Pedal Ed Thermo Reflective gloves review

Winter gloves are tricky to get right. They need plenty of padding to keep your fingers reasonably warm in conditions close to or below zero. But too much padding and you lose bar feel and ability to use your controls effectively. The Pedal Ed Thermo Reflective gloves manage to keep hands sufficiently warm, without losing too much bar feel.

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That’s because the Pedal Ed Thermo Reflective gloves have rather a thin, perforated synthetic leather palm for a close hold on the bars. But the backs of the gloves have much thicker quilted padding with a fleece lining. This is backed up by wind resistance and a membrane, so that there’s little wind or damp penetration, but the Pedal Ed Thermo Reflective gloves are still breathable enough to be comfortable.

There are padded areas on the parts of the palms that come into contact with the bars: the underside of the knuckles and the bottom of the palm, which help with bar comfort on longer rides. The underside of the thumb is also reinforced with a second layer of fabric.

Pedal Ed includes two tapes on the middle fingers to help you pull the gloves off, although I found that the fit was not so close that I needed to use these. In fact, the fit of the Pedal Ed Thermo Reflective gloves is quite generous and you could easily fit a pair of liner gloves if you needed more insulation on really cold rides.

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There’s a long, soft elastic cuff for good wrist coverage and overlap with a jacket. But the most useful feature of the Pedal Ed Thermo Reflective gloves when riding in potentially low light in the winter is their retroreflective backs. Rather than a few strips of reflective material, their whole rear face is made up of this, so there’s a huge amount of extra visibility when holding the bars or making hand signals.