Don’t buy products made by VC funded firms! Especially not if it’s a real product and you value repairability and service. VanMoof made losses the size of their revenue. They made bikes… where’s the natural monopoly to be chased there?
What did Van Moof make, exactly? Do you think they were normal bikes?
They made expensive e-bikes with theft recovery features. They have features that make it possible to trace and locate them, and Van Moof would actually do this. For people who spend €3-4k on an easily stolen object that the police won't care about, that's a unique selling point.
I am not sure why everyone thinks they are expensive. Just the bike is about 2000 euro.
There are eBikes costing 4000 euro.
My van moof was about 2800 because I bought the 2 packages taking care of theft and repairs.
Because of their image I never have to lock the bike besides their amazing kick lock bike, so getting on and off the bike with locking and unlocking it is a matter of seconds.
This is not expensive at all.
*their image amongst bicycle thief’s makes the bike unattractive. They hunt down stolen bikes if you bought their theft service. If they can’t find it you get a new one.
They are expensive. All parts are cheap chinese crap components. I had to dismantle the main motor because some slip ring got worn out. Turned out to be a cheap motor you can find in parts on Alibaba/expess.
The brakes are bad. The electronics are bad. They almost always fail after a while. The only thing what is good about VanMoof are the looks. Everything else is just shit.
And where they could use standard pieces, they don’t. It took me ages to replace a bottom bracket because the cheap one they had installed was bent and replacement was nowhere to be found easily, except at their shop for an outrageous price.
That's pretty much par for the course for all bike manufacturers. There's a million different bottom brackets, headsets, axles standards, etc.
Eg. if your through axle breaks, good luck finding a store that stocks one in the correct length with the correct thread and the correct thread length, and even if you do, you'll probably end up paying 40€ for a small piece of metal.
That's really not true. Most European bikes use standard bottom bracket sizes and you can easily find dozens of compatible bottom brackets. Same goes for headsets, axles, brakes, etc...
The big exception right now are thru-axles, yes, but the vast majority of bikes don't use thru-axles (and there's no reason a vanmoof commuter bike would need to use those), they use quick release axles, and those are completely standard.
this may be true for commuting bikes that are typically lower end, but absolutely not true for higher end bikes across the model line of all mfgs. In many cases they switch year over year.
I don't understand your last sentence. There is more than one standard for many bike parts/mounts, so even when they switch (from one standard to another), that doesn't mean it's not standard all of a sudden.
I've had very high end bikes where all but a couple components were standard, and those that weren't will probably become standard soon, too.
"Standard" doesn't really help you much. To stay with thru-axles, yes, most rear thru axles are a standard size of 12mm. But they may have a M12x1, M12x1.5 or M12x2 thread. The length of the threaded part depends on the frame. The total length depends on the frame.
Another problem is that every manufacturer has their own standard, eg. Shimano has 24mm hollowtech bottom bracket axles, whereas SRAM has 30mm axles, and they come in a million different sizes (threaded BSA, threaded italian, 68mm wide or 73mm wide, press fit external or internal).
In any case, a bike shop will rarely have the part in stock, because there are so many of them.
Sometimes it's even worse, when a manufacturer just updates their "standard" every few years, eg. the Shimano i-Spec standard for mounting shifter levers has 4 incompatible variants.
I mean, you can also easily spend >2k on a bike. In terms of e-bikes the prices for Vanmoof and their competitor Cowboy aren’t particularly cheap, but they aren’t incredibly out of line either.
The fact the market offers a $5,000 car doesn't mean a $25,000 car is an expensive car.
We can stop going in circles. You think it's expensive, but it's not an order of magnitude more expensive, like your example cites. Others don't think it's that expensive, and I agree with them. Researching e-bikes 1-2k seems like market price, and they were within that range.
Yeah, but for the price bump you get features which affect the ride of the bike directly (lower weight, better braking, easier shifting etc.). Of course there are diminishing returns, but a 2k bike is significantly better than a 1k bike in almost all aspects, and a 4k bike is also noticeably better than the 2k one. (Whether the price is worth it for you is another question).
For me, theft-protecting a 4k bike which otherwise would be a 2.5k bike is nonsensical, because I don't need theft protection - basically you would be trying to sell me a 2.5k bike for 4k. No, thank you.
I'm using a bike that I bought new for less than 100 euro from a big box shop. I've been using it for more than a decade with zero maintenance (apart from fixing occasional flat). It still works. It's just little stiff which is a feature because I can prop the handlebars against the wall and it stays like that because the weight of the bicycle is not enough to turn the handlebars. It's also heavy because it has suspension. I could buy lighter bicycle that runs smoother but riding a bicycle is an exercise for me. Why would I pay to make it easier?
