Review: The Yuba Mundo Lux Cargo Bike is expandable, beefy, and ready to haul kids or cargo. It is also designed and built with an old-school ethos: Make good stuff that will work well for a long time.
The best gear marries design and functionality into a seamless package, and the exemplars of any class do this in an iconic way. It has to look good, make you look good, and do a lot of work to meet the challenges of daily life. This applies equally to personal computers, tennis racquets, and toaster ovens.
At the risk of falling into romantic opining, great gear is also increasingly hard to find. How many things have you purchased recently that you expect to be giving you good service in a decade? Two decades?
That high-handed preface is leading to an equally high-handed thesis: I found a cargo bike that solves a major conveyance problem for me and my family. It is from an OG brand, technically refined, completely rugged, and absurdly tailored to our particular use case. It is also designed and built with an old-school ethos: Make good stuff that will work well for a long time.
Importantly, this review will be from the perspective of that use case, from my particular body type and riding style, and you should pay close attention to those particulars, which I elucidate below and which may differ in important ways from yours. This bike is perfect … for me. And while it is a Swiss Army knife of a machine, it most definitely is not one-size-fits all.
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Read on to find out why, and if you’re considering a cargo bike, this review should help you dial in on the relevant considerations, opportunities, and pitfalls.
Setting off from the dock to the daycare!
My family lives outdoors. I mean that almost literally … we call a big old sailboat home and live dockside in a marina in Southern California.
Living on a boat is great, but living on a boat with two kids requires some planning. Kids need to move, and even though our WWII-era sailboat is a beast designed to carry troops, cargo, and tons of fish, the reality is we need to get off the boat early and often to keep our sanity. That means frequent outings to parks, the beach, farmer’s markets, school, and every variety of sports practice, errand, and appointment imaginable.
In Los Angeles, that means lots of time in cars. Cars are convenient but when riding in them becomes a lifestyle something feels off. That’s where a bike with a useful cargo capacity comes in. Is it possible to offload a significant portion of your car-bound life to sustainable, lifestyle-boosting bike commuting?
Given the above constraints (two kiddos, gear, urban environment) the bike needs to be rugged, have a massive cargo capacity, and be flexibly set up to accommodate things as varied as groceries, wiggly children, and random boat parts. It needs to have good visibility and preferably some kind of cool factor (after all, Los Angeles).
Add to the mix my personal rider profile. I’m 6’4″, so I need a big bike. I enjoy a road bike stance over a more vertically aligned beach cruiser or casual commuter. Having ridden motorcycles for years, I’m also more tolerant of a heavy bike when it comes to maneuverability in tight spaces.
The perfect beach cruiser, it doubles as an SUV for around-town errands or out-of-city adventures.
The Yuba Mundo Lux is billed as the SUV of bikes, and with good reason. It’s robust (yet has a stylish look), performs equally well on the street or on a fire road, and can carry gobs of gear and goofball kids.
Yuba is one of the original cargo bike companies and it has perfected the art of the full-sized cargo bike in the Mundo Lux, which it’s been producing in various versions for over a decade. The bike I tested was the sixth version, a longtail that can carry up to 550 pounds and three kids.
It’s immediately apparent that this bike is engineered to last. It has a chromoly frame (short for chromium-molybdenum) that makes it super strong and resistant to corrosion, which is especially important in the marine environment where we live.
The bike is heavy at 57.9 pounds stock. The frame is undeniably beefy and so are the 26″ wheels, which make this a very tall ride. Countering the weight are hydraulic disc breaks and thru-axles, as well as a spring-dampened steering system for ease of control.
