Tesla Balance Bike | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Balance Bike

shop.tesla.com

21 pointssurprisetalk88 comments

This is a balance bike meant to attract the dads who are fans of the brand rather than a balance bike meant to be good for kids.

First the handlebar is too large for small hands and comes with no grips, second the top tube is too wide to be comfortable between the legs and the whole frame is just edges.

If you want a good balance bike look for brands like prevelo [0] or woom [1] who have been designing kid bikes for years.

[0] https://prevelo.com/products/alpha-zero

[1] https://woom.com/en_INT/balance-bikes/self-balancing-bike/wo...

Woom is the best - not only when it comes to balance bikes, but also real bikes. As they really are bikes. Other, even serious, brands make kids' bikes that are just too heavy. Also, Woom keeps it's re-selling value very well, much better than anything what Tesla makes.

Tesla makes the most exquisitely hyped stock available on the market.

I agree, my sons learned cycling on woom bikes. They were the only brand in Europe that offered brake levers for small hands and crank arms with appropriate length.

>> attract the dads who are fans of the brand

I'm surprised they haven't yet released a cyber-grill.

There was a weed burner[1] if that helps. Technically boring though.

[1]: https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower

I was going to say, I could see them releasing a grill styled like one of their vehicles, but they probably aren’t keen to have more associations of their stuff with being on fire :)

They actually have

https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...

Am I just out of the loop but is $200+ for a children's bike absolutely insane?

Another HN user suggested a bike that costs $650, almost three times what the Tesla bike costs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003333

So no, I would not consider $225 "completely insane".

Disclaimer: I have no ties with, financial interest in, or own any products of Tesla.

The suggested bike is a "real" bike, not just a balance bike.

We bought our kid a balance bike for £45, there is no need to go much above that price.

It is. Similar bikes are $40 on Amazon.

https://www.specialized.com/us/en/hotwalk-carbon/p/200221?co...

Could have sworn this was an April 1 joke in 2018/19 originally

It depends what you do with such bikes. My son at 5 y.o. rode green trails in a bike park with a woom bike (not a balance bike), and I have seen other dads bring kids with balance bikes to bike parks.

If that is your objective you are ok to spend a few hundred dollars on a kid bike if that gives you the hope you will be saving a lot more than that from the dentist.

This said, a dad like me whose passion are expensive bikes, is very likely to be willing to spend a few hundreds on a kids bike, especially if you have more than one kid and you plan to pass the bike to the other son when the elder one outgrows it.

There is a significant jump in quality between a bike-shaped object at Walmart and a name-brand kid’s bike at your local bicycle shop. There is also a significant jump in price.

Is Tesla known for building quality? Last time I checked their vehicles were nowhere near basic quality levels of other brands.

Tesla has no reputation in the cycling industry, at least not regarding their bikes, but by the looks of it the fork and wheels are made of composite plastic. Not great.

Strider Balance Bikes are also nice and broadly available and actualy built for kids unlike this whatever that Tesla thing is.

My child started on a Strider balance bike when slighly under two years old. It was a perfect intro to cycling and then we upgraded to the first pedal bike at three.

This year upgraded to his seventh bike so the sport has stuck!

Nailed it.

4T valuation is incoming.

there are currently 600M kids between 0-4 ages. Imagine each paying $100 for this bike, we are talking about $60B revenue. On top of that Tesla is planning to sell accessories and subscription to these bikes, which will grow their revenue by another $120B

We haven't even started talking about how experience with these bikes will shape these kids and eventually they will buy Tesla in the future when they grow up (we are talking about another $50T market cap addition over 30 years, around 125M new customers every year)

IANAL, P&L, this is not a financial advice: Invest now before its too late

/sarcasm

It's $225 per bike so revenue of $135b. Moar valuation!

I expect the TSLA stock to jump another 20% based on this

do you mean based on my message alone?

