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The bike arrived in a box that was practically bigger than our house – rendering ludicrous the request from the supplier that I keep the packaging if possible, in case the bike has to go back to their workshop. Well, I’ve thrown it in the garage for now (could barely close the door), which is only okay as long as nobody else wants to get in there.

First impressions: even without the box, the bike is massive. It’s a 55cm frame (Large, not even XL), which is just about 21.5 inches. The funny thing about that is that my first Trek hybrid bike was about that size, and I always thought it was on the small side. Well, frame sizes across manufacturers obviously aren’t standardised. Anyway, I knew it was a dilemma. I’m 183cm tall, which puts me bang on the borderline between Medium and Large. I went for Large because of my history of thinking a 55cm frame was too small. Don’t mistake me: this isn’t too big (at all), but it’s clear that I’d have probably been fine on a Medium.

And a Medium, of course, would have been a bit lighter. Second impression: wow, this is heavy. Think of an old-fashioned town bike, with a steel (or even aluminium) frame, heavy wheels, a chunky saddle, mudguards, a rack, and a basket containing 2 kilograms of potatoes, a jeroboam of champagne and panniers full of rocks: imagine how much that would weigh. Now double it. The downtube, seat tube and motor housing are cast from a single piece of aluminium alloy, and the rest of the bike is built to match – obviously strength is important, given the torque produced by the electric motor. So a lot of the weight is in the frame, and to that you can add the several kilograms of motor and several more kilograms of battery. Which is before you get to the chunky DT Swiss wheels and Big Apple 50mm balloon tyres.

It was all set up and ready to go, apart from the pedals and the handlebars, which had been twisted around to fit in the box and rotated to protect the brakes. The pedals that come with the bike are flat and plastic, with a grippy surface. I fitted instead a set of Shimano Deore XT pedals which are flat on one side, and which accept a cleat on the other. This means I can ride in regular trainers – or put on a pair of dedicated cycling shoes. I found the handlebar business a bit fiddly: I had to undo a lot of bolts to rotate brake callipers, shifters, the front light, the computer housing etc, but eventually got everything ready to go.

Meanwhile, I was charging the battery up to 100% for the first outing. First time you use it, they suggest charging it completely and then letting it go flat before you charge it again – in order to train the battery.

Let’s talk specs. The bike is a Limited Edition, which means that (unlike the standard 8G) it has no rack and a rigid fork. Mine is numbered 420 out of 500. I don’t know if that means they made 500 in total, or that many of each size. The engine is Kalkhoff’s own Impulse Evo 250 W mid-drive model with shift sensor technology. That means it drives the crank rather than the wheel hub. The shift sensor cuts the power when it detects a gear change so you don’t have to stop pedalling or slow down. In practice, it’s pretty seamless.

Integrated into the frame and giving the range its name is the battery, which is a 36V 17Ah battery. That’s over 600 watts, which is big for an e-bike. Very big. (And very heavy.) The battery can be charged on or off the bike. There’s a separate power supply for this, which connects to the battery using an Apple-style mag-safe adapter, which will only snap on the right way, thanks to magnets. The battery and motor are connected to the drivetrain by a Gates carbon belt drive rather than a chain, and the gears are Shimano’s 8-speed Alfine hub gears.

The white frame comes with matching mudguards but no rack. These are aluminium rather than plastic and they  properly go with this bike rather than being off-the-shelf. The rear mudguard has an integrated LED light (not as impressive as the rack-mounted light you get on other models). The front has a built-in 100 lux twin headlight. I don’t know how bright this will be in practice. It seems pretty good, but I’ve only ridden in daylight so far.

The Limited comes with a fancy Brooks Cambium C17 saddle (in black), with matching fancy handlebar grips. This is highly unusual in my experience. Even if you spend quite a lot of money on a bike (My Trek Domane 4.5, for example, was not cheap), you tend to get a bog-standard saddle, with the expectation that if you want a fancy one you’ll spend more. The Cambium retails at over £100, so it had better be good, right? It seems okay so far, but I’ve only been on one short and one 13-mile ride. The grips are another £50 value, and I’m afraid I’m a bit disappointed in them. They’re a bit hard (no cushion at all), and given the bike’s lack of any kind of suspension or damping, too uncomfortable. I was wearing cushioned gloves but still found my hand actually being bounced off the bar at one point. (The roads around here are disgraceful).

