DJI's E-MTB Play: Avinox, Amflow and the Future Business of eebs

If Avinox were just delivering on power it would be much easier to snub, but their approach to integration and customization is seamless and their motor outright outperforms everything else. The new Kona with the Bosch CX is really close in weight to the 600Wh Avinox bikes so despite not pursuing a lightweight system they’re not meaningfully behind either. 

First generation Avinox bikes were already a foot-throttle compared to everything else on the market. 1000w+ of output with less than 150w of input is no longer a mountain bike in any meaningful way. Doing a sustained 32km/hr up the Blackcomb access road shouldn't be possible without pro-Tour legs and lungs on you. These bikes are going to be an absolute menace on shared climb trails.

I think DJI is going to be really hard to beat long term.  They have such an advantage on application and user interface development that their product is going to seem more refined.  Beyond that, the access they have to cutting edge, and less regulated battery production and technology is going to make it much easier for them to push that envelope and create custom cells and bespoke battery solutions.  The advantage they have with 3 phase motor design, efficiency and development goes without saying... and that is a huge advantage in this space.  

I also think you're bang on about the opportunity to integrate vertically and they also have no loyalty that they need to maintain.  For example, most manufacturers are going either shimano or sram on the electronic drivetrain... where as avinox is supporting both.  The fact that Bosch has stayed strong to their "eshift" standard and not reached across the isle to play nice with Sram or shimano, is telling.   

One thing I do find interesting is that virtually none of them are working to play nice with Garmin integration (shimano, bosch, avinox) and sending data to garmin.  Avinox is doing slightly more then bosch has been with ant+ and receiving a heart rate monitor... but now bosch is doing that with the kiox system as well.  It just seems interesting that this is the place where the mfgs are drawing the line, it seems telling that they are perceiving the garmin eco system as a competitor or at least an ecosystem that potentially conflicts with their own control/vision of the customer.  I can definitely see a world where DJI would potentially want to compete directly with garmin in the future... they seem to most of the tech on hand to create a garmin competitor device.  

It feels like this is the start of vertical integration for avinox and I feel like that's where they are really going to start throwing their weight around.  It feels like MGUs or their own electronic drivetrain, electronic suspension, dropper posts etc, are going to be ripe for the picking for them.  

For me, it's not so much the power, but the packaging. I was not using ALL of my Bosch power or even my EP8 juice when I had them. However, given that the newer Avinox bikes are providing full power in a size/weight configuration getting closer to a DH/enduro bike... Why not?

To me, the Ebike is more of a commodity than a Trail/Enduro/DH. Kinda sad but true. The other issue is service and resale. Due to the fact that this market is commoditized, at least in my head, I want to future-proof as best as possible. As long as the Geo is in the right place, I am good. I mean, it DOES have a motor! Sure, the Bosch bikes are PERFECTLY sufficient, along with Spesh, Aventon, Giant, etc. However, the perspective is that they are yesterday's news. So if and when I sell whatever Avinox bike I have, it will be that much further ahead than the other stuff on the resale market. 

I'm really, really concerned about the level of power and assist and what it's ultimately going to mean for the trail system I founded (and still chair) specifically and trail access in general.  I think the TQ50 is where ebikes should have started and stopped, but what Avinox is putting out is far beyond anything and totally irresponsible and unprincipled. F*ck them.  

I know some bike manufacturers may feel like they have to adopt Avinox or go out of business.  That's a tough decision, but if you decide Avinox, then please please us any further pandering of any rider-owned, we-care-about-the-sport bullshit.  When the chips are down, you're no different than Amazon or any other similar company that makes soulless decisions based on money and spreadsheets.

We need to brand these things quickly and dramatically.  We have to crystalize in the public consciousness that they are not "e-bikes."  I say we call anything with an Avinox motor a "communist bike."   I live in the United States and have watched our political disaster play out.  Apparently these sorts of antics make a difference.

I'm staring down 50.  My TQ ebike feels pretty damn bike-like, at least compared to my Madonna.  I just want to spend as much time as possible maneuvering a bike down fun trails, and the TQ motor let's me do a lot more that and I am so grateful to have it.  But I think motorized bicycles are very likely to take us to a very bad place.  I think a lot about whether, if I could snap my fingers and make ebikes go away forever, I'd be unselfish enough to do it.  I hope I would.