It would be ridiculous if stock prices jumped or dropped just from a single message by someone! :)

Don't forget the potential for bike parking in space bays. So much more eco than earth bound parking.

so many good ideas in this thread, Elon should hire us

I called my wife's boyfriend and told him he needs to get on board NOW. There'll be a huge run on it once they announce the Boring Company Flamethrower Mount add-on.

And this is a great way for Optimus to get around, so you can add another 1b sales right there.

I've analyzed it and I think the total addressable market for these balance bikes exceeds $30 trillion dollars

Just buy your kid a good quality pedal bike [0], and take the pedals off.

That way they can learn to use the brakes, and when you put the pedals on, they will quickly learn to cycle it. Took my daughter an afternoon.

[0] e.g. https://us.earlyrider.com/products/belter-14-kids-bike-age-3...

Thanks for the tip!

Worked for me, thanks for the fond memory

I'm glad this worked for your family, but in my kids' experience this is too heavy to use as balance bike. By the time they were comfortable hoisting their de-pedaled 12" / 5.4kg bike off the ground, they'd nearly outgrown it. They preferred a cheap hand-me-down balance bike which was half the weight (the upscale ones with brakes and pneumatic tires are self-defeatingly heavier).

Depends when they start, but a bike like that would have been too heavy and too big for a ~1.8 year old.

We started with a Strider which is only 6.5lbs for the whole bike, much more manageable for a under-two year old.

Warning: the bike may start to unexpectedly veer to the Far Right

roman salutes to show the way

vom Herzen zum Sohn!

Comes in 4 different themes for your little one:

- Starship

- Dinosaur

- Princess

- Schutzstaffel

Ugh. All you haters have no vision. Pretty sure you have missed the non-GAAP upside of this bike where the PRS of this cohort of ELSCs is booked and multiplied forward as ICFRS which means each bike sale is worth a future two cars, a cybertruck, a power wall, a personal levitation suit, and the revenue contributed from the children’s children’s indentured servitude in the mines of Mars.

[0] Potentialized Recurring Spend [1] Early life-stage customers [2] Infinitely Continuing Future Revenue Streams

Can’t wait to see these with “F Elon” stickers in San Francisco.

technically this is a hobby-horse, not a bike

A dandy-horse, or a velocipede.

My first bike shop job, we had an old crazy guy who scooted around town on his draisienne (read: a regular bike with a big ol' wooden dowel in place of the crankset). Not sure it really caught on.

Maybe I'm too stupid to understand, but how do you ride it? is it electrical? If so what's the maximum speed? or is it just those toy bikes where the kids need to push forward with their feet? if that's the case why on earth is it 225$?

That’s not an uncommon price point for these kind of bikes aiming for that market segment (Woom).

I think it's "just" a regular balance bike that you push with your feet, although I wouldn't dismiss that kind of bike as a "toy". It's actually the best way to learn to use a bike for kids, much better than trainer wheels.

More kids toys: Cyberquad for Kids

https://shop.tesla.com/product/cyberquad-for-kids?sku=171474...

Comes with the full Tesla experience of recalls and safety issues.

https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2023/Radio-Flyer-Recalls-Cyberq...

Every bike is a balance bike. That's how bikes work.

I believe it is called that because it is meant for learning to balance on a bicycle (as opposed to training wheels which, as commonly used, are mostly helpful in learning to pedal, but not balance). There are many other brands of "balance bike". The term is generic enough that it got its own Wikipedia page about 20 years ago.

Aren't so called "balance bikes" very dumb and also mildly harmful for kids? Why not just buy a proper bike with sidewheels, and after a few weeks just drop them and kid will learn to ride bicycles properly now? Instead of both not learning anything and endangering pedestrians and himself on the "balance bike"?

Eh, my daughter had one when she was 2-3, before she would have been able to ride a pedal bike, and it was definitely helpful for her learning. She had training wheels on her next bike for a day or two and then we took them off and she rode without issue.

