ebikes

Lectric eBikes has spent the last several years steadily expanding from its original folding fat-tire e-bikes into just about every corner of the affordable electric bicycle market. Now the company is returning its attention to the commuter category with the new Lectric XPress Lite, a lighter and more affordable version of its popular XPress2 urban e-bike.

If you’ve ever looked at a cargo e-bike and thought, “Sure, but where am I supposed to put the other six people?”, SixThreeZero may finally have the answer.

The company’s latest addition to its growing e-bike and e-trike lineup, the Long Range Luxury Rickshaw, is already a fairly ridiculous machine in its standard form. It combines three wheels, dual motors, rear passenger seating bench, and enough battery capacity to make many electric motorcycles jealous. But start adding its optional passenger trailers, and you can essentially build yourself a seven-person electric bicycle train.

Europe has spent years encouraging people to ditch cars and get around on bicycles and e-bikes instead. And in many places, it’s working. But all of those increasingly sophisticated electric bicycles have created an unexpected new problem: there aren’t nearly enough people to fix them.

There are plenty of ways to build a small electric vehicle. These days, the prevailing options have been to make it faster, give it more power, slap on bigger tires, or keep adding features until your humble little scooter has somehow turned into a 150-pound electric motorcycle.

Or you can be brave and go in the other direction to ask a simpler question: How much vehicle do people actually need for all those short trips around town?

After months of delays, missed delivery windows, and increasingly impatient reservation holders, Rivian spinout ALSO is finally putting its electric bikes into the hands of actual customers.

The Ride1Up Roadster V3 is, for all intents and purposes, is a budget-focused daily driver urban bike. It’s not really a gravel bike. Maybe if you stand back a bit and squint, you could give it a bit more of a gravel bike interpretation. But ultimately, it’s a lightweight, affordable urban e-bike with decent multi-role tires that I mostly use for cruising around bike lanes and city streets.

So naturally, yesterday I took it on a 38 km (24 mile) ride where I spent most of the time off-road.

There are cheap e-bikes, and there are good mid-drive e-bikes. Those two circles on the Venn diagram don’t overlap nearly as often as we’d like. But Ride1Up’s newly launched Prodigy V2 Eco is doing its best to smash them together with a surprisingly low $1,295 price tag.

And this isn’t a $1,300 bike with some no-name mid-drive motor you’ve never heard of. At the heart of the Prodigy V2 Eco is a German-made Brose TF Sprinter mid-drive motor pumping out 90 Nm of torque, paired with a 504 Wh battery using Samsung cells.

Gazelle has spent much of its recent e-bike development pushing its premium Ultimate platform toward faster Class 3 commuters, but now the Dutch bicycle maker is filling out the other side of the family.

If you’ve spent any time reading local neighborhood social media groups lately – and for your mental health, I hope you haven’t – you’ve probably encountered a familiar complaint: teenagers on e-bikes.

An 11-year-old boy in Florida has found himself with a traffic citation, a towed electric motorcycle, and a court date after police caught him riding a high-powered electric dirt bike in lieu of an electric bicycle on public roads.

New York City lawmakers are preparing this week to consider a sweeping new package of micromobility legislation, with more than 20 bills aimed at e-bikes, electric scooters, mopeds, delivery apps, and enforcement.

Being a one-car family works great right up until the moment two people need to be in two different places. Maybe your spouse took the car to work, but you need to grab groceries. Maybe you’ve got to pick up a kid from daycare. Perhaps you’re meeting a friend for coffee, heading to the gym, or just running some mundane errand that happens to require going a few miles across town.

Those are the moments when a second car starts sounding awfully convenient.

Honda is best known for motorcycles, cars, generators, lawnmowers, robots, jets… basically anything with a motor attached to it. But now the Japanese giant appears ready to add another two-wheeler to that list: an electric mountain bike.

South Park has finally come for e-bikes. And perhaps surprisingly, underneath all the explosions, biker gangs, racist caricatures, and general South Park-ness of it all, the show actually managed to make some pretty insightful observations about the current state of e-bikes in America.

Rivian spin-off ALSO is finally getting its futuristic TM-B electric bikes out across the United States.

Unfortunately for the customers who ordered them nearly a year ago, those bikes aren’t headed to their garages. They’re headed on tour.

Segway is giving its compact MUXI utility e-bike a fairly significant upgrade, adding everything from automatic electronic shifting to front suspension and a higher Class 3 top speed.

ENGWE has just launched its latest all-terrain electric bike, the E26 3.0, and the company is going big on power this time around. The new model combines dual hub motors, full suspension, and chunky fat tires into a bike that looks designed to handle just about anything you can throw at it.

I’ve been working in the electric bike industry for nearly two decades, and publicly reviewing e-bikes for around half of that. I used to say I’ve touched hundreds of e-bikes, but now that I’ve lost count, I wouldn’t be surprised to find I need to add a digit to that. With so many saddles that I have to sit on, I get to ride a lot of e-bikes for a few weeks, but I rarely get to spend months on any one bike. So when I finished my one-month review of the Xtracycle Hopper electric cargo bike and had a unique opportunity for a longer-term project, I jumped on it.

My best friend and his wife have a couple of kids and are a bike-friendly family, so I made him an offer: take this bike and ride it as much as you guys can. Now, having just hit 1,000 km (620 miles) on the thing, he’s back to share his experiences with me. And by extension, with you all.

Just when it looked like we were about to find out what Storm Sondors has been cooking up for his return to the e-bike world, the story has taken another strange turn.

There’s a fairly wide spectrum of moped-style electric bikes these days. Some are essentially conventional e-bikes wearing motorcycle-inspired designs, while others lean so heavily into the mini-moto experience that the pedals start to feel like little more than a legal technicality.

The Macfox X1S definitely falls closer to that second group.

Rivian spin-off ALSO is pushing back the delivery timeline for its highly anticipated TM-B electric bike yet again, with reservation holders for the flagship Launch Edition now being told to expect their bikes to arrive by early November at the latest.