Danny Lee

Nov 2616 min read

Simucube ActivePedal Pro Review

Oh boy, the ActivePedal.

Hype smothers these things like syrup over pancakes. Trust me, I’ve felt it just as much as you. It works in a novel, unusual way, it costs so much (Around £1,500 for a single ActivePedal Pro, around £2,000 once you've factored in a throttle pedal, link hub and pedal plate too) and it’s made by Simucube. It must surely be the best sim racing pedal ever, right?

Sort of, yes - but you see it’s not so simple. Its unique abilities are amazing, a real innovation of the sort that would have been April fools' material a few years ago, but these abilities solve specific problems that may not even apply to you. If you’re not the type of sim racer that’ll make use of its extra features, you won’t notice any practical difference over a set of decent traditional pedals and you’ll be overpaying massively. There are even certain ways in which the ActivePedal feels less premium than some normal pedals, so it’s not all sunshine. It’s brilliant new technology, but you certainly need to be the target audience for ActivePedals to be worth the cost, so in this review I’ll be lining up all the things I think you need to know to help you decide if that’s you.

Before proceeding further, please note that Simucube provided the ActivePedal Pro in exchange for a review, as is standard practice for media channels such as mine. However, this does not influence my verdict in any way - integrity and honesty is the lifeblood of what I do, and if I lose that then I lose everything, so I protect it. Rest assured, I present pros and cons as I see them.

Please read/watch the whole review in full before making any decision, but should you proceed to buy, you can find selected dealers in the links below, and a full reseller directory at the end of the list. The following links are affiliate links which may grant me a commission if used by you before purchase - you pay nothing extra.

🛒In the UK:

⭐Demon Tweeks: https://tidd.ly/3BaCbid

⭐Sim Demon (UK): https://bit.ly/45azDvV - 3% off with code DANNYLEE

🛒In the EU:

⭐G-Performance: https://bit.ly/3QHejK6

🛒In North America:

⭐Advanced Sim Racing: https://bit.ly/3W8Jm4N

Full resellers list here: https://simucube.com/resellers/

First up, a quick summary of the main points to come in this review:

Yes, the ActivePedal can convincingly behave like any pedal, be it brake, throttle, or clutch, with full customization, and it replicates the feel of high-end traditional pedals with surprising effect. It works great.
It’s not as smooth or quiet as you might expect at this price. If moved quickly along its range of travel, it feels and sounds quite rough and grainy, but it’s not really noticeable when driving.
Pedal adjustment is very quick and simple; it takes mere seconds to completely transform the pedal into something entirely different without ever leaving your seat.
You’ll get the best value out of it if used as a brake or clutch. Using it as a throttle would be frivolously wasteful, but, y’know, don’t let me stop you.
The haptic and force feedback effects are good to have included. I really like the ABS effect, but with no sim-hub compatibility, some effects are a bit limited. Not all racing titles will give you full effects, and they can actually be matched or outperformed by dedicated haptic devices like bass shakers and pedal modules.
For pretty much everyone, the optional pedal base plate will be necessary just due to the length of the ActivePedal. It’s there to act as structural support for the back half of the pedal, so factor this into your budget.
The ideal audiences that will appreciate the ActivePedal are racing professionals, variety sim racers, people that don’t need to look at the price tag, and simulator businesses. They will love this. For everyone else, it’ll still be pretty exciting and cool new tech, but an overspend nonetheless.

Unboxing and installation

This is the first Simucube product that’s ever come through my doors, and what a way to start. It’s a special moment peeling this granite-colored casing open to see what lies within. In the box, you get a Simucube high-performance Allen key to shave tenths off your installation time, a power supply, a little box of bolts, and the ActivePedal Pro itself.

There’s no denying that the way it looks scratches a lot of primal synapses deep within the brain of the average bloke. It looks like the kind of device whereby a rumor could spread that there’s actually a bottle of vintage cedarwood and charcoal aftershave hidden inside each one, and I’d believe it for a moment. It’s ridiculously clean and chiseled to look at.