Maybe you can. I can't run. Even a minute or two. Never could. My lungs fill with a up with fluid and joints get easily injured when I run. I can walk though. And I'm walking a lot too. Biking engages different muscles, I move differently and it puts less stress on the joints.
It’s a scale, the majority of colleagues that have an e-bike state they don’t want to rock up to work in sweat.
If exercise was the primary focus alongside a commuter, then getting a non-electric bike would be likely the focus.
Source: I just bought a bicycle and went through months of asking colleagues and friends their opinions on e-bikes. I ended up with a bike cause I’m not planning to commute
You can also exercise with an ebike. I push just as hard as on my acoustic bike when I feel like it instead of all the time. It’s 30C outside? I don’t have to arrive all sweaty with an ebike. I have a meeting or go into work? Same.
But when I choose too I can lower the assist level, pedal hard, and/or go faster and longer.
Best of both worlds. But I have a European ebike with torque sensing, not the glorified escooters with pedals where the motor is either full torque or no torque: I still have to pedal to make the bike move.
People have different requirements. I had a commute that on an ebike took 50 minutes, and on a regular bike took me about 1:15 minutes each way. I couldn't do 2:30hrs of cycling every day, 5 days a week - it wasn't an option both in terms of time and effort. Maybe with a serious training program (and if I was older it would be even more difficult).
45 minutes of cycling on an electric bike was still plenty of exercise, and if I hadn't done that, I would've probably taken a train.
There are kids in Amsterdam getting children's e-bikes for a 5 minute ride to school. I'm still not seeing this as good development, at least not in most places in the Netherlands.
e-bike with alarm and all other features like apple find my?
This is about the VanMoof price, so you have to compare with bikes that bring in the same set of features.
Are you saying that the specific electric motor used by VanMoof is useless? If so, under what circumstances? Always, or just on steep slopes or at high speed?
Seriously: They bought a lot of expensive machinery to build things, rented and furnished a lot of shops, and hired a lot of people to staff those, and sales didn't grow to to use their production capacity, sales area and staff time.
Their prices for that trace-or-replace service were quite a bit higher than what my insurance agency charges me for my theft insurance. That operation may have lost money, but that's not obvious.
I think that insisting on operating boutique shops around the world was a very costly option. They could have made it much cheaper for them (and convenient for customers) by affiliating with existing bicycle shops when they went worldwide.
I share your worries about the trace-or-replace service. Specifically about the "trace" part of trace-or-replace. Ok, the program is excellent promotion, and did put them on the map. But, tracing stops making economic sense very quickly: Bills rack-up very rapidly when you send a couple of your people in a multi-day hunt in an unknown location.
No kidding on the boutique shops, an expensive street in Covent Garden is super cool to pickup a bike from but running a specialised servicing department from there was clearly commercial suicide. For profligacy this was topped only by a datacentre I was asked to help decommission that was in an Art Deco building on Strand. Next to The Savoy. Overlooking Cleopatra’s Needle and the Thames.
That said, it is a shame that you can’t have specialised bicycle service shops in the centre of London. VanMoof offered a pretty good bespoke experience and my X2 has had a few issues but it’s going quite well four years in. What goes up quickly comes down quickly, I suppose.
In their defense: if the trace efforts succeed in disencouraging thieves (big if), I'd consider it far more valuable than insurance. I'd rather have the bike not stolen than stolen and replaced.
They are expensive for what is essentially a commuter bike.
I think they simply chose a wrong strategy, because if you have a cheap(ish) bike and a good U-lock, you can leave it anywhere without much stress. It will most probably not be stolen (because the value of the bike is low), and if it does get stolen, then it is cheap to replace - you can buy at least 5 commuter bikes for the price of a fancy one.
In fact, in the past 20 years I had exactly one bike stolen from me from an open basement where the bike was not locked, and there were construction works in the building (=my fault).
I do have bikes worth >2k but I don't use them for commuting and I don't leave them around for more than 10 minutes even locked.
ps. I also happen to own a Brompton, which is another strategy - fold your bike so you can take it with you anywhere. Even it was heavily overpriced (~900 GBP IIRC), and it has propietary parts so servicing is not easy. My excuse for buying it is that it paid back it's price in about a year of commuting (by not having to pay for public transport).
They wouldn't be expensive for that price if they used quality parts and assembled them well (I don't think VanMoof offered a good deal because those crucial aspects were lacking). The market for a quick city e-bike is a bit different than the one for a throwaway commuter bike. People pay for being faster and enjoying the ride. Accordingly, I would make sure such a bike is insured against theft and use a quality lock.