I want more of a mtb feel. Not interested in pedal throttle. At all. Did that last week in SantaCruz and felt like a douche (not that DJI people are, just how I felt)on a bike I was trying. 

 I was going to buy a new Crestline but decided no, rather ride my Relay as long as it is working! Or until some real mtb company builds something similar but better. 

Just purchased my first e-bike after all my ridding buddies made the switch to eebs over the past 2 years. By being the last holdout, I was able to ride the gamut of motor options (Shimano, Bosch, TQ) and I settled on a TQ bike (Yeti MTE). For me, full fat eebs felt awkward, clumsy and over powered on our tight singletrack. In the right situations, the power was addicting (fire road climbs) but for 90% of our rides it was total overkill. For me, the choice was easy once I realized that I preferred more of an “assisted” ride experience. 

Having a 1,000 HP car can be a lot of fun to own and drive from time to time, but it wouldn’t be my first choice as a daily driver.  Having a 450 HP car is still a ton of fun AND I can grab my groceries and take my kids to school every day.

Cheers for making this thread. I think it’s going to get quite old man shouts at clouds, but there we go. 

I come at this from a slightly different angle, I’m an elected local councillor. As a result I’ve managed to have meetings with a few of the land owners and managers at my local. It’s a complicated picture, 3 public owners, a few private and 2 main land managers who have different goals and incentives. It’s an intensively used bit of land, 2 million people live within 30km of it in a very nature deprived part of a very nature deprived country. We get away with a lot there, they rarely close trail unless it’s egregiously placed like dropping into a major fire road at speed or built in ecologically sensitive area. 

They think about mountain biking a lot. For forestry, it’s a source of revenue through car parking and therefore they do kind of like it and want more of it, but it’s also a source of a load of their work. They get sued when dad three kids wrecks himself on a clearly marked black addit on the red XC loop, people moan at them that the official stuff is blown out and then moan that the resurfacing is sanitising it, they have to help extract people who wreck in bad spots- you get the picture. They also have to justify their practice of pretty much not touching the off piste to the other land owners, some of whom are actively hostile to MTB. Versus the revenue that they derive from it, they view MTB as a disproportionate drain on their resources. 

I mention all this to highlight that so far, I wouldn’t say that e-bikes rank highly in their list of concerns. Surrons do though (the police have a dirt bike to chase them, that’s got to be the best job in the station surely). When they do talk about e-bikes it’s in reference to how it’s harder to keep the official loops in good shape than it used to be and to justify some of the more controversial armouring.

So what am I trying to say? The trail access anxiety with e-bikes, which I have, is so far theoretical. Because e-mtbs look like bikes to the uninitiated, I expect lay people’s irritation of them riding fire roads at higher speeds will get directed at mtb in general. For that reason we’ll probably not see an anti e-bike backlash, more a slow scaling up of already existing anti MTB feeling. Whether this will rise to the level of causing land access issues I don’t know.

Solution wise, id like to see two things that definately won’t happen. Namely, sensible speed and power restrictions from industry consensus. Just yesterday I overheard two Avinox owners discussing how easy it was to remove speed limitations on their bikes with a VPN- they need to make that shit harder. The other thing that would help would be people just being more polite to other users of the site.

 

I don't loath Avinox but I also wouldn't pay my own money for one of their bikes - This is my tinfoil-hat brain thinking but I'm wary of any brand that is potentially monopolising a section of the market. I also don't know what brand I would happily pay for at the moment (maybe pinion?) because Bosch isn't exactly a leader in doing right by the consumer either

Vertical integration is something I wouldn't be surprised to see even more of - I've been a fan of the idea of electronic suspension and IMO a lot of the typical e-bike buyers would be all over it, yet Rockshox and Fox have fumbled the concept for over a decade! It would be easy for someone like Avinox or Bosch to make a killer system that eats in to another segment of the industry 

I made my last post when I was generally frustrated with life. Sorry about that.  Most of you are probably still not going to agree with me, but I'll try again and then shut up.  I think it's really, really important our community talks about whatever these two-wheeled machines with 800% assist and enormous torque/power actually are, and I don't want to stifle that occurring in this thread.  I hope this thread gets a lot of traction and I learn something about why others feel so differently than me. Finally, apologies for waxing a bit philosophical.

