Keeping your extremities warm in winter is one of the endless battles in cycling. There’s a wide range of insulated footwear, but when it comes to your hands the options are either a bulky pair of gloves that cause you to lose some of the feedback from your bars or toughing it out for a few hours. A solution may have come from the most unlikely of sources though, British budget brand Carrera bikes.
Carrera bikes are sold directly through Halfords (a bit like a British version of Dick’s Sporting Goods) and are generally known for more lower-end bikes, but their latest Subway AW commuter bike features a bit of tech we’ve not seen on bikes for nearly a decade: heated grips.
There isn’t a great deal of information available yet, but the pictures seem to indicate that a removable bar end is attached to a rechargeable battery that slides inside your handlebars. This element warms up when the grip is turned on and this is then conducted through the rubber of the grips and into your hands. The grips are claimed to have a battery life of 4 hours, are charged using a standard USB cable and can apparently heat your hands up to a toasty 40°C. Expected time to charge is 3-4 hours from 100% discharged to fully charged and they weigh 120g per grip, so 240g in total.
Currently, the grips are only available as part of a bike but Halfords have told us that an aftermarket version of the grips could be available next winter. For now, they seem to be aiming the product at commuters but is it outlandish to think they may appeal to mountain bikers too? After all, we already put tools in the end of our handlebars, why not something with a slightly different purpose?
This isn’t the first heated grip we’ve seen, way back in 2011 we spotted AME heated grips at Sea Otter, however, these GloGrips from Halfords seems a much neater package that don’t rely on an external battery pack – plus you can almost get this whole bike for the price of a pair of the AME grips.
The main drawback we can see at this stage is that the grips seem to add a significant bit of width to your bars and that the rubber doesn’t extend to the end of the grip. But what do you think? Could we soon be swapping on our heated grips when the leaves start to fall? Let us know in the comments below.
More info, here.