It approaches the job of a sim racing pedal completely differently from what we’re all familiar with. Instead of using springs, elastomers, or hydraulics to provide resistance under your foot, this uses an electric motor with a screw drive, nothing else. This is why the ActivePedal costs so much more than your average pedal as it’s so much more technical, but this is how it achieves the special abilities that it has.

Installation requires a little bit of commitment because, as mentioned in the summary, Simucube’s baseplate takes about half an hour to build and is a massive bit of kit, but it kinda has to be, as the ActivePedal is over a foot long. Most people’s rigs will not accommodate the entire structure without this to increase the footprint, so it’s a very good idea to include the baseplate, even though it adds £150 or so to the tally, annoyingly. At least the baseplate itself is a well-made, well-thought-out thing, and you shouldn’t lose any ability to position your pedals how you like.

Generally speaking, you would have one ActivePedal to act as a brake pedal whilst you have a Simucube Passive Throttle next to it, as shown above, for a two-pedal setup. You may add a second ActivePedal for a clutch; you can even add a third for the throttle and just completely pull out the stops.

However, the ActivePedal can also coexist with Heusinkveld pedals with official support, meaning although I have not tested this with any available units, you can connect a Heusinkveld throttle and clutch directly to the ActivePedal instead. Other pedals can just operate side by side with it too, provided they are individually positionable. Among the various configurations for testing, I've used a VRS throttle and clutch flanking the ActivePedal with no issues. The choice is yours, though it would be nice to one day see Simucube release a passive clutch just to complete the set. They’ve done a good job with the passive throttle.

Power and USB cables go into the back of the pedal body, the USB connects to Simucube’s link hub device, and from there into the PC, and Simucube’s tuner software communicates with it at the other end. Take my advice here, read the first-time setup manual; it’ll save you some confusion as you do have to perform an initial update before the pedal will work.

Software

You wake these pedals up from standby from within the software. Pressing the start device button and hearing the pedal move into its rest position is an unusual thing. You assign the pedal with a job to do, it can be your throttle, clutch, brake, or handbrake, even, perhaps an indicator of future accessories. You can then adjust the pedal’s resting position until it’s in a place you’re comfortable with, and this is where you’ll understand the sheer convenience of being able to do all of this without leaving your seat or turning a single Allen key beyond initial installation. Some things are still a manual operation such as the angle and height of the pedal face itself, but all of the nuts and bolts that usually sit behind a typical pedal face are now electronically controlled.

The first way I tested the ActivePedal was on brake duty. What’ll surprise you at first is the pure strength of the pedal, this model is the new ActivePedal Pro with a 110kg pedal force limit and if you put it there, it will be rock solid. This was one of my main concerns going into this, something I needed to feel to believe. Could a reactive motor really emulate a real, physical brake pedal, even one with almost no preload, no slack, just instant resistance with no discernible delay? Well yes, it is lightning quick and extremely convincing, and sure enough whilst racing I forget that I’m using a brake pedal with a mechanism like no other. I prefer fairly stiff pedals with a low amount of travel, that means high forces loaded quickly, and the ActivePedal nails it. I don’t know why I was skeptical or why I believed that somehow an electronically resisted motor would be noticeably different and that I’d somehow feel it, but this is why the ActivePedal interested me so much to try out.

Tweaking the force curve bit by bit and pushing the pedal until you find a profile that matches the feel you’re specifically looking for is really convenient. What would usually take 2 or 3 spannering sessions on traditional pedals, getting in and out of the rig and being glad it’s over when you’re done, now takes 10 seconds without leaving the seat. Whatever pedal you want, this can do. This also means there’s no need to shop around to find out what pedal set might suit you best, even if you had unlimited cash that was still something you’d need to research. This is effectively 100 different high-quality throttle, brake, and clutch pedals in 1 box so nobody should struggle to find their perfect match here, and that means that if someone comes up to me in the street and says ‘money no object, what pedal set should I get’, the answer is now reduced to two words: Simucube ActivePedals. Because, I won’t need to ask any follow-up questions about whether they want soft brake, hard brake, long travel, clutch characteristics - these can be anything and they do it well.

