Don’t buy products made by VC funded firms! Especially not if it’s a real product and you value repairability and service. VanMoof made losses the size of their revenue. They made bikes… where’s the natural monopoly to be chased there?
What did Van Moof make, exactly? Do you think they were normal bikes?
They made expensive e-bikes with theft recovery features. They have features that make it possible to trace and locate them, and Van Moof would actually do this. For people who spend €3-4k on an easily stolen object that the police won't care about, that's a unique selling point.
I am not sure why everyone thinks they are expensive. Just the bike is about 2000 euro.
There are eBikes costing 4000 euro.
My van moof was about 2800 because I bought the 2 packages taking care of theft and repairs.
Because of their image I never have to lock the bike besides their amazing kick lock bike, so getting on and off the bike with locking and unlocking it is a matter of seconds.
This is not expensive at all.
*their image amongst bicycle thief’s makes the bike unattractive. They hunt down stolen bikes if you bought their theft service. If they can’t find it you get a new one.
They are expensive. All parts are cheap chinese crap components. I had to dismantle the main motor because some slip ring got worn out. Turned out to be a cheap motor you can find in parts on Alibaba/expess.
The brakes are bad. The electronics are bad. They almost always fail after a while. The only thing what is good about VanMoof are the looks. Everything else is just shit.
And where they could use standard pieces, they don’t. It took me ages to replace a bottom bracket because the cheap one they had installed was bent and replacement was nowhere to be found easily, except at their shop for an outrageous price.
That's pretty much par for the course for all bike manufacturers. There's a million different bottom brackets, headsets, axles standards, etc.
Eg. if your through axle breaks, good luck finding a store that stocks one in the correct length with the correct thread and the correct thread length, and even if you do, you'll probably end up paying 40€ for a small piece of metal.
That's really not true. Most European bikes use standard bottom bracket sizes and you can easily find dozens of compatible bottom brackets. Same goes for headsets, axles, brakes, etc...
The big exception right now are thru-axles, yes, but the vast majority of bikes don't use thru-axles (and there's no reason a vanmoof commuter bike would need to use those), they use quick release axles, and those are completely standard.
this may be true for commuting bikes that are typically lower end, but absolutely not true for higher end bikes across the model line of all mfgs. In many cases they switch year over year.
I don't understand your last sentence. There is more than one standard for many bike parts/mounts, so even when they switch (from one standard to another), that doesn't mean it's not standard all of a sudden.
I've had very high end bikes where all but a couple components were standard, and those that weren't will probably become standard soon, too.
"Standard" doesn't really help you much. To stay with thru-axles, yes, most rear thru axles are a standard size of 12mm. But they may have a M12x1, M12x1.5 or M12x2 thread. The length of the threaded part depends on the frame. The total length depends on the frame.
Another problem is that every manufacturer has their own standard, eg. Shimano has 24mm hollowtech bottom bracket axles, whereas SRAM has 30mm axles, and they come in a million different sizes (threaded BSA, threaded italian, 68mm wide or 73mm wide, press fit external or internal).
In any case, a bike shop will rarely have the part in stock, because there are so many of them.
Sometimes it's even worse, when a manufacturer just updates their "standard" every few years, eg. the Shimano i-Spec standard for mounting shifter levers has 4 incompatible variants.
I mean, you can also easily spend >2k on a bike. In terms of e-bikes the prices for Vanmoof and their competitor Cowboy aren’t particularly cheap, but they aren’t incredibly out of line either.
The fact the market offers a $5,000 car doesn't mean a $25,000 car is an expensive car.
We can stop going in circles. You think it's expensive, but it's not an order of magnitude more expensive, like your example cites. Others don't think it's that expensive, and I agree with them. Researching e-bikes 1-2k seems like market price, and they were within that range.
Yeah, but for the price bump you get features which affect the ride of the bike directly (lower weight, better braking, easier shifting etc.). Of course there are diminishing returns, but a 2k bike is significantly better than a 1k bike in almost all aspects, and a 4k bike is also noticeably better than the 2k one. (Whether the price is worth it for you is another question).
For me, theft-protecting a 4k bike which otherwise would be a 2.5k bike is nonsensical, because I don't need theft protection - basically you would be trying to sell me a 2.5k bike for 4k. No, thank you.
I'm using a bike that I bought new for less than 100 euro from a big box shop. I've been using it for more than a decade with zero maintenance (apart from fixing occasional flat). It still works. It's just little stiff which is a feature because I can prop the handlebars against the wall and it stays like that because the weight of the bicycle is not enough to turn the handlebars. It's also heavy because it has suspension. I could buy lighter bicycle that runs smoother but riding a bicycle is an exercise for me. Why would I pay to make it easier?
Maybe you can. I can't run. Even a minute or two. Never could. My lungs fill with a up with fluid and joints get easily injured when I run. I can walk though. And I'm walking a lot too. Biking engages different muscles, I move differently and it puts less stress on the joints.
It’s a scale, the majority of colleagues that have an e-bike state they don’t want to rock up to work in sweat.
If exercise was the primary focus alongside a commuter, then getting a non-electric bike would be likely the focus.
Source: I just bought a bicycle and went through months of asking colleagues and friends their opinions on e-bikes. I ended up with a bike cause I’m not planning to commute
You can also exercise with an ebike. I push just as hard as on my acoustic bike when I feel like it instead of all the time. It’s 30C outside? I don’t have to arrive all sweaty with an ebike. I have a meeting or go into work? Same.
