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.

It took four years to build, but Amsterdam’s underwater bike shed in front of Central Station is set to open on January 26th with space for 6,300 privately-owned bikes and 700 more spaces for bike-shares. Parking is free for 24 hours, then €1.35 (about $1.46) for each additional day.

47 percent of Europeans surveyed by Shimano now cite cost-of-living as the primary reason to use an e-bike in 2022, compared to 2021 when the primary motivator (39 percent) was avoiding covid on public transport. Government subsidies and increasing environmental concerns are also helping to spur the adoption of e-bikes, which already outsell regular bikes in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.