Wheeltop’s Budget Wireless Gravel Groupset Looks Ready to Challenge SRAM and Shimano: Taipei Cycle Show 2025
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Welcome to Velo’s Taipei Cycle Show coverage, where we share our favorite things we’ve found at the 2025 show. Bikes, components, accessories, and more: if we think it’s cool, you’ll see it. See the rest of our coverage here.
Wheeltop impressed us last year by offering a wireless, electronic drivetrain for both mechanical and hydraulic disc brakes. Since then, they’ve made serious moves: they purchased Spanish crank and power meter company Rotor Bike, they’ve introduced a new mountain bike groupset, and they’ve built out an almost complete wireless gravel groupset.
The new gravel groupset, dubbed Wheeltop EDS GeX, amounts to a merging of its road groupset — namely the levers and calipers — paired with the MTB groupset’s rear derailleur design. That means GeX can shift any cassette with up to a 46t or 52t climbing gear. And when they say any gear, they mean any gear.
Just like the Wheeltop EDS-TX groupset we saw last year, EDS GeX can be customized to shift anything between 3 and 13-speed cassettes. The rear derailleur pulleys are optimized for 13-speed, but anything will work. It is all interchangeable through a smartphone app, which allows you to customize to the tenth of a millimeter just how precise that derailleur is on every shift. Impressive stuff.
While Wheeltop tells me the MTB and GeX rear derailleurs shift the same 10-46t or 10-52t 1x cassette ranges, the MTB rear derailleur won’t talk with the road shifters, and vice versa.
Just like that last Wheeltop groupset, the lever shape hasn’t changed much. There are four buttons to be found here, though: two for the left levers and two for the right, similar to a Shimano drivetrain configuration. Lever ergonomics are actually quite good. The rubber hoods feel grippy but durable in the hands, the brake levers feel sturdy and with less play than the Wheeltop brake levers from last year.
The shift buttons don’t have quite the solid, reassuring feel of Shimano, nor do they have the clickiness of a SRAM lever either. Shifts didn’t feel especially rapid, but I wouldn’t expect them to be.
Looking to the future
We’re eager to get this groupset in for review and onto a test bike soon. Perhaps the groupset I was able to try on a trainer was a one-off situation, but this new GeX groupset feels noticeably tighter and better made than even just a year ago. And while Wheeltop still doesn’t have much of a presence outside of Asia, I would expect that to change sooner rather than later.