But when I choose too I can lower the assist level, pedal hard, and/or go faster and longer.
Best of both worlds. But I have a European ebike with torque sensing, not the glorified escooters with pedals where the motor is either full torque or no torque: I still have to pedal to make the bike move.
People have different requirements. I had a commute that on an ebike took 50 minutes, and on a regular bike took me about 1:15 minutes each way. I couldn't do 2:30hrs of cycling every day, 5 days a week - it wasn't an option both in terms of time and effort. Maybe with a serious training program (and if I was older it would be even more difficult).
45 minutes of cycling on an electric bike was still plenty of exercise, and if I hadn't done that, I would've probably taken a train.
There are kids in Amsterdam getting children's e-bikes for a 5 minute ride to school. I'm still not seeing this as good development, at least not in most places in the Netherlands.
e-bike with alarm and all other features like apple find my?
This is about the VanMoof price, so you have to compare with bikes that bring in the same set of features.
Are you saying that the specific electric motor used by VanMoof is useless? If so, under what circumstances? Always, or just on steep slopes or at high speed?
Seriously: They bought a lot of expensive machinery to build things, rented and furnished a lot of shops, and hired a lot of people to staff those, and sales didn't grow to to use their production capacity, sales area and staff time.
Their prices for that trace-or-replace service were quite a bit higher than what my insurance agency charges me for my theft insurance. That operation may have lost money, but that's not obvious.
I think that insisting on operating boutique shops around the world was a very costly option. They could have made it much cheaper for them (and convenient for customers) by affiliating with existing bicycle shops when they went worldwide.
I share your worries about the trace-or-replace service. Specifically about the "trace" part of trace-or-replace. Ok, the program is excellent promotion, and did put them on the map. But, tracing stops making economic sense very quickly: Bills rack-up very rapidly when you send a couple of your people in a multi-day hunt in an unknown location.
No kidding on the boutique shops, an expensive street in Covent Garden is super cool to pickup a bike from but running a specialised servicing department from there was clearly commercial suicide. For profligacy this was topped only by a datacentre I was asked to help decommission that was in an Art Deco building on Strand. Next to The Savoy. Overlooking Cleopatra’s Needle and the Thames.
That said, it is a shame that you can’t have specialised bicycle service shops in the centre of London. VanMoof offered a pretty good bespoke experience and my X2 has had a few issues but it’s going quite well four years in. What goes up quickly comes down quickly, I suppose.
In their defense: if the trace efforts succeed in disencouraging thieves (big if), I'd consider it far more valuable than insurance. I'd rather have the bike not stolen than stolen and replaced.
They are expensive for what is essentially a commuter bike.
I think they simply chose a wrong strategy, because if you have a cheap(ish) bike and a good U-lock, you can leave it anywhere without much stress. It will most probably not be stolen (because the value of the bike is low), and if it does get stolen, then it is cheap to replace - you can buy at least 5 commuter bikes for the price of a fancy one.
In fact, in the past 20 years I had exactly one bike stolen from me from an open basement where the bike was not locked, and there were construction works in the building (=my fault).
I do have bikes worth >2k but I don't use them for commuting and I don't leave them around for more than 10 minutes even locked.
ps. I also happen to own a Brompton, which is another strategy - fold your bike so you can take it with you anywhere. Even it was heavily overpriced (~900 GBP IIRC), and it has propietary parts so servicing is not easy. My excuse for buying it is that it paid back it's price in about a year of commuting (by not having to pay for public transport).
They wouldn't be expensive for that price if they used quality parts and assembled them well (I don't think VanMoof offered a good deal because those crucial aspects were lacking). The market for a quick city e-bike is a bit different than the one for a throwaway commuter bike. People pay for being faster and enjoying the ride. Accordingly, I would make sure such a bike is insured against theft and use a quality lock.
Having a non-removable battery is a big mistake IMHO, because that's a not insignificant chunk of the value of the bike.
Also, it's just a normal e-bike, limited to 25kmh, I wouldn't call that "quick" :)
If you want a real quick commuter then get one with a 45kmh limit, that is the point when it kind of stops being a bike and turns into a vehicle. But I think the target market is different in this case, I wouldn't leave a vehicle like that outside my property overnight, that means I need to have a garage or easy living room access. None of this matters for a simple commuter bike.
45 km/h S-Pedelecs can't legally be used on most bike lanes, at least in Germany, even at lower speeds. You always have to share the roadway with cars etc. For many that defeats the purpose of cycling.
The actual cut off for the assistance is typically set to 27.5 km/h, because regulations allow for 10% of tolerance... Then, depending on transmission ratios, it can be quite comfortable to ride at ~30 km/h. The acceleration boost at lower speeds is still super useful.
Of course, VanMoof's and Cowboy's original spiel was that you could easily disable the limit in software.
Oh, lovely Germany, I remember seeing a couple of Achtung Kontrolle videos where the cops stopped scooter riders and actually checked that their scooter is not tuned or the speed limiter is not disabled... this does not really happen anywhere else in the world, unless you cause an accident.
