Hello Vital MTB Visitor,
We’re conducting a survey and would appreciate your input. Your answers will help Vital and the MTB industry better understand what riders like you want. Survey results will be used to recognize top brands. Make your voice heard!
Five lucky people will be selected at random to win a Vital MTB t-shirt.
Thanks in advance,
The Vital MTB Crew
I would say they are pretty boutique. They don't even have an e bike. I'd bet they're bottom 15% of units moved by brands not invited to MADE.
Not worth it. Not on a bicycle. Maybe on a cargo/commuter bike, for pleasure mountain bikes the problems are far greater than the benefits it would bring.
The 8-hour training actually makes perfect sense if you think about it. If you’re going to force a 12-year-old to commute electrically assisted/throttled in a 6-inch painted gutter next to 5,000lb distracted SUVs going 50mph, they probably need Stroad-warrior level tactical training.
Why build a protected bike path for $1M when you can just blame the kids for not having a Ebike Safety Certificate while they dodge F-150s?
You are not wrong.
If People For Bikes spent 1/4 as much advocating for safe routes to school as they did lobbying for Ebike access in skeptical communities, the shrinking American bicycle market might be expanding. Instead we seem laser focused on selling stuff to the same 10% of the population over and over again, each time with an extra battery or two.
Exactly... So, I would guess that the costs of setting up something here doesn't justify the benefits to the company.. Yes, I wouldn't mind a Madonna and a Yella if a DH bike was in the cards for me...
My point is even at that size they could likely make it worth their while expanding here as they are popular. Or at least that is my hypothesis and I want to hear what people familiar with distribution think.
This 1000%. I'm sure a lot of you know this, but a crucial piece of information is that "People for Bikes" is only "people" in the Mitt Romney sense of the word. It's a lobbying organization for bike companies, which explains a lot of the ebike legislation that has been passed in many states.
The other old grumpy people will get this reference, which is what that moniker for an industry lobbying group always makes me think of.
Earlier this year I went to People For Bikes’ Bicycle Leadership Conference. I’m not a PFB member, I don’t feel like a shill for them, but I have an in person experience which seems relevant to this:
I learned that they feel that e-motos pose an urgent threat to existing routes to schools, etc. They’re still supporting new routes, but are focused on supporting existing routes - because there’s a risk that reaction to reckless e-moto users could jeopardize all bicycle access to bike paths. Undoing PFB’s previous efforts.
PFB seemed eager to have e-motos regulated as motorcycles, and the motorcycle industry equivalent of PFB who were in attendance seemed eager to own that segment and to require (sell) insurance and DOT helmets.
A senator in attendance said there are federal, state and local bills under consideration already, apparently with bipartisan support.
All wanted e-motos to be seen as something other than a bicycle. They’re appealing to the Associated Press to encourage the term e-moto for anything that doesn’t comply 100% with class 1,2,3. And they’re working toward clarified federal definitions of the classes.
I’m sure PFB have much better info available on their website. I don’t have a dog in the fight so I might not have ingested every detail.
Edit: Recently, a few parents have been sued for reckless endangerment of their kids for allowing them e-motos. I’m not sure if it’s related, but I suspect that it might be.
Yt Canada back in action
Mother charged with Manslaughter
LAKE FOREST, Calif. (KABC) -- An Orange County mother is facing an additional charge of involuntary manslaughter after the death of an 81-year-old man, who had been hit by an electric motorcycle driven by her teen son.
Ed Ashman, an 81-year-old Vietnam War veteran and a beloved substitute teacher, died on Thursday, two weeks after being hit by an e-motorcycle while walking home from work at El Toro High School in Lake Forest.
Prosecutors say the woman, identified as 50-year-old Tommi Jo Mejer, was warned about letting her 14-year-old son illegally ride the e-motorcycle before the crash.
"An American hero who survived flying combat missions in Vietnam could not survive walking across the street in Lake Forest because of a 14-year-old child who was allowed to ride an E-Motorcycle that he should have never been riding," said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer in a statement. "This mother essentially handed her 14-year-old son a deadly weapon, and despite multiple warnings of the dangers, continued to let him illegally ride an E-Motorcycle until he finally killed someone."
The crash happened on April 16. Investigators say Mejer's son was riding a Surron e-motorcycle, "doing wheelies" outside of El Toro High School, when he crashed into Ashman.
Thank you all for the interest in our bikes and in our distribution / sales model. To give you a bit of context, we’re currently a team of 9 people at RAAW, based in Germany, and we ship worldwide directly from here.
The US has actually grown into our biggest market after Germany, which is pretty wild considering that every RAAW in the US has been shipped individually from Germany.
Our goal is, of course, to make the ordering process and ownership experience as easy as possible. Having stock in the US would be ideal, but that comes with a number of major steps that we’re not quite ready for yet. For now, we focus on making direct ordering as simple and transparent as possible.
When you order a RAAW, you pay for the product and shipping upfront. Taxes and duties are then paid upon arrival to the forwarding / shipping company, not to us. We include all the necessary documentation for US customs. It’s difficult to state the exact import costs, but we provide an estimate here: RaawmtbTaxes & Duties. Current tariffs are applied on top of that.
We try to be as proactive and transparent as possible, and for the majority of our US customers, this system works really well. We’re also able to supply spare parts at relatively low cost with quick shipping times.
Direct sales are our main channel, but we also have a growing network of bike shops participating in our “RAAW on Demand” program. This isn’t a traditional dealership model, but it allows shops to build a RAAW for a customer, earn a margin on the frame, and sell the complete bike.
We hope this helps clarify how we operate and how we serve customers in the US. Seeing the growing community of RAAW riders over there is incredibly exciting, and we’re definitely working toward a strong long-term solution.
I might have missed it in the thread, but apparently Lynskey has filed for Chapter 11. https://www.reddit.com/r/cycling/comments/1t4uqho/lynskey_bankruptcy/
I've only ridden one of their bikes, which had the crazy twisted downtube, but I do love some Ti and hate to see anyone in our world go down this path.
Lynskey has been a failure since day one. They have been regularly selling frames below the market price of raw materials for more than a decade. They really need to hang it up and leave making Ti bikes in Chattanooga to literally, everyone else in that town doing it better.
Post a reply to: The Bikeconomics (Mega)Thread