Honest question: what’s the appeal of a bike that needs an internet connection & app to unlock?
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.
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.
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.
Berlin where I currently live isn't much better but they've not yet introduced parking garages for bikes as far as I know.
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.
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.
I struggle to understand those who think something like that could be a good idea.
Isn't it obvious that an app will not be around for as long as a bike can last?
I have a bike from the early 90s, that's over 30 years. Does anyone think an app will be around even for 10 years, let alone 30+?
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.
People under 25 don't know better, they genuenly haven't experienced anything else than Chinese made self destructing Bluetooth enabled plastic gadgets
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.
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...
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.
Do you know what the median lifespan is of an aluminium frame? I guess it depends on how often its crashed?
The website is telling me there's a charge for the shipping, but no way to pay it.
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.
I don't want a non-e-bike. I want a bike with pedal assist.
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.
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.
Sure, but that's utterly irrelevant to daily commuter / city bikes, which Van Moof are.
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.
Either way you most likely won't recover it.
The point of Van Moof was to associate their brand with "don't steal our bikes because they will lead the police to your dump location".
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
You mean they know the vendor is an infinite supplier of free bikes to steal, deSaaSify, and sell to a different market?
Either way, the message doesn't spread itself; I wouldn't overestimate how much small-scale semi-pro thiefs know or care about bullshit tech startups.
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...
--
[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.
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.
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.