Maybe too many VanMoof riders were caught speeding and illegally tuning their bikes, and that caused the company's demise? :)
You may be kidding, but in several cities the police started pulling out VanMoof and Cowboy bikes because those models came with "US" or "off-road" modes to raise their motor speed limits. It didn't matter whether people had them activated, just having the software option easily accessible was enough (frankly, the manufacturers were very aware of this being illegal). Owners of these Cowboy models were given the option to disable the switch in a firmware update. Newer Cowboy or VanMoof models didn't come with that option anymore. Both brands lost one of their major unique selling points.
Unrelated to VanMoof, my bike has a battery that goes on top of the rack. The battery includes a key, and locks to the bike. To charge it, I usually just leave it on the bike, but you can fairly easily unlock it from the bike and change it separately if desired.
To clarify: I personally don't see them as expensive. My neighbour who bought an e-bike this year called them expensive, because they were well above the cheapest things on offer.
They have some fine features that IMO justify their prices, but I'm guessing that I'm an outlier wrt judging bike values and my neighbour more mainstream, so I called them expensive.
Note that when they first came out, they were actually pretty affordable; since then, competition and mass production spun up and you can get an e-bike for <€1K now, and they'll be less custom made, more generally available parts too. The brand's USP then became that they look and are pretty unique, which is cool on one hand, but they weren't able to make it financially viable. Probably because they relied on VC money, and spent it on people who knew they had VC money to burn.
I'm in Europe, I don't want to buy a Mercedes S Class. Who sells the Volkswagen Golf of electric bikes? I just want decent build quality, decent comfort, decent features, good repairability and easy maintenance.
The electric bike market seems immature to me. I want 20-30 big bike brands that I can compare, just like the car brands here, for example:
In the Netherlands at least most of the established brands (Gazelle, Sparta, Batavus) have been selling e-bikes for 15-20 years now with sales really taking off in the last 5-10. Most are comfortable city bikes that use standard bike parts. Battery performance has improved a lot over the years and most models allow you to remove (and replace) the battery.
Depending on where you live they may be sold under different brand names. I saw that Sparta is for instance sold as Hercules in Germany.
€2+k would be a Golf-class e-bike. A decent non-electric bike is around €1k, add to that the battery, motor, display, charger, etc. and you get to €2k quickly. High-end e-bikes easily go for €4-6k.
Well, I guess I want a robust EV, from what I see with a Bosch electric motor, probably a belt drive. Commuter bike, low frame, disk brakes. Transmission, dunno, Bosch or from what I see, maybe Pinion? I think Shimano doesn't make belt drives.
I have an e-bike like that, belt driven commuter bike, removable battery in the frame (you want this, as it lowers the center of gravity compared to a battery under the cargo rack), disc brakes, 7 speed transmission, from a A-brand, etc. Basically this bike: https://www.batavus.nl/elektrische-fietsen/finez-e-go-power-... (although this is the 2023 model and mine is a few years old now)
The listed price (€3699) is about the same as what I paid for it back then. I made one upgrade to it, by replacing the standard display with a Nyon (which includes satnav among other things) which added €400 to the price.
Awesome bike, absolutely the best bike I’ve ever owned. Rock solid, nothing rattles even on rough terrain or going over speed bumps. I highly recommend the satnav if you plan on touring around. You can pre-plan routes on your PC and upload them to the display (it has wifi). And with the belt drive it’s completely silent, which is nice if you like to tour through nature like me.
Those requirements will make the bike expensive. Belt drive you don't really see on bikes below €1000. A pinion gearbox is €1000 by itself.
So what you're saying is you want a S class for the price of a VW golf.
In the Netherlands all the big bike brands are doing a lot of E-bikes, and there's a gazillion small competitors who do cheap bikes with mostly off-the-shelf components. The bigger brands include Gazelle, Giant, Batavus and Sparta.
I have this - Tenways C600 for EUR 1400. My work subsidised it by EUR 500, so it was a EUR 900 e-bike for me. It is almost perfect for my commuting needs.
https://www.tenways.com/products/cgo600
That’s a common waiting time at my local bike shops to be honest. The difference is that you can do most stuff on a normal bike yourself with off the shelf parts (supply chain woes permitting).
Not OP, but I live in Munich and have heard of both six-week and one-day waiting times this summer. It depends on part availability. One day is common, six weeks not unheard of. A friend waited almost that long when two strange and unusual screws had to be replaced, the wrong ones arrived from the manufacturer, etc. The quick routine procedures failed her, the result was slow.
Just from what I hear, it seems that there are more cases of unavailble parts this summer than a few years ago. Maybe the supply chains haven't quite settled after covid, even now.
The person who mentioned six weeks didn't specify whether Van Moof has a six-week average or whether it's a 99th percentile.
It was claimed six weeks was common, common is more like 'average' than it is to '99th percentile'. Your example of the missing screws is unfortunate but it also sounds like something that is not 'common'.
There are three within 5 minutes on my bike. But waitlists for appointments are crazy in the summer. My friends don’t cancel but pass them on amongst each other if they don’t need theirs.
That sounds rough. Normally the guy at my corner does them for me within a few hours if it's something quick. If he's busy or on holiday I'll go to one of the other five or six bike shops within a few minutes' walk of the house.
Before moving to the Netherlands I did a lot of repairs myself but I've totally stopped now that it's so quick to have them done for me.
Hardly unique, I've heard that from Tesla owners too. From a VC's point of view that doesn't per se speak against the prospect of a successful venture.
