The recently released Santa Cruz Vala broke new ground for the boutique California brand in a couple of ways. For starters it’s the first design to stray away from Santa Cruz’s highly-evolved VPP (Virtual Pivot Point) suspension design – the brand having started out on single-pivots and added its patented VPP design in 2001. Next is the integration of the latest Bosch Performance CX motor, I rode in Germany, into the Vala’s chassis design. Significant because Santa Cruz has stuck with Shimano since releasing its first e-bike – the Heckler – back in 2020. Although it has flirted with the lightweight Fazua system on its new Heckler SL.

The Bullit was Santa Cruz’s second e-bike, but packaging the Shimano motor and lower link-driven VPP design wasn’t easy.

But this isn’t Santa Cruz’s first awkward three-point turn. For many years it made no secret of its disdain for e-bikes generally, finally caving in and releasing one well after most of its competitors. But the current Santa Cruz is not the old Santa Cruz, and with two driving forces of the brand no longer at the helm – founder Rob Roskopp left in 2023, and engineer and latterly CEO, Joe Graney a year later – it’s fair to say this is a different business altogether. Judging by the bravery required to step away from your very DNA, perhaps a more open-minded and forward-thinking entity than it was just a year ago. But that’s pure speculation. What we do know is that the FSR-style linkage makes a lot more sense for e-bike design, and that VPP will continue to live on throughout its conventional bike range – at least for the foreseeable future. You can read Rich Owen’s first ride review of the Santa Cruz Vala here.

Separated at birth? The Santa Cruz Vala and Vitus E-Sommet.

So why make the move to a four-bar design (VPP is strictly speaking a four-bar too, just with short, counter-rotating links)? The answer, as we said, is packaging, and when there’s a bulky motor in the way, it’s just not possible to configure the VPP design such that the suspension performs as desired. Moving to a four-bar with a Horst link and rocker link driving a vertical shock gives more freedom to put the pivot points where Santa Cruz wants, while also allowing the designers to shorten the chainstays and add more insertion depth for long dropper posts. Wins all round then, even if critics will say the Vala now looks like the Trek Rail, Transition Repeater, and Vitus E-Sommet to name but a few. Alan Muldoon actually made the point that all e-bikes would start to look the same (and predicted Santa Cruz’s u-turn) in a video we made earlier this summer.

What I find impressive is that Santa Cruz has had the courage of its convictions to throw the baby out with the bath water. It takes guts to abandon years of company history and hard-protected IP and change course, even if it makes total sense from an engineering perspective. Bike brands are paranoid about blending in. They cling on to any form of product differentiation like a life raft, and sometimes the product suffers as a result. For me, the ultimate point of difference is performance (and price, of course) but it’s hard to build a marketing campaign just around saying ‘our bikes ride great’.

Other brands that spring to mind where they incur significant drawbacks to stick with a legacy design are Scott, with its TwinLoc remote attached to the fork and shock, and hidden shock requiring increasingly complex linkages, Mondraker with its Zero suspension design impeding dropper post insertion, and Giant with the continued use of the twin-link Maestro system on its e-bikes. There’s a reason all motocross bikes look alike, and the main differentiators in the showroom are the colour of the plastic.