Canyon's e-MTB Returns To Oz, Norco's Team DH Lands At $8,999

Quiet week on the race front, so let's talk about the two bikes that actually matter if you're shopping. One is an e-MTB that's been missing from Aussie shops for years. The other is a downhill race rig with a price tag that isn't a typo.

Canyon's Spectral:ON is coming back to Australia

Canyon pulled its e-MTBs from the Australian market a couple of years back. Part of that was a battery recall on the previous Spectral:ON and Torque:ON, where the plastic casing could develop stress fractures. Canyon built a tougher battery and shipped replacements to affected owners. Part of it was plain logistics: getting e-bikes into the country got hard, and sales paused.

That pause looks like it's ending. The 2027 Spectral:ON showed up at Sea Otter Australia and got more attention at the Canyon stand than anything else on display.

The headline change is the motor. It runs the Avinox M2S, which is the same unit doing the rounds in the Amflow range. Canyon quotes 150Nm of torque and up to 1500W peak. The battery is a 700Wh internal pack, and it's the same cell design as the Amflow PX Carbon Pro. Avinox builds its own cells, which is how the pack comes in at 3.18kg and lets the downtube stay slim.

Rest of the numbers, for the spec nerds:

• 155mm rear travel, 160mm Fox 36 Grip X2 up front
• Full carbon frame, four-bar suspension layout
• Mullet wheels standard, with a flip chip in the chainstay pivot so you can run a 29in rear if that's your thing
• Claimed 21.7kg in CF 9 trim, which is genuinely light for a full-power e-MTB
• Four sizes, S to XL. 64 degree head angle, 78.5 degree effective seat angle, 33mm BB drop
• Medium gets a 470mm reach and 644mm stack. That's Large territory on plenty of other brands
• DT Swiss HXC 1700 carbon wheels, SRAM Maven Silver four-piston brakes on 200mm rotors, SRAM X0 AXS Transmission
• Canyon G5 dropper with up to 230mm of travel

Two honest caveats. First, Canyon hasn't confirmed Australian pricing yet. They've said it'll be competitive with other Avinox bikes here, and the Amflow PX Carbon Pro currently sits at $13,999, so that's the number to hold in your head until it's locked in. Second, local stock is only tentatively March 2027. Tentative is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Also worth saying plainly: this is a first look from a launch, not a test. Nobody outside Canyon has ridden this thing properly yet, and we haven't. Treat the weight claim as a claim.

Norco's Team DH finally exists, and Australia gets a real price

Norco spent five years developing this bike, much of it in public. It launched ahead of the Whistler World Cup, and it's a very different animal to the Torrent DH they released earlier in the year.

Where the Torrent is a park bike you can race, the Team DH is a race bike, full stop. 200mm front and rear, alloy front triangle paired to a carbon rear end. That's the opposite of the usual carbon-front-alloy-rear setup, and Norco says the alloy front gave them more freedom to refine geometry and frame features, while the carbon rear keeps things stiff and light.

The suspension is the interesting part. Norco calls it HPV6: a high virtual pivot six-bar layout built on their i-Track design. Six bars means more variables to tune, which is harder to design but gives engineers far more control over how the bike behaves.

Two adjustments stand out:

• A flip chip on the upper shock mount that adds 2.5% progression
• An adjustable idler with AS+ and AS- positions, where AS- drops anti-squat by 20%

Five sizes, each with its own front and rear centre lengths, plus three reach positions for 10mm of adjustment. Norco also kept cable routing external, which looks less tidy but means brake and drivetrain changes in the pits take minutes instead of an afternoon. Rear centre at sag runs from 458mm on the S1 to 466mm on the S5.

Australian pricing is confirmed and it's sharp:

• Team DH 2 RockShox complete bike: $8,999 AUD
• Frameset with Fox Factory DHX2: $6,199 AUD

Claimed weight is 19kg on an S3 complete, 5kg for the frameset. Lifetime warranty on the frame, and it works with Norco's Ride Aligned setup system, which is still one of the better fit and suspension tools going around.

What this means if you're buying

Two different buying decisions here. If you want an e-MTB, the Canyon is worth waiting on, but wait for the actual Australian price before you commit to anything. If you're building a downhill bike, the Norco frameset at $6,199 is the more interesting number of the two, because it lets you spend the difference on the parts you actually care about.

Either way, both bikes come with cockpit gear you'll likely want to change. Stock bars and grips are built to a price on almost every complete bike, and the contact points are the cheapest performance gain you'll make.

Sort your cockpit first

• Wake alloy handlebar for a wider, stiffer bar without the carbon price tag
• Bucklos lock-on grips so your hands stay where you put them
• ENLEE Enduro flat pedals for proper platform and pin grip
• The full MTB hardware range if you're doing a bigger rebuild

Free shipping Australia wide, 30-day returns, 12-month warranty on everything we sell.

Sources: Flow Mountain Bike first looks on the 2027 Canyon Spectral:ON and the Norco Team DH. Prices and availability are as published at the time of writing and can change.