VanMoof, the e-bike darling, skids off track: Sales paused, execs depart | Hacker News Reader

VanMoof, the e-bike darling, skids off track: Sales paused, execs depart

techcrunch.com

13 pointsj-a-a-p8 comments

I bought an X2 in July 2019 and still use it most days. There have been a few niggles but nothing major and customer service has been good. Would buy again. Given the cost, however, I really need to sweat this asset (while mildly sweating myself). I think the total cost including rack and basket and insurance was around £3.5K. £875 a year. For a bicycle. That needs to be much lower to really get the value for me. No new VanMoof for me - even though I paid to get early bird on the vapourware V.

However, the landscape in four years is TOTALLY different, e-bikes are absolutely everywhere and at every reasonable price point, so it must be super tough to fight it out in this market.

I have a S2, after a few error codes I had my battery replaced. About 6 weeks ago, before all this news, the same error message appeared, which means they have to check my bike. Next available slot: 2 months later.

I’ll never ever buy a bike which can only be serviced by the company selling the bike.

Yeah, I hear you, the risk of buying something so integrated factored into my original decision. I was in London at the time, and after diagnosis of an error code I had, they simply shipped me a new wheel and motor as I said I could fix it myself.

As an aside, do check the connection between the motor and the battery in the fork, comes loose easily and causes all sorts of errors.

I can’t imagine when I’m next going to be able to afford a bike, probably in six or seven years, but I too will be going for something more generic.

>£875 a year. For a bicycle

If it replaces a larger vehicle, that's not that much. That's the big value prop. If you live somewhere with good enough public transit (especially good enough public transit that you can bring a bicycle on), the value prop is low. If you live in a more rural/suburban area where the bike is good enough for many of your trips that would have required a car or would have required a 1hr+ bus ride, it's a great deal.

I have a similar comment on the same article elsewhere recently, but "darling" is a really tech industry-centric way to describe them. The people most likely to spend $1k+ on a bike are people who already ride bikes. These don't particularly appeal to those groups.

We go through a new one of these companies every few years but the thing is simply that "people with no bike opinions who want to buy an expensive bike" is not a large market at all. Bikes, even e-bikes, are a very mature, well-understood technology and "innovation" is incremental and easily copied if effective.

The "my first bike is an electric bike" group is addressed by cheap utilitarian east asian ebikes. The "my first bike costs $3500" group is addressed by every single bike manufacturer, they all compete aggressively in that segment. The intersection of the two is just too small.

Personally, I love the idea but the execution was very strange.

Only offering automatic shifting (and lurch-y automatic shifting at that!) made the bikes basically unrideable for anything beyond a slow flat ride.

I guess the Dutch never see hills so gearing is sort of foreign to them anyway!

Hills, sure, not too many of them. But there are sooo many bridges that require shifting. And the flat landscape can also give you terrible headwinds where again, shifting is very handy. So I don't think that /that/ is the reason for the lack of manual shifting.

There is a very small part in the Netherlands where that is not the case, called 'Heuvelland' (Hill land). It even has a 'Bergdorp' (mountain village). DAF, a truck factory, does their testing there, and I even met a professional Belgium cyclist who preferred it for practice.

But VanMoof, "born in Amsterdam", I can understand they missed it.

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