The pedals give you a power and cadence reading, of course, but there's a lot more than that available. These pedals transmit on ANT+, so you'll be able to pair them up with your Garmin/Wahoo/ head unit and get all your data. Having said that, I've successfully changed the batteries out on the road, and there's a couple of spare O-rings in the box if you do manage to destroy one. LR44 batteries are easy enough to get hold of on the cheap as well.Ĭhanging the batteries is a slightly fraught operation: there's a delicate silicone O-ring you need to be a bit careful of, and the thread is fine so you need to make sure you don't cross it when you're screwing back in. They don't give quite as much run-time, a claimed 120 hours, but they're easy to swap, residing behind an end cap that you can undo with a 4mm Allen key. There's no room in the sleek new pedal for a battery that big so instead they use tiny LR44 button cells, two in each side. If, like me, you get your button cells eight for a quid in Ikea then you won't have troubled that kind of service interval, but the batteries were easy enough to change and readily available. The previous Vectors ran from a 2032 coin cell battery in the pod and that gave them a claimed run-time of 150 hours. They do feel very nicely put together and the improvement in build quality means the rider weight limit goes up to 105kg, even though they're a little bit lighter overall. The new pedal body is again designed around a Look Kéo cleat and Garmin has upgraded the internal bearings to needle rollers from bronze bushings. You don't need a torque wrench, it's just a case of doing them up nice and tight like a normal pedal. Putting the LED there means no fitting the Vector 3s with an Allen key, it's a standard 15mm pedal spanner job like before.

It blinks, as before, to let you know what's going on with the system. The only real giveaway is the end of the spindle: a black cover hides the LED status light which used to be on the pod. The new body is much smoother than the rather angular Exustar body from the Vector 2, and I'd say these Vectors look the most like normal pedals of any power pedals. There's really nothing left of the Vector 2. Everything has been redesigned: the electronics are new, of course, but so is the pedal body, and the axle, and the bearings. All the electronics are contained within the new pedal body. So the main bit of good news is that the Vector 3 is an entirely new design, and it does away with the pod completely. It was an extra thing to remove and swap, and the connection was a bit fiddly, but most of all they were a bit prone to failure: I've had to buy at least two new ones, at £60 a pop. The Vector 2 system's weak point was the transmitter pod, which plugged into the pedal and dealt with transmitting the data.

Double sided coin vector