A cargo bike usually tops out at a few grocery bags and one brave rider. Minimal’s Pedal 4 carries 300 kilograms in a 2.5-cubic-meter box, and it still pedals through streets a delivery van can’t use.
The box does the heavy lifting
That box holds 2,500 liters. Picture a market stall folded flat, a week of parcel rounds, or the kind of catering load that normally books a small van and a second pair of hands.
Payload tops out at 300 kilograms, about 661 pounds. That’s not a pannier upgrade. It’s a different job category, the point where a bike route starts replacing van routes instead of just topping them up on quiet days.
Minimal calls it the commercial e-cargo bike, and the sizing backs that up.
There’s a smaller sibling, the Pedal 2, rated at 140 kilograms and 650 liters for dense city streets. The Pedal 4 more than doubles the weight rating and nearly quadruples the space, which tells you exactly which one a fleet buyer is meant to pick for real freight work.
Think about what 2,500 liters swallows in practice. A baker’s full morning run. Twenty parcels that would stack to the roof of a hatchback. Market stock, catering trays, tool cases for a two-person repair crew, all behind one door, all in one trip, with no second run back to base when the first load runs out halfway through the route.
A small motor doing serious work
The motor is a 250-watt unit, rated for continuous electric pedal assist. On paper that reads modest next to the payload figure, and around a city route that’s the trade Minimal chose on purpose.
Top speed is 25 kilometers per hour, roughly 15.5 miles per hour. City delivery work lives at that pace anyway, between lights, loading bays and curb stops.
Range runs up to 60 kilometers, about 37 miles, on two batteries. Each pack holds 1.44 kilowatt-hours and lifts out, so a spare set can charge while the bike keeps working. A full charge takes four hours.
Swappable packs change the maths of a shift.
A van driver waits on fuel stops and parking. A Pedal 4 rider swaps a battery, shuts the box, and rolls. Over a dense route with forty stops, the small delays are the ones that pile up, and this setup is built to skip most of them.
The cab keeps the weather off the work
The street shots show a full windshield, a roof and twin round headlights, with mirrors on stalks at the corners. A courier on an open cargo trike gets soaked by October. This rider sits behind glass, and the load behind stays dry under a sealed box.
That changes who’ll take the shift in January.
It also changes the look of the thing. Parked by the market stalls it looks like a tiny delivery truck that shrank in the wash, not a bicycle playing dress-up. Fleets care about that more than they’ll say, because the vehicle is a rolling advert for whoever’s name goes on the box.
Sized for streets a van can’t use
The Pedal 4 stretches 3 meters long and stands 1.95 meters tall, yet it’s only a meter wide. That narrow footprint is why the format works, slipping through gaps, bike lanes and market streets where a van simply stops and blocks the road.
The frame is zinc-coated steel, and the bike weighs 280 kilograms with one battery fitted. Nobody’s carrying this upstairs. It’s built to live at street level, loaded, working.
Minimal photographs it parked beside Borough Market in London, and the shot explains the pitch better than any spec sheet. Stalls, crates, tight turns, crowds. That’s the natural habitat.
What a working day looks like
Start with the box empty and the route full. Bakery crates at dawn, parcels through the morning, a market trader’s stock by lunch, then the returns run nobody wants to drive. The Pedal 4 fits that loop because the load space never asks the rider to play luggage Tetris at the curb.
It’s priced at $13,870 through Minimal’s own shop, sold as a commercial vehicle rather than a leisure bike. That money buys capacity, not lifestyle gloss, and fleets will judge it on cost per delivery against a small van.
A few answers aren’t on the maker’s pages yet. Brakes, warranty terms and servicing intervals go unpublished, and a fleet buyer will want all three in writing before a deposit moves. Those gaps don’t sink the idea. They do set the questions for the first sales call, and a loaded test ride on a real route answers the rest.
For a solo courier, it’s a bigger call. The payload only pays when the route is dense and the loads are real.
Buy it if your workday is a tight city loop with heavy loads and nowhere to park a van. Skip it if your routes run long highway miles or your cargo fits in a backpack, because a regular e-bike does that job for far less.