Kickr V5 is very quiet the drivetrain of my bike and my gym fan make much more of a racket than the trainer does. It's well balanced, too, so there's very little vibration to transmit to sprung floors or your downstairs neighbours. It's graph time! Everyone's favourite time in a trainer review, yes? In these graphs I'm benchmarking the Kickr against a pair of Vector 3 pedals (double sided) and a Rotor 2InPower crankset, both of which I've used on multiple comparisons before and tend to more or less agree with one another (the cranks read slightly higher, generally).
The Kickr is dark red, the Vectors purple and the Rotor cranks blue. Here's the cadence plot for that 110rpm interval.
You can see that the Kickr line is lagging behind the other two, even though the power traces are lined up. My hunch is that this small lag is hindering the Kickr's ability to respond to changes in cadence with changes in resistance, because there's a tiny lag in the feedback loop. It might not be that, but it would probably explain it. Standing up cadence is lower, and tends to be more consistent, so it's less of an issue. Overall I've no issue with the accuracy of the power, but I think there is still work to be done in the firmware to get the ERG mode to behave a bit better.
#POWERBILT AIR FORCE ONE WEDGE SET REVIEW UPDATE#
The latest firmware update has mostly stopped the cadence dropouts that I was getting when I first rode on the Kickr (I still get the odd one) but I don't think it's fully sorted yet. Out of ERG mode and just riding around Zwift, the Kickr is a very capable trainer with quick resistance changes. It never struggles to keep up with things when the gradient changes are coming thick and fast, and when you ramp up the realism to 100% you'll be in your winching gears and out of the saddle on the steep stuff. On the flat it offers more than enough resistance to deal with my sprinting power (1,200W) without any issues. 'The new Kickr Axis feet enhance the ride feel of the Kickr Smart Trainer by mimicking the side-to-side movement experienced riding outdoors,' Wahoo claims.
'These feet allow up to 5 degrees of movement and so the Kickr can respond more naturally to the rider tempo and body position changes.' The feet achieve this by having a rubber bit and a hard plastic bit, and the rubber bit allows the trainer to move about a bit. Swapping out the rubber and plastic bits (there are three options) gives more or less movement.Īnyway, if you want your trainer to move about then the Kickr does, a bit, but there are better options out there if that's high on your list of needs. As an incremental change to a trainer that's basically static, it's fine.
Overall: a very capable trainer but not a big leap forward You won't be trading in your old Kickr for a new one based on that, though. No doubt about it, the Kickr V5 is a very good smart trainer. The power accuracy is good, it's easy to use and it's easy to connect.
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