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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

What was left there to be acquired?

Brand, inventory, names and addresses of all of the previous buyers, servers for the lock/unlock facility and possibly more than that.

And leases, something very people know is that Van Moof has a great corporate leasing program. All big tech offer eBike commuting options paying Van Moof Leases.

I think it is genius, the bikes are expensive to buy, but $100 a month lease including maintenance is very popular among Big tech (especially if your company pays for it).

https://support.vanmoof.com/en/support/solutions/articles/44...

How many of these do they have in the field?

They could very well be losing substantial money on that. Leases only work if the quality of what you lease is high enough that you won't be bleeding to death on the availability guarantee. Financial lease insulates the lease provider from that but if it is operational lease then whoever inherits the leases might be in for a very hard time.

100% Agree and unfortunately I don't have numbers. However, anecdotally I work for a big tech and I have one of the leases, and it is a very popular option across my colleagues. I'd probably never buy one, but with the lease I'm very happy customer. Also they gave the option to upgrade to newer models for $10 more dollars a month after a year which I think it helps them to fix operational issues. There is also in-campus maintenance which is very convenient. I think that if they operate/scale the lease business properly it could make a very good business in its own.

There are multiple of these lease suppliers and then there is Van Moof themselves, I take it your deal is with Van Moof directly. That should - assuming the new owners have actually bought the lease contracts as well - give you a priority position for spare parts. Here is the FAQ of another such provider (there is also Athlon, possibly others):

https://www.leasefiets.nl/qavanmoof/

Customers from a demographic that’s willing to pay a premium for looks.

Income from future repairs to bicycles already sold.

Reading https://www.vanmoof.com/en-NL/terms-and-conditions#t&c-secti...: payments from customers who leased a bicycle.

So many people locked out of their bikes to which you can now sell a subscription.

Exactly zero people are locked out of their bikes. That profoundly low information take is like a canary.

Certainly there are people locked out of their bikes, but perhaps not for the reason you're thinking about. Just recently, I bought a NIB VanMoof on CL. The owner had never put together and it sat in his basement for 2 years. So the batteries in it are dead (the controller battery was a spicy pillow, but the motor battery may still be okay), so I figured at the price it was offered at, it worth it just for the parts in the worst case.

I knew about the BikeyApp, and getting the encryption keys downloaded before I went to go buy the bike, but unfortunately, before I could stop the PO, he deletes the bike from his VanMoof account because I now own the bike, and he wanted to release it so that I could register it to myself. So I own it now, right? Wrong... Even though I now "own" the bike, I cannot register it because I don't have the original manual for it (the PO lost it), which has a special QR code printed on it to register the bike.

The PO, who has a receipt for the bike, cannot get VanMoof to transfer the ownership to me, so the bike is parts (which is a risk I was willing to take). I'm going to strip the craptacular electronics from it and just make it a regular 4spd pedal bike.

The funny thing is I was able to get the controller powered up and guess what? The bike was defective from the factory... the controller throws charging over-temp errors regardless of it being hooked up to anything, even dummy loads. This apparently is not an uncommon experience with these bikes from the forum posts I've read about them.

Also, as an aside, f* having to carry a phone to use a bike. This thing might look cool but it's a garbage fire of bad decisions fueled with VC money.

You don’t need to carry a phone to use a vanmoof. You can unlock and change speed settings directly with the bike without a phone.

This is incorrect. No-one was locked out of their bike.

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