Nothing illustrates the new world of possibility more than the fact that you can quite literally download pedal profiles so you can try out new settings. Want to see how Heikki Kovalainen sets up his F1 pedals, or how Tony Kanaan sets up his IndyCar? Pick them from the profile list, and whatever ActivePedals you have, whether you have 1, 2, or even 3, they will morph into and assume the characteristics of the profile, so you can try their exact recommended setup, no guesswork. Further to that, you can create your own profiles and switch between them in the same way. This is something that a lot of people would truly love to be able to do, and they’ve been waiting for a product to appear that would let them do it. Well, here it is.

However, this unique system comes at a cost, and this time I don’t mean money.

It surprised me how effective it was at emulating a physical pedal; however, it also surprised me how noisy and rough/grainy it felt when I was tinkering with it at first, and there’s something really strange about this. When you’re using the pedal in a fast-moving, long-travel style, such as a long soft brake, throttle pedal, or clutch, you can hear the mechanism produce a scratchy, scrapy noise, and you can feel a trace of this through the pedal face; it’s not a liquid smooth action. This definitely disappointed me a bit; for the price, you would expect everything to glide like silk. I expected silence and smoothness, so to find that this doesn’t come across as elegantly as some traditional pedals I’ve used in the past was a bit of a letdown. Clearly, this is just a byproduct of the mechanism, impressive though it is. Having said that, something weird happens when you put your headphones on and drive: that scratchiness effectively goes away—because you can’t hear it and you’re not focusing on it, you no longer feel it.

So how does it actually perform in each role?

As a brake, I found it to be excellent, I find it very much able to match my previous VRS pedals or Asetek Invictas in terms of reproducible consistency, my accuracy is certainly no worse or hampered in any way and I have complete confidence in it. I always wondered how an ActivePedal felt, and the answer to that is it just feels like any other high end pedal. The ABS haptic effect is very convincing, too, a little more on that later in the haptics section of the video. Ultimately its ability to perform well as a brake was the most important thing to me, and it’s a mark of success that I actually have quite little to say about it, it passes with flying colours and I have no criticism, because this is a pedal with an unusual mechanism what I’m really looking for is a telltale sign that something just isn’t right, but it’s a perfect mimicry, I’d never know the difference.

As a clutch, it took a little bit of experimenting with the force profile to find a good feel, one that properly emulated a typical clutch pedal, but nonetheless within a couple of minutes I settled on something I was happy with, it is fully capable of imitating a clutch pedal of virtually any type. It’s so good to just be able to essentially draw the clutch resistance by hand, clutches are usually quite tricky to tweak on traditional mechanisms. Although the clutch pedal is the one you’ll be pushing the fastest a lot of the time, that scratchiness I mentioned earlier isn’t really noticed, you’re far too focused on your shifts so in practice it feels as smooth as any other. Clutches can feel vastly different from car to car so having the ability to swap and switch is where this shines, this will be just as important as the brake pedal to some people.

Using it as a throttle is perfectly fine but you do hear and feel that mechanism noise more prominently because resistance is low and pedal speed is high, it’s more noticeable here, this is the least smooth throttle pedal I’ve used and it feels slightly mispurposed. Nonetheless, you can tune the throttle to add character as you see fit, with friction, damping, force curve options, engine vibrations and traction control effects if your simulator supports it, there is an argument to be had for an ActivePedal throttle, you’ll be throwing big money at a small problem, but if you want a throttle pedal to feel exactly how you want and you don’t want to mess around with springs, this will do.