Honor, or whatever you want to call it,  doesn't really exist outside of community. "Honor" means two things: you do the right thing yourself and you hold others accountable when they don't do the right thing.  A lot of people do the former; far fewer do the latter.  But a community is defined, in large part, by its shared values, and those value are propagated by the members of the community holding each other accountable to them.

Mountain biking has been a lifestyle for me and provided me with community.  I thought I knew what that community stood for - what it's value were.  But I've watched an outside corporation, focused only on profit, began the process of fundamentally changing the nature of the activity we all love so much while almost all of the prominent voices in our community have remained silent (props to Hans Rey) and numerous bike companies have adopted the motor.  I find that silence and adoption very, very disquieting. 

When we struggle with workday attendance and general coordination at my local trail system, I remind other leaders that the people who are highly amendable to that sort of thing are at the tennis courts and golf courses.  We attract independent misfits who don't much care for authority and are happy to tell said authority to go f*ck themselves.  I like it that way.

But I'm becoming less and less confident that's the true nature of our community.  I'm feeling more and more like I no longer understand our community's values or the people that constitute it.  How have we turned into such a bunch of passive, shrug-our-shoulders, aw-shucks-it's-going-happen-anyway sheep?  The mountain bike "press," prominent riders, and other voices remind me more and more of corporate middle management, which is about the ugliest thing I can say about another human being.

I firmly believe this is an existential moment for mountain biking.  Ebikes made that moment inevitable.  DJI/Avinox has made it now.  I fear we are failing to rise to that moment, and instead choosing passivity, silence, and - worst of all - cowardice.  Perhaps I'm simply getting old and am only resisting the natural and inevitable change in the values and composition of a community over time.  Still, I'm increasingly asking myself whether this new community is one about which I still care deeply and want to make a central part of my life.

I suppose I should think about whether to just call it and buy one of those newfangled, carbon-fiber pickle board paddles.  Maybe I should, but I'd encourage all of you to think about whether you really want to sit passively and silently by while our sport and community is reshaped and redefined by a foreign corporation that doesn’t give a shit about either, much less general norms of corporate ethics.

I wish MTB media would refuse to review any non-Class 1 e-bike. That would rule out the current Levo and anything with an Avinox. Of course, the Utube Bros would then get all of the clicks as they would review all day in exchange for free use of Class 3 bikes.

Avinox offers a UCC compliant motor now, and it's labeled and locked down. That should be the only DJI motor installed in an e-bike, imo.

I ride an ebike from 2018 with a 500wh battery. Still goes like the day I got it new. I’m glad I don’t have to make a decision on a new bike and test ride new ones. 

I'm curious if anyone knows whether the DJI motor origin story rumor has any merit. 

As the rumor goes, at some point in time, Mike Sinyard was looking to develop something along the lines of a Surron. They were starting to pop up in the streets of California, and every kid had to have one. In the past, maybe they got mom & dad to drop several grand on a Specialized. Someone set out to find more powerful motors in China. DJI is well known for making good, lightweight motors and batteries for their drone business. Specialized was working with them on a motor system to go in their ebikes first, and then got cold feet. All of a sudden, DJI had a system and no bike partner, so Amflow entered the picture to demonstrate its capabilities to the broader industry. 

Perhaps this is just a folk legend or a game of telephone. Makes me wonder how far above Class 3 on the Levo they'd really like to go, though. It must be tough to be a big bike company, watching the ebike/emoto startups taking your youth audience at a rapid clip.

The unlocking market has been a thing since e-bikes were a thing. Strangely seems a lot less popular on this side of the pond but you can buy a speed-limit delimiter for every single system out there already. 

