5 March 2024
Today Look has announced two interchangeable power meter pedals, their Look KEO Blade carbon road pedal power meter, and their X-Track SPD-based power meter pedal. These two pedals share the same internals, allowing you to buy one set, and then an extra set of pedal bodies to swap back and forth between road and off-road. On the road side, Look’s new pedal is by far the lowest-weight power meter pedal on the market, while on the MTB side, it has the highest drop-rating on the market.
I’ve been testing these in various iterations over the last few months, however, despite that, this isn’t an in-depth review like I normally would release. I’ll detail why lower in the ‘Accuracy’ section, but as the famed bike-shop saying starts “I was just riding along…”, when things went…well…very wrong. As you’ll see, Look has taken these issues very seriously, even bringing engineers up to the DCR Cave this past weekend to disassemble and autopsy the unit. But this does mean my full normal review is slightly delayed while they get to the bottom of things. Again, more on that down below
Nonetheless, these pedals mark an interesting point for Look. Many may not realize Look is actually one of the cycling companies with the most power meter pedal experience. In fact, one could argue that no company has made as many power meter pedal variants as Look. They first started in 2011/2012, developing Polar’s power meter pedal system. From there they transformed that slightly to be their own short-lived iteration. Then in 2018, they partnered with SRM for their EXACT road-based power meter pedal. SRM went on to develop their own MTB version solo-cup, the X-Power, albeit that too has now been updated with Look-made pedal bodies.
All of which brings us to these new pedals, which are built entirely from the ground-up. That’s notable, because if you know my thoughts on the previous Look-driven power meter design, which required very specific installation tools or positions, this does away with all of that. Just simply install like any other pedal, and you’re done.
With that, let’s dive into it. Oh, and as usual, this isn’t sponsored in any way. Look has sent a total of four sets of pedals up for evaluation and review, plus another 1-2 sets likely arriving in the next day or two per the details down below. Once I’m done reviewing them, I’ll charter a semi-truck to get all these pedal sets back to them. If you found this not-review useful, you can consider becoming a DCR Supporter, which gets your access to behind the scenes videos and an ad-free dcrainmaker.com
The Key Specs:
Here’s a quick look at the key specs of these pedals, with the slight differences noted for both road & MTB side, which is essentially just the weight and 0.1mm difference in stack height.
– Claimed accuracy: +/- 1%
– Temperature Compensation: Yes – active temperature compensation
– Auto-Zero Capability: Yes
– Manual Zero-Offset Capability: Yes
– Connectivity: ANT+ (unlimited concurrent connections), and Bluetooth Smart (max 1 concurrent)
– Cadence Transmitted: Yes (30-180rpm)
– Left/right Balance Transmitted: Yes
– Cycling Dynamics (or similar): No
– Oval/Q Chainring Compatible: Yes
– Weight per pedal: 130g (for Road), 202g (for MTB)
– Battery type: Rechargeable
– Battery life: Claimed 60 hours (recharge time: 2hrs)
– Water Resistance: IPX7
– Operating Temp Range: -15°C to +50°C
– MTB Jump Drop Height: No limit
– Max Cyclist Weight: 120kg
– Q-Factor: 53mm (both)
– Stack Height: 10.8mm (road), and 10.7mm (MTB)
– Included 3-year warranty
Probably the most notable takeaway from the above is actually the weight of the carbon road pedal, being far below any of their competitors. The battery life time is basically the same as the other rechargeable units, and the other operating specs are relatively similar. The single concurrent Bluetooth connection is a minor bummer though.
There’s what’s in the boxes, note that the spacers are not included in the final production box – as Look said all their testing indicates it’s simply not needed.
From a pricing standpoint, here’s where things stand:
Power Meter System Pricing:
Look KEO Blade Power: $679/659EUR (single sided sensor)
Look KEO Blade Power: $999/999EUR (dual set)
Look X-Track Power: $759/749EUR (single sided sensor)
Look X-Track Power: $1,099/1.099EUR (dual set)
Pedal Body Pricing:
Look KEO Blade Power: $125/pedal
Look X-Track Power: $150/pedal
Note that if you register your pedals (as part of the setup with the app), then you get access to the crash replacement program, which includes 50% off parts in the first year, 30% the second year, and 10% in the third year.
The Pedals & Usage:
Setup of the pedals is easy, since you’re simply using a pedal wrench to attach them to your bike. Technically you’d torque them to spec, but practically speaking if you simply put them on rather tight that’ll be the right spec after 5-10 mins of riding and a couple of hard sprints. For power meter historians, what’s most notable here is that the wonky tools & specific angular placement of past Look power meter pedal systems is now gone. Simply install the pedals like any other pair of pedals and be done with it.
Now once you’ve got the pedals on the bike, you’re going to use the Look app to do any configuration you need, as well as displaying quick one-off metrics with the pedals (a live view of sorts). Of course, it’s still transmitting via ANT+ & Bluetooth for connectivity to head units, but the app is handy for quick checking of settings/connectivity, as well as firmware updates. As with any pedal based power meter, that includes ensuring the crank length is correct, which you can also do on your head unit. Same goes for zero offsets.