All of this weight and all of this power needs to be able to stop safely, and the Shimano M396 hydraulic disk brakes are up to the job. The Shimano Alfine shifter is the kind with a numerical display (it only indicates top, bottom, and fourth), though it feels a bit plasticky.

The brains of the bike are contained in an LCD display, which is about half the size of my phone. Using the simple control switch (which is on the left side of the bar, leaving the gear shifters on the right), you can set menu items such as level of assist (there are five settings, from Off to Turbo) and view battery level, speed, distance, cadence, and all the usual bike computer settings. The display also has built-in Bluetooth, so you can connect your phone to it through a companion app. This means you can use your phone as a sat nav, and the directions are displayed on the bike’s LCD display, meaning you don’t have to attach your phone. Should you want to do that, though, the LCD has a USB port which will supply a charge.

I went on two rides. The first one was just a quick blast to check that everything worked. I started off in Power mode (the next-to-highest level of assist) and in 4th gear, and from the first push on the pedal you could feel the motor kicking in and the bike surging ahead. I went around the block and through town, and my top speed was 27 mph. The motor cuts out at 15 mph, so anything over that is pedal power only – but if you’re going even slightly downhill it’s not hard to get up there.

Later on, when it had stopped raining, I headed around my usual 20km (13-mile) circuit. I thought I’d try Turbo mode, the highest level of assist – mainly because I want to run the battery down before Monday. As I set off, the display reported that I’d have a range of 31 miles. Well, in spite of the fact that I haven’t ridden a bike for over a month, I’m still fairly cycle fit, so my pedalling was clearly more than the bike was expecting. In spite of wind, cold, wet roads, it was a joyous ride. In recent years, with my leg muscles (perhaps?) weakened by Statins (or the blood pressure meds, or a combination), I’ve been struggling round that route at around 13 mph, but today I did it at (ahem) 15.6 mph. That, you’ll note, is 0.6 mph above the legal cutoff speed for an e-bike in the UK. That means that for most of the journey I was slightly above the 15 mph, which I’m pleased with. I was also pleased to note that the range the bike was predicting, after 13 miles, was still 31 miles.

I suspect that Turbo mode is more than I need anyway. I didn’t need to use gears 1-4 at all, and only used 5th gear to get up all the hills that usually see me labouring. So I was riding around with a fairly narrow range of gears – just four! – and found that my downhill speed topped out at 30 mph simply because my legs were spinning so fast that I had to stop pedalling.

Mind you, you don’t half notice when you’re going up hill and the motor isn’t helping you. Have I mentioned how heavy this bike is?

All things considered, this was great fun. I found myself chuckling as I launched up hills at a sustained speed. Most of the time I was pedalling as normal — but instead of pain and suffering and struggling against the wind, I was swooshing along (in near-silence, I should add) and actually enjoying myself. It was like having the wind at your back all the time – or, you know, being fit. I even overtook somebody. It’s rare that I see someone going in the same direction (most people seem to prefer anti-clockwise circuits, whereas I go clockwise) so it’s not going to happen often. I wonder what he thought as I blasted past? The sound the bike makes is more to do with the belt drive than the motor, I think. Anyway, I was past him so quickly he would have barely had time to register the sound. What he will have noticed is the enormous size of the thing. The Kalkhoff is a giant tank of a bike made for giant Northern Europeans – about as far as you can get from an Italian road bike with skinny tyres.

As to the balloon tyres, they weren’t providing much cushioning today. I might have to deflate them a little on these roads. I’ll add too that although I didn’t notice how bright the lights were, they do have a neat safety feature in that they stay on for a while after you switch the bike off. This means, say, that if you stop on a dark road and are taking time to hoik the heavy weight of the bike up a kerb or walking along with it for a bit, you don’t suddenly become invisible. The front light stays on for about 15 seconds, but the back light stays on for a few minutes. The commuting begins next week.