Haptics and Feedback

So now to turn to the ActivePedal’s other ability, and that’s force feedback effects. The 5 effects currently available are ABS, Traction Control, Engine Vibration, G-Force and Brake Lockup, but there’s something important you need to know, and that’s that not all racing simulations will work with all effects. For example, sims like Assetto Corsa, BeamNG and ACC support all effects, but iRacing only supports ABS and Engine Vibration. No Traction Control, G Force or Lock-up effects. That’s 3 out of 5 effects that you will not have access to if you are an iRacing fan, and that will be a lot of you, let’s be honest.

Furthermore, Simucube has chosen to pass on cooperation with popular third party software Simhub and doesn’t appear to be heading towards it as far as I’m aware, if you don’t know what that means then I can sum it up with this comparison, Simagic cooperates with Simhub and as a direct result, their pedal haptic modules can tell you when you’re locking your brakes in iRacing’s Porsche Cup, yet the ActivePedal, at many many times the cost, can’t.

Ultimately this means that depending on what you’re into, you could be missing out on things you wouldn’t expect to be. If for example you tend to only drive iRacing which only has ABS and Engine effects, and you tend to stick to Porsche Cup which has no ABS, the ONLY feedback effect you really have access to is engine vibration, you get nothing else. Whereas if you’re an Assetto Corsa or Raceroom fan, for example, you get access to all effects. The current effects and compatibility list is shown below. This could change over time, I certainly hope it does, but a link is in the description.

So are the available effects any good?

The engine vibration effect is a nice addition, but it also really only kicks in when the pedal is actually being pressed, the vibrations are felt solely through the pedal and nothing is really transferred to the rest of the rig so you’ll only feel it in your foot and calf. The vibration can be incredibly strong and intense if you want it to be. As engine vibration effects go, however, I much prefer the warmer, more encompassing effects of a Buttkicker for this particular job, so this is why I said in the summary that the haptic effects can be matched or surpassed by dedicated devices. However, if I’d never experienced a bass shaker before then I imagine I’d be in love with this pedal-based engine vibration effect, that’s why I also say that your satisfaction will hinge on what you have and haven’t experienced before, I don’t want to be that type of reviewer that can’t appreciate a Lamborghini just because I’ve tried a Ferrari before, all I’m saying is that you can get better results for cheaper in this particular department.

The ABS effect is superb, however, very convincing and realistic, not that I know what a race car ABS system feels like, but I sure know how a road car one feels and this is a very good representation of it. Driving in iRacing’s GT3’s, for example, the ABS effect helps clearly define the line between just enough and a little too much, I definitely do like this and it does make a difference to consistency being able to feel that directly in your braking foot, right at the source. This is perhaps the one effect where the ActivePedal really is king, so if you require distinct and convincing ABS, this is the pedal for you.

The G-force effect is curious, it basically floats the pedal away from you when you’re accelerating, and floats it back towards you when you’re braking, to try and impart an effect of inertia back and forth along your leg line. It does kinda achieve that effect when you’re accelerating, but when you brake it’s just too slow to react and it just tends to slowly compress your braking leg in an unnatural way that I didn’t get on with. I didn’t enjoy this effect but it does show potential if it was able to be tuned more freely.

Brake Threshold vibration is an effect that does not rely on the simulator’s data to work, it’s just a manual waterline that you set, and the pedal will listen out for it via its own sensor, nothing else. If you set the threshold to 70% for example, it’ll shake to alert you once you hit that level, regardless of whatever’s happening or whether you’re even in a simulator at all, and that could be a continuous shake like resting your foot on a nervous chihuahua, a short buzz just to let you know you passed that threshold, or a mix of the two. It’s a good idea in essence, and it will help you if you’re struggling to dial your muscles in for consistent braking, but ultimately it’s a passive effect so it’s limited in use. The correct brake threshold for a straight line braking zone might be 70%, but for a curved entry it might be 40%, this effect can’t dynamically react to any of that so whilst it might assist you for straight line braking, it won’t for curved entry, but something is better than nothing, so it’s there if you want it.