From a charging standpoint, they include small little charging clips, which are USB-C on one end, and then magnetically attaching to the spindles on them other side. They also include a dual-USB cable with it, so you can charge both pedals at once. Charge time is 2 hours, and battery claim is 60 hours (which seems to be trending properly for me).
From there you’ll pair it up via ANT+ or Bluetooth Smart to your bike computer/watch/etc, I had no problems using it with both Garmin and Wahoo units (via ANT+), as well as the Apple Watch Ultra (via Bluetooth Smart). I’m sure I also paired it to a few other apps along the way over the past few months for fun too.
Once riding, you’ll see total power, power cadence, power balance, as well as torque efficiency and pedal smoothness:
You won’t however see any cycling dynamics (only shown on Garmin head units). Look hasn’t enabled such a feature at this time on their units. Certainly from a competitive checklist standpoint (vs Garmin & Favero), that’s a gap. Though I suspect most people don’t actually look at those metrics after the first few rides, but of course, to each their own.
Of course, the big ticket item that’s unique here is the pedal spindle swapping capability. When you buy an extra pedal body set, you get the tiny little tool that can remove the end of the spindle (three prongs basically that stick into the spindle). Here’s what that spindle looks like inside:
Then from there you can swap it from the road side to the off-road side. Or, vice versa. Or, in case you somehow manage to break a pedal body. The process takes about 5 mins, maybe 10 mins the first time you do it. I’ll include how that all works in my full in-depth review. As with Garmin’s similar process, I don’t see this as something you do every week or even every month. But rather, mainly seasonally, or if you needed power on MTB but normally ride road, you might do it once or twice.
Still, one of the things I asked Look was: What’s your sales pitch here? What are the reasons someone would buy these pedals over Favero at a lower price?
Obviously, there’s some easy answers they focused on, such as the pedal spindle swapping capability, as well as the lower weight on the road side, and a longer warranty (3 years vs 2 years). But they also had two areas they noted that they felt were notable. The first is on the off-road pedals, in that their X-Track system power meter pedals don’t have a max drop or category limit. In the case of Favero’s MX Pro pedals, those have a specific Cat-3 limit, which means drops of no more than 24”/61cm. Whereas Look doesn’t have a limit.
Look says that with one of their pro MTB teams using the pedals for the last year, that having the higher drop limit was a requirement from the start.
The second item they noted was around the power transfer through the pedal, and they had this little image to show the areas of each pedal that power is transferred through from your cleat (since while a pedal is a larger platform, it only makes direct contact in a few spots). They noted that they had the largest surface area for that power transfer:
The last area that’s frankly the most tangible one for most consumers, is distribution and availability. Simply put, you can apparently walk into bike shops in North America & Europe today, and start buying this pedal. And then from a servicing standpoint, the same is true as well. That’s something that obviously Garmin matches (at a higher price), but is harder for Favero to match. Of course, inversely, Favero basically gives you a lower price in exchange for not having to deal with the logistics side of global distribution.
In any event, in terms of the pedals themselves and riding, when they worked, all was good. But of course, there’s a reason this isn’t a full in-depth review today, so let’s get into that.
So What Happened Was:
There’s a famous quote from legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager: “If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.”
Turns out, that applies here too.
I’m not going to focus on the pre-production sets that I’ve had since December. After all, they are pre-production. Instead, I want to focus on the production units that arrived about 10 days ago. Twhese were off the normal production assembly line, picked randomly, albeit Look did note they did one extra QA pass on the accuracy side before sending them to me. As I’ve talked before, companies will sometimes do extra QA passes, but based on my historical badges, it certainly doesn’t appear to have helped their odds of passing my power meter testing. Heck, maybe it even curses it.
In any event, my wife and I decided to divide and conquer this final set of production pedals for the first few days. She’d take the LOOK KEO Road set, and I’d take the SPD set. Then I’d eventually takeover the road set as well. After I got her set installed on her bike and did a quick sanity check of a few minutes against the known-good trainer, I was happy with initial accuracy being within a few watts. But then the next day when she did a hard interval workout, the results were all wonky. It had a significant 20-30w offset the entire time.
Confused, I sent the data over to LOOK, and then swapped them onto my road bike + a different known good trainer. The results there were pretty good, right inline with what I’d expect. I then did another trainer ride, with the same good results:
I also did multiple outside rides with good results:
Look did some digging and found a rare firmware bug that could cause one of the two pedals to not perform the zero offset properly, causing the total power offset my wife experienced. Because I would have zero offset again (as she did too), it basically reset it. My wife didn’t do anything wrong, she was just the unlucky person that the bug surfaced on.
(One thing to remember here, is that these pedals all share the same internal spindle. Meaning, the fact that one set died and the other didn’t isn’t actually indicative of the pedal body type, but rather just bad luck for that particular set, as you’ll see.)
In the meantime, I started testing the final production SPD set. Usually I start with indoor rides, and then work my way up to messy outdoor rides (usually road first, then MTB). Roughly operating on the theory to ‘prove on the easy stuff first’. In this case, I did a number of indoor trainer rides, and all looked pretty good. It did seem like it took a bit longer to settle after moving between bikes, than I usually see, but nothing that’s a red flag.