Having a non-removable battery is a big mistake IMHO, because that's a not insignificant chunk of the value of the bike.
Also, it's just a normal e-bike, limited to 25kmh, I wouldn't call that "quick" :)
If you want a real quick commuter then get one with a 45kmh limit, that is the point when it kind of stops being a bike and turns into a vehicle. But I think the target market is different in this case, I wouldn't leave a vehicle like that outside my property overnight, that means I need to have a garage or easy living room access. None of this matters for a simple commuter bike.
45 km/h S-Pedelecs can't legally be used on most bike lanes, at least in Germany, even at lower speeds. You always have to share the roadway with cars etc. For many that defeats the purpose of cycling.
The actual cut off for the assistance is typically set to 27.5 km/h, because regulations allow for 10% of tolerance... Then, depending on transmission ratios, it can be quite comfortable to ride at ~30 km/h. The acceleration boost at lower speeds is still super useful.
Of course, VanMoof's and Cowboy's original spiel was that you could easily disable the limit in software.
Oh, lovely Germany, I remember seeing a couple of Achtung Kontrolle videos where the cops stopped scooter riders and actually checked that their scooter is not tuned or the speed limiter is not disabled... this does not really happen anywhere else in the world, unless you cause an accident.
Maybe too many VanMoof riders were caught speeding and illegally tuning their bikes, and that caused the company's demise? :)
You may be kidding, but in several cities the police started pulling out VanMoof and Cowboy bikes because those models came with "US" or "off-road" modes to raise their motor speed limits. It didn't matter whether people had them activated, just having the software option easily accessible was enough (frankly, the manufacturers were very aware of this being illegal). Owners of these Cowboy models were given the option to disable the switch in a firmware update. Newer Cowboy or VanMoof models didn't come with that option anymore. Both brands lost one of their major unique selling points.
Unrelated to VanMoof, my bike has a battery that goes on top of the rack. The battery includes a key, and locks to the bike. To charge it, I usually just leave it on the bike, but you can fairly easily unlock it from the bike and change it separately if desired.
To clarify: I personally don't see them as expensive. My neighbour who bought an e-bike this year called them expensive, because they were well above the cheapest things on offer.
They have some fine features that IMO justify their prices, but I'm guessing that I'm an outlier wrt judging bike values and my neighbour more mainstream, so I called them expensive.
Note that when they first came out, they were actually pretty affordable; since then, competition and mass production spun up and you can get an e-bike for <€1K now, and they'll be less custom made, more generally available parts too. The brand's USP then became that they look and are pretty unique, which is cool on one hand, but they weren't able to make it financially viable. Probably because they relied on VC money, and spent it on people who knew they had VC money to burn.
I'm in Europe, I don't want to buy a Mercedes S Class. Who sells the Volkswagen Golf of electric bikes? I just want decent build quality, decent comfort, decent features, good repairability and easy maintenance.
The electric bike market seems immature to me. I want 20-30 big bike brands that I can compare, just like the car brands here, for example:
In the Netherlands at least most of the established brands (Gazelle, Sparta, Batavus) have been selling e-bikes for 15-20 years now with sales really taking off in the last 5-10. Most are comfortable city bikes that use standard bike parts. Battery performance has improved a lot over the years and most models allow you to remove (and replace) the battery.
Depending on where you live they may be sold under different brand names. I saw that Sparta is for instance sold as Hercules in Germany.
€2+k would be a Golf-class e-bike. A decent non-electric bike is around €1k, add to that the battery, motor, display, charger, etc. and you get to €2k quickly. High-end e-bikes easily go for €4-6k.
Well, I guess I want a robust EV, from what I see with a Bosch electric motor, probably a belt drive. Commuter bike, low frame, disk brakes. Transmission, dunno, Bosch or from what I see, maybe Pinion? I think Shimano doesn't make belt drives.
I have an e-bike like that, belt driven commuter bike, removable battery in the frame (you want this, as it lowers the center of gravity compared to a battery under the cargo rack), disc brakes, 7 speed transmission, from a A-brand, etc. Basically this bike: https://www.batavus.nl/elektrische-fietsen/finez-e-go-power-... (although this is the 2023 model and mine is a few years old now)
The listed price (€3699) is about the same as what I paid for it back then. I made one upgrade to it, by replacing the standard display with a Nyon (which includes satnav among other things) which added €400 to the price.
Awesome bike, absolutely the best bike I’ve ever owned. Rock solid, nothing rattles even on rough terrain or going over speed bumps. I highly recommend the satnav if you plan on touring around. You can pre-plan routes on your PC and upload them to the display (it has wifi). And with the belt drive it’s completely silent, which is nice if you like to tour through nature like me.