The Lock-up effect works well for cars without ABS, if the brakes lock, the pedal can shake to notify you according to the intensity you set, but as mentioned earlier, not all simulators pass lock-up information on so whilst it works great in Assetto Corsa and others that do share that info, if you were hoping for this effect to help you out with iRacing’s unassisted braking cars like Formula, Porsche Cup or GTE then you’ll be out of luck because the effect doesn’t work with iRacing, the best you’ll get for now is the brake threshold setting I just talked about. Again, other haptics that do work with Simhub can work out when you’re locking up in iRacing, Simucube’s activepedal can’t, and they really need to address gaps like that in order to truly claim the crown, hopefully they’ll work it out.

My overall judgement of the ActivePedal’s force feedback and haptic effects is kinda mixed.

The ABS effect is absolutely superb and probably a bigger draw than all the others combined, no other pedal and haptic combination could possibly do it better, it’s really excellent. In all other areas, though, it kinda feels like window dressing because the effects are somewhat limited. I’m just gonna say it, Simhub compatibility would go a long way to resolve it because there are effects within Simhub that I would use with this, such as gear shift bumps and just ambient road rumble, even the engine vibration effect is more nuanced. Simucube look like they’re working hard on developing the effects for the ActivePedal, so maybe in a year’s time or so things will be different, but right now it does sting to think that this very expensive pedal suffers from a limited effects ecosystem, effects that I know can be brought to bear because I explored all of that reviewing the P1000’s with pedal haptics. I know that between those and the buttkicker I have been spoilt with haptics prior to touching the ActivePedal, so it wasn’t as exciting and new to me as it would have been if this was my first brush with that type of feedback so keep that in mind, I can imagine the ActivePedal’s effects being like opening a whole new angle to sim racing, just be aware that you can definitely get a broader, fuller experience right now with existing standalone devices, if I had to choose between the haptic effects of an ActivePedal or the haptic effects of a Buttkicker, it’s a Buttkicker all the way.

I can summarise the ActivePedal Pro like this. It can be any pedal and it does it scarily well. If you’re hoping that the basic, core feeling is somehow better than the traditional high end pedals you can get right now then you’ll be disappointed, because it isn’t, it’s essentially the same. But it’s pretty amazing that this pedal can electronically morph and change into a high end pedal of any kind and do it well, that is genuinely an accomplishment.

Because it’s so expensive, It feels more like a successful tech demo, like witnessing someone coming 5th in the tour de france on an experimental bicycle made of glass - the impressive element is that the glass bike performed on par with the established norm and has challenged the known limits of bike building. The same thing is happening here, I think a lot of people, including me, are so impressed by this curious new approach that just being on par with the finest traditional pedals counts as a success, even if most of us will never buy one, we’re still rooting for it because we all hope the technology will trickle down the scale, and by the way everyone seems to be reacting to this, it looks set to do so.

Because of its blend of high quality abilities that remove inconvenience whilst still performing extremely well, I would say that the ActivePedal is the best overall sim racing pedal available. However it’s not the best value one, not even close, not even in the form of this cheaper ActivePedal Pro, and I wouldn’t stretch to buy one with my own money, the benefits don’t really apply to me but I can see how they solve what felt like unsolvable problems for some. The people who’ll buy this will need the unique abilities to get over a practical problem that only the ActivePedal can solve, or they won’t sweat too much at the price to begin with and just want the newest and best - if neither of those sound like your situation then I can at least tell you that you’re not missing out on anything that could fully justify the price for the average sim racing enthusiast, but this is still something well worth admiring.

Simucube should be proud of themselves because ultimately, even after I’ve tempered expectations a bit and thrown water over the hype for you and me, we all absolutely still want one.

Thank you for reading! Should you proceed to buy, you can find selected dealers in the links below, and a full reseller directory at the end of the list. The following links are affiliate links which may grant me a commission if used by you before purchase - you pay nothing extra.