Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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.

(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.

Bike theft is rampant in London, but I never had any worries with the X2, combination of inbuilt-lock and an Almax chain saw to that.

This. I also would not like my bike to rely on an internet connection. At least in my view this lowers the value of the bike.

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