Zwift Ride V2: A Fit Update, Not a Power Update

Zwift announced the Ride V2 on 9 September and it went on sale the same day. The headline most sites ran with is that the price hasn't moved. That's true and it's worth something, but it buries the more useful fact: nothing about this bike will change your numbers.

Same controls. Same virtual shifting. Same everything that happens once you start pedalling. What Zwift has changed is who can sit on it comfortably, which sounds like a footnote until you're 40 minutes into an hour with a RoboPacer and shifting around on the saddle every two minutes.

What actually changed

There's also a squirrel head badge on the frame and a redesigned sizing card that uses emoji markers to match the seatpost positions. Small things. The sizing card is a quiet admission that setting up a V1 was more confusing than it should have been.

That's the whole list. No belt drive, no new shifters, no aero bar option, no change to how the frame talks to your trainer.

Fit doesn't change your watt target. It changes whether you can hold it

Worth being clear about this, because a lot of the launch coverage has drifted into implying the V2 makes you faster.

It doesn't. On Zwift your avatar's drag is calculated from your height and weight and the bike you've selected in the game. It has nothing to do with how you're actually sitting in your spare room. You can ride a Ride V2 dialled in to the millimetre or a V1 with the saddle three centimetres too high, and if you both push 180 watts up the Alpe you'll both climb at the same speed. The watt targets on the calculator don't move.

What fit changes is whether 180 watts for an hour is a session or an ordeal.

RoboPacer rides are the specific case where this bites. A pacer ride is a fixed target held for a long time at a steady cadence, which is the least forgiving thing you can ask of a bad fit. There's no coasting, no out-of-the-saddle break on a descent, no traffic lights. If your saddle is a centimetre too high your hips rock, and rocking hips at 90 rpm for an hour is how you finish a Coco ride with a sore lower back and decide pacer rides aren't for you.

Crank length is the same story from a different direction. If your legs are short and you're turning 170 mm cranks, your knee is closing further at the top of every pedal stroke, roughly 5,400 times an hour. Shorter cranks reduce that. This isn't controversial in the bike fit world and it's the main reason road bike brands have quietly been dropping stock crank lengths for years.

146 cm is the actual headline

Zwift dropped the minimum rider height from 152 cm to 146 cm, or 4'10" in old money. Six centimetres doesn't sound like much. The more telling figure is the minimum saddle height, which came down from 60 cm to 56.75 cm.

If you're around five feet tall, the V1 wasn't really a bike you could set up. It was a bike you could compromise on. Saddle at its lowest, cranks too long, reach too far, and every one of those problems making the others worse. Plenty of people bought one anyway and worked around it.

The household case is the more common one though. Two riders, different leg lengths, one bike. On the V1 you either picked a saddle height and made one person put up with it, or you paid extra for the adjustable cranks and still swapped the saddle up and down between sessions. On the V2 the cranks are included and the seatpost has proper fore-aft movement, so switching between riders is a couple of minutes with an Allen key rather than a negotiation.

If you're the only person who uses your setup and you're somewhere between 5'6" and 6'2", none of this applies to you.

Should V1 owners upgrade? No

Buy the parts instead.

Zwift is selling the fit components separately, which is the sensible thing they've done here. At launch DC Rainmaker listed them at $99 for the adjustable crankset, $74.99 for the full seatpost, and $49.99 if you only want the topper. UK pricing wasn't published on launch day, so check before you order.

The one thing you cannot buy separately is the frame itself. The V2 has a lower standover and a shorter top tube, and if that's your problem then parts won't fix it. If you bought a V1 for someone around five feet and it never really worked, the new frame is the only answer and it's a legitimate reason to replace the whole thing. Sell the old one, they hold their value reasonably well.

For everyone else: your V1 is not obsolete. It runs the same software, pairs the same way, and produces the same power numbers. There is no feature gap.

If you're buying new

Buy the V2. Same price, better fit, newer trainer in the bundle.

The only scenario where a discounted V1 makes sense is a big discount on remaining stock, and even then only if you're comfortably inside the old height range and nobody else in the house will ride it. Otherwise you're saving money on the exact thing the V2 fixed.