I mean, even if a stolen bike has a working tracker and you're able to trace it to a particular house, do VanMoof's recovery team have the legal authority to bust the door down to reclaim it?
Generally not. According to a newspaper that followed one of the trackers for a day, the tracker offered a choice: "Give me the bike now right now or I call the police, who will see my data, believe me and do have the authority, and I'll meet you at the door if you try to move the bike."
The security guard companies have some sort of arrangement with the police; I've heard that they can call police and have someone show up in a hurry. Why wouldn't Van Moof have the same sort of arrangement in the countries where Van Hoof operates most (well, operated most)?
You're implying that about $30 is enough to build something airtag-like into a bike? Can you describe how? I'd be happy to learn just for myself (I'd love to do something like that with my expensive bike) but you get bonus points if the scheme is usable for a business, ie. doesn't rely on Apple's benevolence or ignorance.
Not sure what the point here is, since VanMoof does integrate with Apple FindMy.
Manufacturers can purchase AirTag-like chips to integrate with their electronics. Done. Price per unit probably orders of magnitude lower than the AirTag retail price.
Of course the whole "locking system" with companion app is a separate thing. But as far as FindMy goes, it should be fairly simple. Would be interesting to learn what kind of royalties Apple charges.
A more unique selling point is having an easily and widely serviced ebike since its complexity and serviceability is worse than a normal push bike for ordinary people. You can get trackers for most other ebike systems.
While I think you're right, you could have said the same thing about Tesla cars - but it worked out in that case. The problem with VanMoof was that they prioritized growth over quality - which may be a side effect of taking VC money, but is plain dumb if you're selling physical goods that are expensive to fix. Just talk to anyone with a VanMoof or see the subreddit: Nearly every bike they sold required multiple repairs during the warranty.
Here's my personal story (they sure didn't make profit on me):
I got my S3 in 2020. It went dead a few weeks later. We didn’t have service hubs close, but I told the support I could do the repairs myself. The sent me a new main unit, that didn’t help so I had to send it in (they wouldn’t ship the battery to me because of some regulatory issues). Took a while but I got a working bike back. A few weeks later the e-shifter broke.
Again I fixed that myself and for a few months everything was fine. Then the battery (or main unit) died again in late 2021. I insisted on getting a replacement bike and could convince them to swap my S3 for the second gen one (that with Apple Find-my).
On that bike I had to replace the left button and later the e-shifter (again). The rest of 2022 went fine but the eshifter broke again this spring and it got stuck in the 4th gear.
As the bike is now out of warranty, I did not contact support and went with just riding it this way until yesterday, when I finally got around to fix the (mechanically defective) eshifter using parts from the old (electronically defective) eshifter that I replaced last year. Now it is running fine again. Wouldn’t get another VanMoof as my next bike though.
I was thinking about Tesla while posting. It's the natural counter argument. That's why I specifically mentioned the target market (in my opinion): bikes. (One of the reponses above is critical of my target market definition. Hey, I'm Netherlands-based. Two wheels is a bike. Whether € 10 or € 10k. I can understand that theft and bike services are more of a US value proposition.)
The thing is I think Tesla pulled off a near miss with their repairs, waiting times and general inavailability of spare parts. That was a very big issue for a few years. Tesla got a helping hand (in several European countries at least) in tax breaks for the electric early adopters. With the tax brakes came the premier buyer: lease companies (say NED / BEL). You know what lease companies are good at? Supply chain management on behalve of their customers. If a Tesla was out for repairs for a month, the lease company had to deliver a temporary car. The tax brakes for the consumers kept the demand up, no matter the service record. No tax incentives helping VanMoof.
Second is that I think the disruption Tesla caused in the car market at that time was a lot larger than that of VanMoof. As others point out: VanMoof didn't leapfrog (e-)bike market and didn't get a temporaty moat. They were actually a late to pivot to electric. Their earliest models were based on non-electric, affordable and robust (as a buyer at that time: they weren't robust at all). Then by playing the high margin-high marketing angle they just weren't a viable option in the price range where quality starts to matter.
All in all: Tesla got a temporary technological head start with some favourable tax headwind giving them just enough runway to manage the supply chain. VanMoof had no technological head start, no tax incentives and crashed and burned on the supply chain.
Part of a premium product is the number of failures to expect.
To reduce the number of failures, they need a fleet of thousands of bikes in the field to monitor and redesign any component that might break.
But those bikes aren't yet reliable - so they shouldn't be putting their brand name on them.
Other manufacturers get this right. It is pretty common I buy something from Aliexpress for really cheap and it is clearly a premium product that has had the logos removed and is being sent out for user testing. They normally come with a card in the box saying "If this breaks, email this gmail address and we'll exchange it for a new one for free". They do that because they really want to know about failures. That lets them redesign the product to make it reliable, which in turn lets them put the premium brand name on it.
You simply can't make a product reliable with lab testing alone. The only way is with real users and time.
This is why I only buy bikes with mid-to-high-end Shimano components. My bike is my daily transportation many days; putting up with this kind of unreliability is unthinkable.
Blitzcaling to achieve monopoly is not the only reason for funding. A manufacturing company like this has high up-front costs for R&D and manufacturing, orders of magnitude more than a typical software companies. You also don't need to chase a monopoly to make expanding to new market with investor money a sound decision. Obviously VanMoof didn't make it work here and had horrible OPEX due to expanding to markets without getting the sales to support it.