We also lived in an apartment and a tiny balance bike was a lot less disruptive than a pedal bike with training wheels.

You can start a kid on a balance bike at like 9 months. There are no pedal bikes with training wheels that's small enough for a 9 month old.

No responsible parent will allow a child on a balance bike (or one with training wheels) in any scenario where they'll 'endanger' anything.

Balance bikes teach you to ride a bike (maintain balance while steering). Training wheels teach you to pedal a bike.

Learning balancing and steering first, and then learning to actually cycle the pedals is the right order of events I think.

1. Assuming there is a real proven age gap and balance bike allows a noticeably earlier start than a real bike with side wheels - what is the purpose of doing that in the first place? What will kid learn in the gap period specifically? Just balancing? Well, maybe that's beneficial.

I have googled and the quick search tells me that the gap is between 6 to 12 month.

2. I have never ever in my life seen even one balance bike with brakes. So as soon as a kid can "glide" on it, he is a danger to himself and to the people around.

Does learning balance a bit earlier outweigh the danger? I don't know.

As an adult I try to walk as far as possible from kids on these balance bikes, unless parent is holding their hand or handlebar. Getting hit at a significant speed in the leg is not fun.

1. I think the point is they learn the more difficult skill first, which is balancing. It's low enough to the ground that the kid can balance with their feet, but they will naturally start picking up their feet when they get some momentum and speed going. I think it's a much less stressful way to learn riding a bike compared to knowing mommy-or-daddy-might-let-go-and-I-will-fall school of training.

2. A very quick google search got me this¹. More than half the balance bikes on there have brakes. I've seen similar on other bike websites. I agree it's irresponsible to not have brakes, especially for the bigger kid models.

I have a 7 month old now. I want to get her on a balance bike before the end of the year, or maybe start with a trike. Exclusively indoors, or under very strict supervision from me if we are anywhere outside. As soon as she's big enough, she'll get the smallest "big" bike where I have removed the pedals, but we have the front and back brakes present. Then she'll continue balance-biking on there till she's ready for the pedals.

1: https://www.decathlon.ie/8104-balance-bikes-tricycles

> So as soon as a kid can "glide" on it, he is a danger to himself and to the people around.

Oh please. We're talking about a 1 year old on a 6lb bike going jogging speed.

The benefit in learning curve is huge. I didn't have the benefit of balance bikes, so had to learn to bike at ~6 years old on a big pedal bike and struggled for a long while to balance it.

In contrast my kid learned to balance on a balance bike at age one, and had a seamless transition to a pedal bike at three.

5 year olds on balance bikes are endangering pedestrians?

Kids on balance bikes are more like 1-2 year olds.

No. They are widely considered to be one of the best ways to learn balance and steering as well as developing coordination and core strength. The bike is not physically capable of reaching a high speed on flat ground due to the lack of a geared propulsion system. Generally they result in a faster transition to pedaling two wheels than by using training wheels on a “normal” bike.

> Why not just buy a proper bike with sidewheels

Training wheels are the worst for multiple reasons. The kid doesn't learn any balancing since the bike stays upright on the training wheels no matter what they do. And a pedal bike with training wheels is quite heavy (for a 1 year old) so it's more frustrating.

The best way to learn to cycle is to start on a balance bike when very young (under two) which gets the balancing part hardwired in the young brain. Then it is an easy step up to a pedal bike when they are a bit older and can handle the extra weight.

No doubt it's just a spray painted OEM product from China.

Well, at least this one looks like custom made: https://shop.tesla.com/product/cybertruck-for-kids?sku=19856... . I dare to say, most products in that shop make sense. Well besides the entire "why would I want anything related to this toxic brand" issue.

I feel like most of us could knock this up out of ply with a handsaw and a drill, and 3D print some covers to go over it, in about an afternoon.

Or, you know, spend a tenner on a used one off Facebook Marketplace and a fiver on a tin of spray paint to make it all cool and custom.

