The new Bosch Smart System unpacked

With the arrival of the new Focus Bosch-powered models, new owners will get their first taste of the new ‘Smart System’ from Bosch. It’s going to be found on lots of bikes from 23 onwards.

We’ve had this system on our demo bike – a Focus Thron – since October ’22, so we’ve had some time to play with it.

At the core of this new generation is an upgraded Performance CX drive unit and a 750Wh battery. Not much has changed with the drive unit; internally it’s pretty much the same as the old P-CX but now it mounts directly into the frame. There’s new riding modes too.

Yes, there’s a ‘Race’ version of the drive unit, but we’re not going to get into that here (but it’s SWEET).

The Smart System levels up from the old Gen4 system in the modular approach to hardware that supports the rider. You can mix and match with this system.

Important to note here: There is no forwards-backwards compatability between Gen4 and the Smart System. Out with the old and in with the new.

Critical to the new bike system function is the LED Unit that lives on the lefthand side of the bars:

This unit carries the on/off switch, the five navigation buttons, the bluetooth and comms port, 5 LEDs to tell you how your battery is doing and one big LED to let you know what mode you’re in.

For the minimalists, this is all you need to run your bike. Plus, if you have a crash and lose the head unit, the bike will still run.

There’s a new ‘Flow’ app from Bosch to run this new system. It’ll run on Apple and Android. The old app from Gen4 doesn’t work with this new bike – same as the hardware. It has some cool features with more to come including alarms, trackers and locks.

There’s a separate mount for the new head unit, again with modular wiring. You can unplug the mount and take it off the bike in minutes.

Click on the head unit – KIOX 300. It’s just a display screen and has nothing in it (like GPS or bluetooth). It has six scrollable screens that tell you all about your ride and your bike. These screens are not customisable like they were on the old Kiox.

Click off the KIOX and click on the Smartphone mount for more goodies. This mount grips the phone super tight (you’ll have to take your case off) and charges your phone if you have a wireless charging model. For the old-schoolers there’s a charging port on the side of the mount.

The Flow app now goes large in landscape with bike and trip info, maps and ride tracking. Yes, you can connect Strava!

If you have an Apple Watch, you can run the Flow app on your watch to display heart rate info on your display. This will also bring your ride data back to Apple Health and help you close those rings 🙂

The Smart System is pretty cool and Bosch say they will keep on updating it with new features. Plus soon (fingers crossed) we’ll get the Connect module to give us the alarm and tracking function if your bike is stolen.

For the tech-heads, the Flow app will also let you tune your bike on the go via the Custom Riding Modes. More on that later!!