Van Moof bikes are EVERYWHERE in Amsterdam. They obviously shouldn’t have taken so much investment. But if you can capture a latent market need like that, there probably is a lot of opportunity at scale, too.
There is a lot of bikes in Amsterdam in general. Van Moof just stands out because of their 1 marketing, 2 annoying signature noise whenever people bump into them, 3 loud owners that general use it as a status symbol and 4 joke status due to national Dutch publications writing about all the shortcomings of owning this bike.
I live in Groningen, a Dutch city that is even more suited for bikes, and I rarely spot any Van Moof here. There is a big amount of Swapfiets though, because there is a bigger demographic for a sturdy bike that costs 20 euro as month. You can have that bike in theory for 8 years and it still will not have the same cost as a Van Moof.
If you rent a swapfiets for 8 years, you have owned a shitty 100€-bicycle for 8 years for the price of 1920€. I can buy a shitty bike for 100€ every year and still be less than half as expensive than swapfiets. Their business model are people who are unwilling to do and/or learn basic maintenance on their bikes.
and (4) because they don't have a removable battery so people are always charging them in annoying places like common stairwells or with a cord through the mail slot of the front door.
Isn’t the assumption that they are losing money on the cost of expansion, not the material cost? Eg, if they were only selling in the Netherlands it would be profitable—but they are paying for international growth and that isn’t profitable.
The point is that it might have made sense as a big business but not necessarily as an international growth story. If you can sell 100k bikes with $1000 profit (~15% of cost) that’s still 100M profit.
I assume that's the key used by the app. So if they kill that key, they also kill all existing applications.
That's the thing with this kind of "protection". If your proprietary app needs to access the server, anybody who can either extract the key from the app with reverse engineering or who can listen in on the communication between app and server will be able to use that API.
It's the same issue as with DVD encryption: If you need to show the movie to people, people need to be able to decrypt it. If this needs to happen offline, then the material needed for decryption must be static and either be on the disk on in the player - where it can be extracted and used by third parties.
I don't know anything about these bikes; but what is one supposed to do once they retrieve their keys? Does the app/bike provide an alternative method of presenting the key? Are keys rotated, so they need to be downloaded more than once (I assume that's that's the case since this code is intended to be run as a service, in a Docker container)? If so, what happens when their servers do shut down and there is no API?
Are people like the creator of this tool hoping for a future option to make use of the keys, and they're just being backed up for a rainy day at this point?
The keys in this case are used for bluetooth comms locally between somebody's device and their bike.
These are ordinarily used by the VanMoof app to unlock the bike and control the bike's settings.
There are already some third-party apps (Moofer, Mooovy) to allow alternate access to those settings – including some hidden ones.
With a few tweaks those third-party apps should be able to support direct key upload, rather than having to log in and proxy authentication through to VanMoof's API.
Note that a competitor to VanMoof, Cowboy Bikes, have also created an iOS app - with a beta on the App Store - that supposedly does the same (saving the encryption keys locally).
I say supposedly because the source is not available to inspect. However, the linked FAQ states that no data is stored outside the app.
(Note this is not en endorsement for Cowboy - whom I know nothing about - just pointing to the currently only iOS app I know of to save these same encryption keys for VanMoof owners).
Going from Vanmoof to Cowboy Bikes is like switching from the plague to cholera.
Same modus operandi: excessively VC funded, lots of hype, proprietary parts, mounting losses, loosing money with every sale, ... and it's getting worse every year. Cowboy Bikes is just another bankruptcy waiting to happen.
I'm riding a Cowboy right now, and I chose it because they didn't have the service and quality issues that Vanmoof had. I've been very happy with it and hope they will not go under. I was annoyed with the app but I created a bluetooth key fob so I don't have to use the app to unlock it. Now I'm even happier with my daily rides.
That being said: if I were in the market today I think I'd go for the Veloretti Ace. Less proprietary parts, great design and owned by a stable company.
They spent a lot of money on expansion, opening stores in places like NYC and Tokyo. I'm also betting that since all the parts in their bikes are custom-produced for them, the production cost of their bikes is quite high as well (that is, they're not making that much money per bike).
Then why do they do it? What is the supposed gain from producing your own parts, when mass produced parts like Shimano are available all over the world? Is it to increase sales of their repair services after the warranty ends?
They want to "re-invent the bike". They do (or did) produce some pretty new/innovative designs; I haven't really followed them since they went electric because I'm not that keen on electric bikes, but the original (non-electric) had the lock roll up inside the frame for example, which is pretty nifty. Lots of people also like the design from an aesthetic point of view.
"Use standard stuff" has a lot of value, obviously, but it also limits you. This is true for everything: from bike parts to the POSIX API or POSIX shell.
The team behind Cowboy also has a history of going bankrupt and not doing the right thing. Their previous venture was a Uber Eats competitor and they took the end user’s money until the end but never paid the restaurants nor the deliverers. That’s the main reason why I can’t get myself to buy one their bike. But it seems Van Moof wasn’t any better.
The appeal is that thieves need to do the same thing. Which limits the value of the bike for them because it makes it easy to track them down. It's part of the theft protection. Which, if you've ever had your bike stolen is a big selling point for these bikes. Theft is a reason why I've never bothered with premium bikes. Because you can't take them anywhere and expect them to not get stolen. Van Moof changed that. They can be stolen of course but it's a lot of hassle and bike thieves learned pretty quickly that there's very little point in doing so as they'll go through a lot of trouble to track down the bike. Which means it's risky.
