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Comment by mattio | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

In this case it was a low-end model of VanMoof. I could see no excuse not to use something standard, the goal seemed to be customer lock-in.

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.

Well, unless you think they are ugly (I very much do)

> This is not expensive at all.

I mean, you can get a regular bike for €300, €700 if you want to splurge. But of course, the downside of that would be that you'd get more exercise.

Have the prices come down lately? When COVID hit, it was nearly impossible to find cheap new bikes.

I bought a new bike for €300 something in 2021, in NL. But it does seem like some stores hardly carry anything that costs below €1000.

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.

If the features are nearly useless, like for instance an electric motor, then we can simply assign a very low weight to them when comparing.

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?

I would say a motor is remarkably useful feature on a transportation device.

Market changed. Bike vendors have a harder time unloading their inventory these days.

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.

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?

I mean, why buy a bike at all? You could just run instead of riding, it is even more exercise for you, and doesn't cost a penny.

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.

This is a commuter bike. That's hardly related to "exercise", it's about getting from A to B efficiently, cheaply and comfortably.

Pretty ridiculous claim to say that biking to and from work every day isn't providing you with exercise.

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

> I mean, you can also easily spend >2k on a bike.

And what you would have is an expensive bike. $2k is an expensive bike.

The fact the market offers a $3,000,000 car doesn't mean a $100,000 car isn't an expensive car.

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.

You can get a cheap bike for 300 where every part except the frame fails within a year.

Otherwise 500-700 is the low end for quality bikes.

300 buys you a fantastic second hand bike with all standard parts that any shop can repair or replace.

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.

As the expression goes, 'horses for courses'.

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.

> This is not expensive at all.

> If they can’t find it you get a new one.

Can't figure out why they weren't profitable.

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).

How do you secure the battery with ulock? Or are there bikes with non-replaceble batteries? How do you charge them?

If I had an e-bike I would just take the battery with me. Minor inconvenience for security.

The VanMoof has built-in batteries that are extremely hard to access. You must take the bike near an outlet to charge.

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.

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.

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.

> I am not sure why everyone thinks they are expensive. > There are eBikes costing 4000 euro.

Is this coping mechanism where you justify yourself you got a good deal from them?

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