What is Specialized Mission Control?
What is Specialized Mission Control?
Mission Control is a free app created by Specialized to work with their Turbo electric bikes. The app is exclusive to Specialized and unlocks a lot of features which you can’t get on other electric bike systems. Specialized recommend that everyone who has one of their electric bikes should pair it to Mission Control.
Mission control has been around for a few years and has gradually been evolving and improving. It covers four main areas:
- Track your rides – record speed, distance, maps etc
- Tune your ride – adjust max power, acceleration and other settings
- Manage your ride – make sure you don’t run out of power
- Fix your ride – get notified of errors and access diagnostics, including suggested fixes
Track your ride
One of the simplest features of Specialized Mission Control is that it can track your rides. It can automatically work out when you have started a ride and start tracking you (if you enable Auto Track) or you can manually track rides. Mission Control tracks all the usual data such as speed and distance and will plot it onto a map for you so you can see where you have been. If you want to mount your phone onto the handlebars of your bike there is an option to have the screen stay open so you can see your speed in real time. When you have finished your ride you can share the information to ride sharing apps Strava and Komoot. As with the tracking you can choose to do this automatically or manually.
Tune your ride
This is where Specialized Mission Control really comes into it’s own. Mission Control lets you adjust the motor on your bike in a number of different ways. Using a set of simple sliders you can adjust the maximum power on the bike down from 100% to give you greater range. You can also adjust the support so you have to work harder to get power, or make your life easier. The acceleration can also be tuned to give you a smoother or more aggressive start off the line. Certain bikes have a Shuttle Mode which can also be adjusted. Once you have a group of settings you like these can be saved as a Preset.
Manage your ride
A big worry for ebike users is battery range. Will you run out of power before you get home? With Smart Control via Specialized Mission Control you can set how far you are going to ride, or for how long, and Mission Control will manage your battery so it doesn’t run out. You can go even further by adding in the amount of climbing you expect, whether you want support on short climbs, how much battery you want left at the end of the ride, and the heartrate you want to maintain. Mission Control will take all of this into account and then adjust things for you.
Fix your ride
With many ebike systems you need a special cable and special software to diagnose problems. This normally means a trip to your local bike shop. With Specialized Mission Control you can get a lot of that information yourself on the app. It can help you manage firmware updates and can provide ideas for simple fixes (e.g. a loose cable). The diagnostics can also be shared with Specialized to help them figure out a fix for more technical issues. This can save you a lot of time and hassle, especially if you are away from your local bike shop on a riding holiday.
More information on Mission Control
If you download Mission Control it has a series of help screens for each function to explain how they work. Specialized have also created a series of videos to take you through the main functions which can be found on the Specialized YouTube channel.