Van Moof actually had an insurance policy that you could buy that included a guarantee to either track down your stolen bike or replace it. The so-called bike hunters would attempt to track down the bike. And stealing one involves dealing with a very loud and obnoxious alarm that is motion triggered that can only be disabled by unlocking the bike.
Those were all good things. What's not good is all the proprietary components, the poor quality of those, and the over dependence on the Van Moof servicing. That's what's killing the company. Basically classic VC funded company problem: great idea and product but hopeless execution resulting in a company that has a lot of cost but no profits making that problem worse through rapid growth and inflated investor expectations. The debt bubble burst last year, they are running out of cash now, and game over pretty much.
I actually have a lease bike from a company called Swapfiets here in Berlin. Very nice deal. I pay them per month and the bike is basically ignored by bike thieves and vandals. There are hundreds of thousands of these bikes across Europe. Each bringing in revenue through a subscription. Genius idea.
The bike is decent but nothing special. What they sell is peace of mind. I get to ride a decent bike and not worry about it getting stolen. Very low tech solution; the bikes are just very recognizable which means selling them is not a thing for thieves. If it gets stolen and I can show the key, my risk is 60 euros. I've had one for three years now and I park it all over town in all the hot spots where bikes get stolen, vandalized, etc. without a second thought. Not a single incident.
Idk the Berlin market, but in The Netherlands, homebase of Swapfiets (literally: swap bike) as you probably know, a decent secondhand bike costs €100-200. Nobody comes to fix your tire, but if it doesn't get stolen, it's a lot cheaper than a Swapfiets. Still quite a few of my (younger!) colleagues have a Swapfiets. I don't really get it.
Swapfiets business model are people who are not willing to do even the simplest maintenance tasks and therefore can not use any cheap or expensive bike longer than a few months. Astonishingly, this seems to be working great in the netherlands. In my hometown in germany, where 1/5 of the population are students, they tried but closed down again. My assumption is that this was due to the fact that it is common to repair your own bike here, the uni even has a bike workshop for the students.
> The appeal is that thieves need to do the same thing.
Couldn’t you achieve that with a hardware key though? You don’t really need a server and still have a hardware Bluetooth key that is secure with the bike being useless without it? Then you don’t depend on a company staying afloat and granting you the privilege to keep using your bicycle as they see fit/VC greed dictates.
>Theft is a reason why I've never bothered with premium bikes. Because you can't take them anywhere and expect them to not get stolen.
Maybe where you live. Here in Tokyo, bike theft isn't a big problem, and there's lots of reasonably expensive bikes (and e-bikes) parked on the sidewalk with just a lock through the wheel spokes.
You'd be shocked anywhere in the Netherlands (I'm Dutch) at how common bike theft is. We have actual secured parking garages in many cities to counter the problem. The larger ones in Utrecht and Amsterdam have room for many thousands of bikes and they are used a lto.
Berlin where I currently live isn't much better but they've not yet introduced parking garages for bikes as far as I know.
Netherlands is a wealthy developed nation; how did it get like what you describe? It sounds like a lack of enforcement, or some kind of problem with an unrecognized socioeconomic underclass. Here in Tokyo, this kind of problem with theft is unheard of. Most bike theft is just joy-riding, and is deterred by using a wheel lock (goes through the wheel spokes, so it can't be easily ridden). Of course, this is also a place where you can put your phone and wallet on a table in a cafe to reserve your seat while you're in the bathroom...
(I immigrated to The Netherlands from another developed nation).
It's weird, the main oddity is that it's just not considered theft in the same sense.
Before E-Bikes took off ~10 years ago everyone living in a city had a €50-300 beater bike "omafiets" for commuting, if you went out you were expecting your bike to be stolen on occasion.
So, you'd steal someone else's bike, either personally, or if you were downtown a junkie would ride past every 10 minutes offering a freshly stolen bike for €50 euros, which if you were smart you could easily haggle down to €5-20.
When pressed (especially after a few drinks) almost every city dwelling Dutchie you meet will admit to having stolen a bike, or bought a "second hand" one that's obviously stolen. I'm talking about people who are well off, went to University etc.
So bikes simply weren't personal property in the usual sense, and admitting to stealing one was no big deal, even if admitting in the same company to stealing a car would make you unemployable.
People stole your bike. You stole theirs. It all worked out in the end.
Now, this has really been upset by the E-Bike boom, now people are communiting in the same cities as 10 years ago, but on bikes costing 5-20x as much when adjusted for inflation.
So there's been some adjustment, but not really. The police still don't care about your stolen bike, and realistically you'll face zero consequences if you buy and use a stolen bike.
> When pressed (especially after a few drinks) almost every city dwelling Dutchie you meet will admit to having stolen a bike, or bought a "second hand" one that's obviously stolen.
Complete bullshit. There are people that steal bikes and there are people that buy bikes they can reasonably assume have been stolen and then there is everybody else, where everybody else is by far the larger fraction.
I've lived in Amsterdam for roughly half of my life and that statement really irks me, especially since you seem to use this as a fig-leaf for your own illegal behavior. The lack of enforcement against bike thieves is vexing, but not as vexing is people that move here and that then engage in criminal acts.