Longer term, I suspect the entire hardware package becomes crackable in the same way the tuner community has been cracking ECUs for decades. That likelihood only goes up as AI models get better at coding, reverse engineering

Maybe, maybe not.  Modern models are available for both offensive and defensive teams, and it will be stupid for sw/hw security designers not to utilize them.  And as it goes, most implementations like for gaming consoles are really really good at it already - it's not Playstation 3 days anymore, PS5 jailbreaks / homebrew didnt arrive in a jiffy.

Anthropic's coding tools did not exist back then, but they do now.  These firmware packages will get cracked in no time from this point forward.  The more challenging firmware (and hardware logic) to crack will be the bms.  

The change is that the new coding tools are also available for the firmware authors.

Sure, the attackers can find flaws, but the firmware authors too.  And they are in a much better position since they also have access to the source code, as opposed to the attackers that only have a black box, and thus are somewhat limited.

I mean, from a defensive team POV things are actually better with those tools available than they were some time ago.

Soon enough there will be full "ECU" swaps for the commercial ebike motors. There have already been some for a few of the Bafang offerings. 

No locks and motor controllers that are able to handle much higher amps. Plug n play 3000w that just looks like a regular bike.

3000w will likely shred the gears...but someone will determine that replacing a certain bearing or certain gear and it will handle 2750w or some other number well above what it was sold at. 

https://endless-sphere.com/sphere/ 1.6 million posts of ev enthusiasts that have already cracked open most ebike things on the market and reverse engineered it. 

Don't most ebike motors have GPS receivers these days? Cracking and speed unlocking gets a helluva harder if you have location data. You can technically know which jurisdiction you are in and thus which laws (speed limit) to cover plus you know the speed. 

It could be hacked, but you'd need access to the PCB to hookup to the Jtag connector or something similar, but that would require dismantling the complete motor in some cases. 

How many people are willing to buy a piggyback box vs. how many people will pay hundreds to have their motor "serviced" to go faster? 

To me the biggest thing preventing hacks always seemed insurances. Having an accident with your hacked bike means no insurance coverage which can get expensive real quick. At least that's the European situation, no clue how that translates to other regions 

I know there’s a difference because it’s harder to control with bikes, but why is it such a big deal here when people unlock their hardware?
I can drive a car faster than the speed limit, too. It’s the driver’s responsibility to follow the rules. If they don’t, there are penalties—or they lose their insurance coverage.
It’s true, though, that we as humanity are apparently generally unable to exercise restraint at the moment. I think it’s illusory to believe that anyone will regulate themselves.

As a personal experience:
I still think my Unno with M1 is great. I don’t need an M2(S). I wouldn’t have wanted a Bosch anyway, because of the look. You can and are allowed to see it differently...

And a (so far) major advantage is that the M2(S) also fits easily into M1 bikes. So manufacturers can “simply” update the current model with the new motor. Has that ever been possible with Bosch?
Just imagine if Avinox continues this trend with backward compatibility...

You can think what you want about Avinox. The fact is, in my view, that since the M1, there’s been significant pressure on all other motor manufacturers to innovate. That’s basically a good thing for consumers.

Backwards-compatibility and allowing easy future upgrades by keeping motor mounts standardized is such a basic, consumer-friendly feature that no MTB-centric company would even consider it. Would be even more of a struggle to shift Levo 4s if you could just put the new motor in the old one. DJI isn't playing in that league or even playing the same sport really. 

Specialized drops prices on e-bikes at 'a competitive moment'

This seems relevant to the thread for one passage in particular (underline is mine):

https://www.bicycleretailer.com/industry-news/2026/05/07/specialized-un…

In an email to retailers from Matt Kephard, the company's North America commercial leader, the brand said "operational improvements on the Levo platform reduced cost structures specific to this product line, and the competitive moment in e-MTB made now the right time to act.

 

"The result is a permanent pricing reset that brings more riders into the category and into your store, while supporting sustainable margins and stronger sell‑through."

 

The "competitive moment" includes new market entrants including AmFlow with significantly lower pricing.

I'm also willing to call BS on "operational improvements" unless that includes beating up your suppliers for post-purchase rebates.

