Review: Excellent commuter bike, great spec & brilliant value cycling Halfords_uk
The Carrera Subway All Weather Edition from Halfords is a mountain bike-styled urban warrior that comes out of the box with some very useful winter-riding accessories and an excellent spec for a very modest price.
The guards and lights are a bit basic and you could carp about that, until you remember this is only a £450 bike. Nevertheless, I wish Halfords had spent a bit more on the mudguards even if that put 10 or 20 quid on the price. The guards have plastic bodies and don't look terribly durable compared with the plastic-and-aluminium sandwich used by many other mudguard makers.
The GloGrips heated grips are little short of marvellous, however. Press and hold the end cap until the green LED comes on and they quickly heat up. I measured them at 40°C, which is plenty to help fight the chill. They're claimed to last up to two hours, but customer reviews report shorter run-times when it's cold, so take that with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, if you've got a half-hour commute they definitely help keep your hands toasty.
Halfords could have made a concession to trail riding by fitting a suspension fork, but I'm really glad it didn't. Cheap suspension forks are almost uniformly awful: heavy, bouncy and quick to develop control-robbing slop or just stop working entirely. Anything but a cheap fork would take the Subway AWE well over £600.I've got to give props to Halfords for the gear selection here. Up front there's a 46/30 chainset combined with an 11-36 cassette for a 502% gear range.
The same goes for the Clarks Clout disc brakes which provide plenty of easily controlled stopping power, which is why they're widely considered the best inexpensive brakes by the mountain bike community. Doyen of mountain bike testers Guy Kesteven once wrote that Clarks brakes provide 'effective stopping at ridiculously economical prices' and given that the retail price for these brakes is less than £50 for both ends, including rotors, I can't argue with that.
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