After being happy with things, I then got my stuff ready and headed out for some MTB action. It has rained a lot in the last few weeks. And while the actual MTB route itself drains really well, there were some connector sections with deep water. Basically, a pond.
I went through that, and things got funky quickly (totally dropped out). However, they also concurrently got briefly funky on the Quarq XX1 power meter. The 4iiii Precision dual system did not drop-out. At first glance I assumed it was the head unit and being confused about the power meter being submerged. But after 8-10 mins, the Look SPD unit was still refusing to connect. Finally though, it did, but at a seemingly slightly higher offset. I then proceeded to ride the beach for 60-90 minutes, including occasional draining tide saltwater crossings and more.
All of which, I should point out, is totally fine for these pedals. Look has been very clear that both the initial pond immersion, subsequent saltwater immersion, and even further pond immersion (getting back), were all well within spec. Same goes for me spraying down the bike afterwards. In my case I literally had video of all these things, and they looked at it and said it was way below the thresholds they do for their own testing. Nonetheless, aside from the slightly higher values, the pedals were fine for the rest of the 2.5hr ride.
In any case, I get back from the ride, clean things off, and get ready to head back out two days layer.
And that’s when things went wrong:
To say the pedals were unhappy would be an understatement. They were showing anywhere from 1,000w while easy pedaling, to 4,000w, to nothing at all. While the pedals would transmit cadence just fine, the power balance between them varied from 100%-0% to 92%-8% and just nothing at all.
As a result, after more testing from afar, Look decided to drive from their HQ in France, up to the DC Rainmaker Cave/Studio in Amsterdam to investigate in person, on the bike in question. They arrived Sunday afternoon and got to work disassembling the pedals and starting initial autopsy.
They found some concerning elements inside the left pedal, on the spindle, indicating at least one clear manufacturing defect. It appears that defect, potentially in conjunction with the salt water which was also inside the pedal body, caused things to go downhill very quickly. They noted that water actually can get into the pedal body, it’s designed to handle that. But it’s not designed to handle it within the section it got to, especially salt water – they actually test that in the lab too.
At the moment, based on further investigation back at Look’s HQ on Monday, all signs are pointing towards the manufacturing failure, combined with “droplets of seawater” resulting in the failure. But they continue to investigate, as well as follow-up on the manufacturing side (which happens there as well).
Power Meter Comparison Specs:
Now, as I noted a few weeks ago, I plan to do a complete comparison between power meter pedals. There’s a lot of them here to look at. Except, I had planned for that comparison to go live tomorrow (a day after my review). Obviously, it’s a bit silly to do that until I get validation that the Look SPD pedals are happy.
In the meantime, for funnies, here’s the comparison on weights. Note that for the non-Wahoo units, I didn’t include extra cleat weight, whereas in the Wahoo I mentioned it. The Speedplay mounting hardware on your shoes is substantially more than the other units (2-3x). And since most people are comparing Look vs Look, or Shimano vs Shimano cleat types in terms of weight, it’s most interesting to just look at the pedal itself.
Road Pedal Weights:
Favero Assioma LOOK KEO-style: 152g per pedal
Garmin Rally Look KEO: 165g per pedal
Garmin Rally Shimano SPD-SL system: 159g per pedal
Look KEO Blade Carbon: 130g per pedal
Wahoo POWRLINK ZERO Speedplay: 138g per pedal + ~78g mounting (cleats/baseplate/screws)
(Each other system does have roughly 25-30g per cleat, depending on the cleat you use)
Offroad Pedal Weights (SPD):
Favero Assioma MX Pro: 191g per pedal
Garmin Rally Shimano SPD: 221g per pedal
Look X-Track Power: 202g per pedal
SRM X-Power SPD system: 194g per pedal
Again, a full comparison coming (hopefully) shortly, as soon as the situation gets sorted. Or, if the replacement set doesn’t sort the issues, then I’ll go ahead as-is.
Wrap-Up:
It’s great to see more competitors in this space, especially ones that offer reasonable prices. One of the things that DesFit and I were discussing in this week’s FIT File Podcast, is that we’ve seen such a massive consolidation of the indoor trainer industry (and competition) in the last few years, that it’s nice to see the inverse over on the power meter pedal side. While Look’s prices are higher than Favero’s, Look’s units are actually available in retail shops as of this evening, and have Look’s massive distribution channel behind it. And Look’s units are slightly cheaper than Garmin’s pedals, at least when Garmin’s aren’t on sale. Of course, there’s lots of other minor differences, that may sway one towards one model or another.
It’s obviously too soon for me to make a recommendation one way or the other on these pedals, given the issues I had. Hopefully though, this a combination of initial teething issues combined with simply bad luck in having a bad pedal set come off the manufacturing line. One thing I will say though is I’m impressed with how well Look has been handling it. At no point have they even hinted at trying to blame me, or my testing equipment, or anything else related to the process. They’ve clearly taken all the feedback in, and quickly worked to address it – or at least provide an explanation.
With that, thanks for reading!