Yeah I hope to see motors getting cracked in the future and the industry will evolve to keep some power in the hands of the consumers. Other industries have gone down the road of making it harder and harder to crack their hardware, and trying to make it illegal but the push back from the EU and other countries will hopefully block that. It might be naive to think manufacturers won't keep looking for ways around it, but if consumers keep pressure on the brands and don't just lie down and let it happen then it will be much better in the long term.

Honestly one of the biggest reasons I started dabbling in computers and electronics was because of this exact thing - It was clear the world was becoming more "connected" and I didn't want the ability to have control over my own stuff be taken away! Avinox bikes are fast and relatively cheap for now but we really shouldn't take it for granted that it will be like that forever

There are no real speed limits on trails, and there is no one enforcing "reckless driving" or anything similar on multidirectional and, most importantly, multiuse trails.  I think it'd be fan-fuckin'-tastic if there were cops on the trails writing tickets for being an asshole and revoking "drivers licenses." Please tell me where to volunteer for the training required to get deputized.  

There's also no required insurance coverage to lose unless you count an umbrella policy that would cover you for a tort.  Are you suggesting drivers of Avinox e-moto's be required to have at-fault insurance coverage and, presumably, driver's licenses?  I fully support that position as well.  

While it's always dangerous to underestimate the effort and creativity insurance companies will put into figuring out how to deny coverage, I'd be shocked if those efforts regularly reach as far as figuring out whether an e-bike motor was unlocked.  Unless such lawsuits became fairly common, you'd have to paralyze or kill someone for the potential liability to get large enough to warrant that kind of attention from the insurance company's investigators and counsel.  

To boot, that's not the sort of harm that's most commonly going to be inflicted.  Teenagers with partially formed prefrontal cortexes on Surron's aside, the harm e-moto/Avinox riders are most likely to inflict is the externality of deteriorating relationships with other user groups and, eventually, loss of trail access for all mountain bikers.

The car, speed limits, and insurance analogy works about as well as a first generation reverb.

Im not sugesting anything like that. But maybe (probably) I dont't understand the "trail access problematics" of northern america as well as you do. 

In fact no insurance and need of licence is already the "legal" situation for "tuned/unlocked" ebikes here in germany. You are only viewed equal to "normal bikes" if you comply to the 250w nomimal power + max 25km/h. If you have a bike that does not comply, you have some sort of "e-pedelec" (ebikes equal to "small" 45 km/h scooters) without the nessesary features (light, license plate, horn (yea, really!)). So yea no insurance an you need a licence for that.

In europe, germany in particular, you have either sanctioned trails (rare) where as long as your ebike meets the regulations you are viewed equal as any non ebike.

But much more often you are illegal or at least halfly-illegal anyways, so any kind of regulation does not do/help anything.

IMHO max 25 km/h is all the regulation thats needed. Avinox meets these criteria as much as any other motor of the last 2-4 years. That they are the first ones to find the loophole of "nominal power" is simply not true.

If you take the thoughts of this thread to be true, logically we’re in a pretty rubbish situation. Ie if the following holds, which I think it does-

• It’s functionally impossible to keep power limits of e-bikes to around the 1k peak watts & 15 mph level.
• 1.5k peak watts on an 800% assist pedal throttle (half a Surron) is here and numbers are only going to go up. 
• It’s hard and will be increasingly hard to differentiate between e-bikes and bikes.
• Surrons are a problem in shared recreational areas because of erosion and incompatibility between what speeds they do in places where families are walking with small dogs and kids.

Then what choice does a sensible land manager trying to satisfy the needs of all of the users have other than restricting bike access more widely?
 

Now if point 3 isn’t true, then a potential solution could be just to ban e-bikes in the more pressured areas. But I expect organisations like Forestry England will think that is too hard to enforce.

If point 4 isn’t true, or e-bikes arnt parsed in the same manner as Surrons currently are by the general public despite doing similar things to future high powered e-bikes, then maybe we can all get along fine.
 

Regarding the tuning and unlocking and all, France has it covered: https://ebike-mtb.com/en/france-bans-illegal-emtb-tuning/

Don't know what it's like elsewhere, but over here in Slovenia people whizzing past on electric scooters at mach chicken are a fairly common sight and are an accident waiting to happen. An unlocked ebike is not much better, maybe the control is a bit better than what you can do on a scooter...