Everyone in NL has like 2.3 bikes on average. They are many times treated as essentially throw away items. Not for the up upmarket segment, but for the casual bikes.
> Isn't it obvious that an app will not be around for as long as a bike can last?
That's the softwarization of everything, with its in-built early obsolesce: they clearly expect you to start replacing your bike as frequently as you replace your phone, irrelevant of how long the hardware itself is still functional.
> Isn't it obvious that an app will not be around for as long as a bike can last?
People under 25 don't know better, they genuenly haven't experienced anything else than Chinese made self destructing Bluetooth enabled plastic gadgets
While what you are saying is true and the market is moving towards long term solutions because of environmental reasons, at the moment the lifespan of electric components in bikes is usually set at 5 years with 2 years of warranty for the consumer.
Bikes are made of aluminium these days instead of steel, which gives them a lifespan of about 10 years, certainly not 30.
If you buy an ebike, you must be prepared for maintenance and replacement of parts. That's the state of the market right now.
I agree that making an app mandatory for a bike is a bad idea, and I would never buy such a solution. However this is an urban city design bike, aimed at a specific group of customers who do value these kind of innovations.
> Bikes are made of aluminium these days instead of steel, which gives them a lifespan of about 10 years, certainly not 30.
Absolute bullshit, especially for a city bike.
Stress cycle is an issue but city bikes are over engineered and don't see a lot of stress compared to every other type of bikes.
I've used alu bikes over 30 years old daily and I had no issues whatsoever, that's how I went to school everyday for 3 years, and that was a race bike that actually had been use for racing in the past
Online posts make it sound like alu bikes self destruct at 5 years and a day...
My experience as long term employee of a big bicycle manufacturer is different.
Yes, aluminium can survive a long time. But in general steel has a better chance to survive. The category of city bikes are low cost bikes, and the frames are as well. They are not so over engineered as you think as it is a very competitive market. The first generation VanMoof frames for instance, were prone to breaking.
While it is possible for a aluminium frame to reach 30 years lifespan, in practice the lifespan is shorter. This is because steel is more forgiving, it can handle dents and scratches where aluminium is more prone to breaking. Also the frames are usually hand welded and this can too be a weak point as it is hard to perfectly weld aluminum. It doesn't mean you can't ride a 30 year old aluminium bike or that it will auto destruct. It does mean that the bike is unlikely to reach that age.
Is aluminium more brittle then? My aluminium frame has plenty of dents and scratches and its about ten years old. I've another thats 25 years old but isn't ridden as often.
Do you know what the median lifespan is of an aluminium frame? I guess it depends on how often its crashed?
Old fashioned steel bike lovers live in an alternate reality where bikes not made of steel are all experiencing catastrophic frame failures left and right.
I worry about this with most components of e-bikes. I suppose a mid-drive one is probably always gonna have parts you can replace but custom kit like VanMoof seems ready for landfill.
My VanMoof is currently dead, awaiting to be shipped off to the VanMoof shop to supposedly replace a battery that is erroring out. Now I’m concerned that I’ll never be able to use it again, or that I’ll lose the bike completely if I hand it over to them for repairs just as they are being shuttered.
Heh. I just shipped my S3 to vanmoof 2 weeks ago and it was just repaired this week for what sounds like the same battery issue. I'm... not sure if I'll get it back either.
The website is telling me there's a charge for the shipping, but no way to pay it.
You should be able to get years of support for established brands. They are all using similar/identical components (Shimano, Yamaha, Bafang mid drive motors, similar battery packs, etc). There's also aftermarket support/custmizations available for them.
Going with a small/exotic brand will always carry a risk of brand disappearing, no aftermarket options, hard to get spare parts, etc... And e-bike business is especially competitive these days so I wouldn't bet on some random hipster brand having any chance to survive in the battle against established brands.
Honest answer - I don't expect the e-bike to last past 10 years. I expect(ed) that by the time the app was unavailable I would have moved on to a different e-bike for whatever reason.
I don't want a non-e-bike. I want a bike with pedal assist.
This is why I struggle updating my old PHP apps. It sure would be nice to refactor it into something newer, but I really don't want to run it on some VC-funded wet dream that disappears one day with 3 hours of notice.
A buddy of mine is a hardcore rider. He goes through a $5k bike every 5 years or so.
Could he refurb the titanium frames for newer parts? Maybe. At some point racing tech moves on and you need a newer frame for the latest and greatest stuff to fit.
Your friend just want a new bike every few years, he doesn't go through it. I have been in that place. That doesn't mean older stuff becomes unrideable and unfixable.
You can find parts for nearly any kind of old/obsolete bike technology ever made in volume, even tires for odd wheel sizes that have been mostly abandonned can still be found.
Nothing gets consumed, he just gets bored with his 5 year old bike and wants something that has all the latest new tech. He probably got a new 12-speed bike in the last year just because it's 1 more speed than the older 11-speed bikes from 5 years ago, for instance.
You don't need an internet connection or the app, but that's the most convenient way - you can enter a PIN on the bike itself to unlock it.
I think the appeal (at least for me, I considered one but never got one) is that it makes the bike harder to steal. Someone can't just ride off on it after they cut your lock. I worry about leaving my $600 bike out in public, so I'd be super paranoid about a $2000+ bike.
