Electric Bikes

The trailblazing Dutch e-bike brand that went vanpoof last year is slowly delivering upon promises made by new owner McLaren Applied. Parts are limited, and right now only eight service center partners have been named for all of the Netherlands and Germany, but it’s a start with more parts and countries to come.

The self-balancing brand once hyped as “more important than the internet” has been so thoroughly milked of its value by Ninebot that it now covers giant batteries, lawn mowers, robots, 4x4s, and scooters that can’t balance themselves at all.

Urtopia, an Indiegogo darling that sells “the world’s smartest e-bikes” direct-to-consumers, spends as much time marketing its bikes as it does saddling them with superfluous tech. Now it’s pushing an Iron Man “Jarvis” feature ahead of CES complete with smart ring activation that’s so absurd I just had to share.

Ever since declaring bankruptcy in the Netherlands, trustees have been trying to find a buyer to restart the e-bike industry darling that raised over €200 million in capital and ended up with total debts of €144 million on sales of over 200,000 electric bikes.

micromobility.com (formerly Helbiz) won’t be acquiring the bankrupt Dutch e-bike company, after the trustees in charge of VanMoof’s future turned down the company’s bid, according to a tweet from CEO Salvatore Palella. (He also suggested VanMoof’s founders may be trying to purchase the company through a shell company.) And Taiwanese bike manufacturer Giant also said it wasn’t in the running.

In my e-bike conversion feature, I talked about why I don’t trust the battery that came with the motor I put on my cargo bike. The wording from the warning section on a battery very similar to mine really drives home why:

Micah Toll at Electrek, who knows more than anyone about e-bikes and the challenges US bicyclists face, had the same reaction I did to a pair of weekend NYT articles that mistakenly blame e-bikes for a rise in injuries and deaths among cyclists. Sure, some e-bikes go too fast, and young riders often lack experience with road rules, but make no mistake, the culprit is cars, and urban planners that design communities around them, not people.

Electric bike maker Cowboy is in an intellectual property dispute over the new AdaptivePower feature it released in March via a free software update. Seems the company was originally developing the tech to automatically overcome resistance like wind and hills through a partnership with eBikeLabs before terminating the contract sometime last year. Unsurprisingly, eBikeLabs feels cheated. Coincidence? Decide for yourself after reading TechCrunch’s excellent explainer.

The full-size S4 and smaller X4 (pictured) cost $2,498 / £2,198 / €2,198 and start shipping in August. They arrive after the company said they’d skip the 4-series of e-bikes because the 5-series was such a major advancement.