The Ride V2 with the KICKR CORE 2 bundle is the standard way to buy it. If you already own a trainer with the right setup, the frame on its own is the cheaper route.

What to check on the bike you already own

None of this needs a new frame. If your pacer rides keep falling apart in the last 20 minutes, the problem is usually one of the following, and they're all free to test.

Saddle height. Sit on the bike and pedal backwards slowly with your heel on the pedal. Your leg should just reach the bottom without your hip dropping to one side. If you're rocking, the saddle is too high, and every watt you produce after about 30 minutes is costing you more than it should.

Saddle setback. Crank arms horizontal, front foot in its normal position, drop a weight on a string from the bony bump just below your kneecap. On a steady endurance position it should land roughly over the pedal axle. Too far back and you'll feel it in your hamstrings on long RoboPacer sessions. This is the adjustment the V2 seatpost improves, and it's the one most people never touch.

Crank length. If you're under about 5'4" and turning 170 mm cranks, try shorter ones before you conclude that steady tempo work isn't for you. Zwift now sells the adjustable set on its own, and it's the cheapest meaningful change you can make to a Ride.

Fix the fit and the watt target stops being the hard part of the ride.

Watt Lock is the announcement that changes how you ride

Buried further down the same autumn announcement is a feature called Watt Lock, and for anyone who uses watt targets it's more interesting than the bike.

Watt Lock puts an ERG toggle in the action bar during a free ride. You pick a target power, switch it on, and your trainer holds you at that number while you carry on riding around Watopia. No structured workout, no workout mode, no leaving the world.

For zone 2 this is a real improvement. Steady endurance riding is the discipline most of us are worst at, because it's boring and 15 watts of drift doesn't feel like anything at the time. Watt Lock takes the decision away from you.

One thing to be careful about, though, because I've already seen people describe this as a way to ride with pacers more easily. It isn't. A RoboPacer group changes speed constantly with terrain and with how tightly the bunch is packed, and the watts you need to sit in that group change with it. Lock yourself to a fixed number and you'll get spat out the back on the first ramp and roll off the front on the descent. Watt Lock is an alternative to a pacer ride, not a tool for one.

Where it does work alongside the calculator is as a warm-up or a cool-down at a known number, or for the solo steady sessions where you'd otherwise be chasing Miguel just to have something to follow.

The rest of the autumn announcement

The Ride V2 took most of the coverage, so the rest got less attention than it deserved.

Watopia gets about 18 km of new road on 26 October, inspired by the California coast and Catalina, connecting Jarvis Island to the jungle via a new island chain. There's a new flat route around the Epic Conch, which sounds like an obvious home for long steady pacer rides, plus two crit circuits built for racing.

The Tour of Watopia runs 5 October to 22 November, five stages with double XP, and the new roads arrive in time for stage four. That's a deliberate launch strategy rather than letting people stumble across the expansion on their own.

Whoop is now Zwift's first wearable partner, live already. Connect the accounts and Zwift uses your sleep and recovery data to shape its ride recommendations, so a bad night nudges you towards something easier. Later in the autumn the data starts flowing the other way too. Only relevant if you own one, obviously, but it's the first sign of Zwift treating recovery data as an input rather than something that lives in a different app.

The game home screen gets a redesign from 22 September, with the Companion app following. Planned sessions move to the front, day labels, a weekly progress widget. Also new: a Power Play campaign from 23 November, the Kona triathlon collection in October, Factor bikes and Black Inc wheels in the Drop Shop, and Halo bikes from Canyon and Cervélo later in the year.

The bottom line

The Ride V2 is a good update and a boring one. Zwift took the loudest complaint about the original, which was that it didn't fit enough people, dealt with it, and didn't put the price up. I'd rather have that than a long list of features nobody asked for.

If you own a V1, spend the money on cranks and a seatpost and forget about it. If you're buying your first one, this is the one to buy. And if you're neither, Watt Lock is the thing from this announcement you'll actually use.

Some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn't change what I recommend, and as you can see above, most of this post is me telling V1 owners not to buy anything.