Similar appeal for me! I have a neighbor with a VanMoof and they are one of the few bikes that can just be parked in a corner with a kickstand and doesn’t need to be locked to a metal bar or other static thing. And this VanMoof has been around in our backyard for quite a few years, so I suppose the “don’t steal me, I’ll be tracked” tactic works. That being said, once I tried riding a (older non-electric) VanMoof, I was shocked how terrible it felt to ride – So, I never considered getting one in the end.
Most of the bike thieves around me are opportunists who live within a mile or two of the bikes they steal. Afterwards, they often just leave the bikes out on the street in semi-organized chop shops. Even for bikes without GPS, people have decent luck just cruising around freeway underpasses until the see their bike.
Regardless, part of the allure was the Van Moof has (had?) a program where if they couldn't recover your bike you'd get a new one for just $100
I once overheard a conversation at a bike shop where a customer complained that he could not switch on the light without using the app. On that day I knew I had made a good decision bying a steel frame non-battery bike.
If it’s stolen they will either recover it or replace it. And everyone knows this, so no one will buy a stolen one and they are less likely to be stolen.
In a fight between a bullshit tech startup whose entire business model shows they're actively hostile to both customers and society at large, and minimally sophisticated thieves with access to a dedicated defeat toolkit that is surely already available to buy somewhere[0], I expect the startup to surrender first.
EDIT: the only real advantage VanMoof could have here is if they're selling shitty bikes and overpricing customers for the brand name. That would indeed deter most thieves successfully - by making stealing those bikes not worth the effort. Well, until the metal prices spike or something, and it's profitable to steal them and sell as raw material...
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[0] - See e.g. cheaply available conversion kits for Bird scooters; IIRC they were being sold for something like $30. Though those had a plausibly legal use case: converting decommissioned or seized scooters. There were plenty of the latter, as following the example set by Uber, Bird also pretended law and society don't exist.
Maybe a clarification: it doesn’t need both the app and internet connection to unlock. There are 2 ways to unlock and one of them uses the app and Bluetooth (no internet).
In terms of the appeals, I see it the other way around. The app is just the means to get the feature set to work; people don’t buy the bike because it has an app. There might be other implementations of the features that don’t require an app.
I have an older model, the ES2, which can be unlocked by tapping a key code into the button in the handlebars. I don't ever use the app for anything, it's not even downloaded to my current phone.
It doesn't need an internet connection & app to unlock.
It needs an internet connection to initially get the bike's encryption keys. After that the app can communicate with the bike over bluetooth without internet access.
And then, you actually don't even need the app to unlock the bike. You can unlock the rear hub by entering a passcode physically on the bike without the app. Occasionally the app/bluetooth conked out and I had to unlock using the code.
I'm just now hearing about VanMoof failing. This is surprising, considering these bikes seem to have pretty meh build quality and are being priced much higher than one would expect.
I've got an X3 that is rock solid even after me and the bike flying apart in an attempt to avoid collision with a truck. And its design is the primary reason why I decided to start biking again to begin with - I just find it so pleasantly satisfying I just want to ride it. So IDK, but I haven't seen a viable alternative yet.
For me, it's just nice/satisfying using a aesthetically designed piece of kit, even if not top of the line performance. Which is issue for bikes, since a well tuned bike makes a huge difference. I don't like looking at all the bits of gear drive system, I like aesthetics of single speed, but riding one PIA. Ended up with a slick belt drive + internal hub setup. Van Moof (which I was considering buying) was basically the only ebike vendor that had similar aesthetics, and cover for chain/belt drive option. Checked my aesthetic boxes enough that I was fine if performance was average because it's ebike and I won't be physically struggling if something goes out of tune anyway. Support killed it for me though, and it seems like killed the company as well.
Belt drive and gear hub is an awesome combo indeed. I'm spending a stupid amount of money to build a gravel bike with that setup, since it doesn't really exist.
I like a different aesthetic but to each their own. A bike you love is the best investment you can make.
There are some that use Shimano Alfine, like the Priority Apollo and Shand Leveret, and others that use Rohloff like MiTech R-Gravel and Shand Cycles Stooshie Rohloff. They're still much rarer that derailleur bikes, though the latest innovation is using a rear derailleur and a 2 speed gear hub with the Classified Powershift.
The build quality is so bad they are going under in warranty claims. They also don't use common components, so very few bike repair shops in high-volume markets (e.g. Netherlands) are willing to touch VanMoof bikes.
Apparently they spent €8M on warranty claims, on an income of €83M, so ~10% of their income. It's not really clear to me if this is exuberantly high, especially since this may also cover non-traditional "warranty" like their theft recovery.
I think it is crazy high, should be well below 1-2% for any "mature" (simple) product, for more complex products (let's say cars) it should be below 5%:
This reminds me of Boosted Boards, which was also VC funded and got killed when Trumps China tariffs killed any profits they had on the hardware.
When Boosted went under years ago some people tracked down the manufacturers of the individual components and to this day you can buy brand new replacement motors. It'll be interesting to see if a market pops up for VanMoof replacement parts as well.
I sure hope so, I'm sitting on an S3 with a broken e-shifter. Support told me they didn't have any in stock and they'd let me know when they did. With hindsight I know now they probably hadn't been paying suppliers for a while now, and weren't getting any parts in because of that.
