Comment by teknover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teknover | Hacker News Reader

It’s a pity that the leading eBike brands like Van Moof and Cowboy are not available in Australia.

I believe part of the reason for the delay & resulting country exclusivity is due to needing a repair presence to support the bikes.

Speaking to an independent senior bike repairer, they told me that they’re unlikely to fix eBikes as they can be more complicated & once they touch a bike to repair the onus is on them to bring it to restore to a repaired state (ie if you pay for a repair and it’s not repaired then the fault will lay with them until corrected).

So unlike traditional bikes that largely are free & operate mechanically similarly, you’re more likely going to see a more electronic car-style repair model (eg where only Tesla are repairing Tesla cars) and a push to consolidation where the 3rd party bike manufacturers or parts (eg Bafang motors or no-name) will lose out to those who have a physical store & large network (Trek, Giant, etc).

I’d love someone’s opinion on this to validate or challenge the thinking here — as for now, it seems I’ll wait forever and never to get a Van Moof or Cowboy & importing seems a dead end since it wouldn’t be repairable by any local repairer.

Both Van Moof and Cowboy are losing money too, both of them have been close to running out of runway, who knows if they'll survive in the long run. As for maintenance, the main critique on Van Moof is that almost everything on the bike is a custom made component, I'm sure it's a similar story for Cowboys. So even if you took it to a generic repair shop, they wouldn't be able to get parts that fit.

When my Van Moof broke, I had to ship it to Amsterdam for repairs, it took three weeks. My friends with Cowboys generally get faster service because they have the Tesla model of sending a repair person out to you. Other friends with bikes that have generic Bosch and Shimano parts seem to fare better, they can walk into your average bike shop and they're able to take care of it.

I got into Boosted Board electric skateboards early on, and if their story is anything to go by, these more lifestyle oriented brands tend to not fare so well once the market matures and you're better off with your Bafang/Bosch bike, instead of an expensive brick.

as an owner of a Van Moof I think they had their moment, but now it's time for the company to go bankrupt. They have made too many mistakes, and focus on the wrong things, so it is time for some darwinian pruning.

Let me explain: they were early to introduce a cheap e-bike with a nice design (the S3 came in at €2o00 + €400 3 year service). Cheap is of course relative,but at the time most reputable brand ugly as hell bikes sold for €3000+.

Where they went wrong is that they took minimalism too far. The combination of automatic shifting (and there are no buttons), absence of a pedalling force sensor (cause cheap) and an internal gear hub (can't really shift under load) is basically a recipe for disaster. Combine that with general lack of QA and all of a sudden you have a company burdened by it's repair costs almost to the level of bankruptcy...

Odd, I thought repairs were supposed to be the business model? Get folks hooked on a cool ebike witha bunch of proprietary parts they can't fix themselves. Force them to pay you ongoing fees to tune up and repair the bikes. Bike-as-a-Service.

Hilarious to think that the decision to make their devices unrepairable is actually bankrupting them. But also very sad to think that many of those bikes are destined to become ewaste once the company folds and nobody can repair them.

What makes these brands leading in your opinion? From a tech and design perspective I get the appeal that VanMoof and Cowboy have, I've wanted one for years because of that. But in doing research I've also read a tonne of horror stories about random failures and reliability issues where repairs mean shipping it back to Cowboy/VanMoof, waiting weeks or months and then getting your bike back only to do it all over again a short while later.

For a bike the traditional brands that use of the shelf parts like Bosch and Shimano still have the advantage in my opinion, especially if you don't live close to a dealer/repairshop that can handle it.

Edit: What's also putting me of from both VanMoof and Cowboy is their rocky financial history. Last month Cowboy secured funding, but it was looking sketchy for a bit. I wonder what would happen to all those cloud features from Cowboy if the company goes under.

Leaders in marketing perhaps. For that kind of money it'd always be a bosch/shimano mid-drive for me.

Sounds like a great reason to be happy that the leading brands aren't in Australia. Get a Bafang or a Tongsheng and be happy.

I was about to say get a Bafang too. Put it on a normal, better old, bike. They are indestructible. And all other parts are standard and cheap. You need some bike mechanics skills, and a little understanding in connecting electric components. But all is well documented on the web.

The torque sensor in the tongsheng makes the battery go further with less perceived effort and is just generally nicer to use. Hitting 25km/h feels like less of a wall.

I can go 75–90km on one charge with the open source firmware and a 850Wh battery. And you can service the bike yourself because it’s all standard parts (and you had to put it together yourself in the first place!)

You can also use any generic battery or build your own.

Standardization is key to this, I think. Any device that cracks the 'fits all bicycles' electrification nut, is going to grow.

Same goes for some startup that comes up with a way to convert existing petro-cars into electro-cars, i.e. hub motors, super-capacity, etc.

It makes all the sense in the world to me that electric revolution/evolution is happening in the e-bicycle (and to some extent e-motorbike) classes of transportation.

Bicycles, generally, are an area where we have always seen how important it is to have standards...

Australians can build their own bicycles?

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