....Why?!

Seriously though.

Musk promises self-driving cars, hyperloops, tunnels, and what they actually deliver is... a †balance bike*?!

Satire is dead, because I can't imagine a worse self-own.

Same reason the Musk Corporate Universe does everything else: because Elon woke up and thought it would be cool.

Which would be fine I think if the company was otherwise successful. But the only thing preventing its complete downfall at this point is the high import taxes on the Chinese EV competition, and the only reason for said high import taxes is market protection.

But while Europe and the US desperately try to protect their own markets, the rest of the world - you know, the other 7.5 billion people - is a potential customer.

I mean at least it is transportation adjacent. Tesla flamethrower on other hand ...

They don't even have dealers that could throw this stuff in instead of real discount...

Because they failed to get any other working new products to the market. Tesla semi? new roadster? Updates to their existing models? Tunnels? All announced years ago, nothing released.

Cybertruck is the only released new product that made some waves, and it failed, did not meet sales targets, definitely does not meet any requirements for a truck. Less than 100K sold, 20% of which to Musk's own companies (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-05-05/how-many-c...).

Tesla semi?

Well, that did make it to market. One of them killed two people near Reno recently.

https://electrek.co/2026/07/01/tesla-semi-first-fatal-crash-...

This is pretty cool, but seems like a massive waste of time for Tesla.

It's between odd and creepy, not sure where the cool is.

If your reaction to this is that it’s odd/creepy, that says more about you than it does the bike.

It is completely in-line with their strategy to become a lifestyle brand for tech-savvy conservatives: https://shop.tesla.com/category/lifestyle

(That's pretty normal for a car company - many car brands have a lifestyle department).

I was just thinking, I'm surprised they haven't started making ludicrously expensive road bikes with like 9-spoke wheels and oval carbon-fibre frame tubes, and not just bluetooth gears but brakes too because it saves a gram off the frame weight.

The overlap between Tesla arseholes and roadie arseholes is probably considerable.

No, Preston, the yellow lambswool jumper that cost as much as a second-hand Fiat is not making you faster. Take it off, you look like a tit.

They really should go and buy out Reevo. Or rebrand their bikes. E-Bikes with perfect futuristic design (almost non-functional). Would be right up their alley.

I would love a Reevo, they're so shit :-D

But then I would also import a Pontiac Aztek and park it beside a Fiat Multipla.

It's almost like replacing one pair of small low-friction bearings with 40 or so of them is a bad idea.

I view roadies as prototypically moderate/liberal - I don't know anyone who owns a Tesla and bikes

All the roadies round here are at best Lib Dem and often Reform or Alba types.

There's a guy in my town who makes a point of deliberately riding his bike *at* cars to prove some sort of a point about how dangerous cars are for bikes, because they should be able to stop if he swerves into oncoming traffic with a metre clearance. Same guy is also vehemently opposed to spending "his" taxes on sports grounds, playgrounds, or improving walking and cycling infrastructure because everyone should be riding racing bikes on the road.

One day he's going to get a physics lesson he'll remember for the rest of his life.

There's already more than a few brands which have the douche chills roadie market cornered, Factor and Pinarello come to mind

There aren't many Pinarellos around here but they all seem to be ridden by bad-tempered Tesco Value Peter Capaldi-looking guys with cycling clothes that cost more than my Range Rover (which granted was 250 quid).

They look great but I'm faster on my Commençal and probably more comfortable too.

How about for grownups? Those old ICE motorcycles are still making city centers noisy and it would be nice to start phasing them out with electric.

This isn't electric, it's a balance bike for kids you push it with your feet.

In any case there's endless electric bikes on shops.

There are plenty of electric motorbikes already, problem is those guys WANT it to be noisy.

Electric motorbike rider here. I had to tape a whistle to my helmet to prevent ignorant pedestrians from stepping right in front of me ..

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