Those requirements will make the bike expensive. Belt drive you don't really see on bikes below €1000. A pinion gearbox is €1000 by itself.
So what you're saying is you want a S class for the price of a VW golf.
In the Netherlands all the big bike brands are doing a lot of E-bikes, and there's a gazillion small competitors who do cheap bikes with mostly off-the-shelf components. The bigger brands include Gazelle, Giant, Batavus and Sparta.
I have this - Tenways C600 for EUR 1400. My work subsidised it by EUR 500, so it was a EUR 900 e-bike for me. It is almost perfect for my commuting needs.
https://www.tenways.com/products/cgo600
That’s a common waiting time at my local bike shops to be honest. The difference is that you can do most stuff on a normal bike yourself with off the shelf parts (supply chain woes permitting).
Not OP, but I live in Munich and have heard of both six-week and one-day waiting times this summer. It depends on part availability. One day is common, six weeks not unheard of. A friend waited almost that long when two strange and unusual screws had to be replaced, the wrong ones arrived from the manufacturer, etc. The quick routine procedures failed her, the result was slow.
Just from what I hear, it seems that there are more cases of unavailble parts this summer than a few years ago. Maybe the supply chains haven't quite settled after covid, even now.
The person who mentioned six weeks didn't specify whether Van Moof has a six-week average or whether it's a 99th percentile.
It was claimed six weeks was common, common is more like 'average' than it is to '99th percentile'. Your example of the missing screws is unfortunate but it also sounds like something that is not 'common'.
There are three within 5 minutes on my bike. But waitlists for appointments are crazy in the summer. My friends don’t cancel but pass them on amongst each other if they don’t need theirs.
That sounds rough. Normally the guy at my corner does them for me within a few hours if it's something quick. If he's busy or on holiday I'll go to one of the other five or six bike shops within a few minutes' walk of the house.
Before moving to the Netherlands I did a lot of repairs myself but I've totally stopped now that it's so quick to have them done for me.
Hardly unique, I've heard that from Tesla owners too. From a VC's point of view that doesn't per se speak against the prospect of a successful venture.
I mean, even if a stolen bike has a working tracker and you're able to trace it to a particular house, do VanMoof's recovery team have the legal authority to bust the door down to reclaim it?
Generally not. According to a newspaper that followed one of the trackers for a day, the tracker offered a choice: "Give me the bike now right now or I call the police, who will see my data, believe me and do have the authority, and I'll meet you at the door if you try to move the bike."
The security guard companies have some sort of arrangement with the police; I've heard that they can call police and have someone show up in a hurry. Why wouldn't Van Moof have the same sort of arrangement in the countries where Van Hoof operates most (well, operated most)?
You're implying that about $30 is enough to build something airtag-like into a bike? Can you describe how? I'd be happy to learn just for myself (I'd love to do something like that with my expensive bike) but you get bonus points if the scheme is usable for a business, ie. doesn't rely on Apple's benevolence or ignorance.
Not sure what the point here is, since VanMoof does integrate with Apple FindMy.
Manufacturers can purchase AirTag-like chips to integrate with their electronics. Done. Price per unit probably orders of magnitude lower than the AirTag retail price.
Of course the whole "locking system" with companion app is a separate thing. But as far as FindMy goes, it should be fairly simple. Would be interesting to learn what kind of royalties Apple charges.
A more unique selling point is having an easily and widely serviced ebike since its complexity and serviceability is worse than a normal push bike for ordinary people. You can get trackers for most other ebike systems.
While I think you're right, you could have said the same thing about Tesla cars - but it worked out in that case. The problem with VanMoof was that they prioritized growth over quality - which may be a side effect of taking VC money, but is plain dumb if you're selling physical goods that are expensive to fix. Just talk to anyone with a VanMoof or see the subreddit: Nearly every bike they sold required multiple repairs during the warranty.
Here's my personal story (they sure didn't make profit on me):
I got my S3 in 2020. It went dead a few weeks later. We didn’t have service hubs close, but I told the support I could do the repairs myself. The sent me a new main unit, that didn’t help so I had to send it in (they wouldn’t ship the battery to me because of some regulatory issues). Took a while but I got a working bike back. A few weeks later the e-shifter broke.
Again I fixed that myself and for a few months everything was fine. Then the battery (or main unit) died again in late 2021. I insisted on getting a replacement bike and could convince them to swap my S3 for the second gen one (that with Apple Find-my).
On that bike I had to replace the left button and later the e-shifter (again). The rest of 2022 went fine but the eshifter broke again this spring and it got stuck in the 4th gear.
As the bike is now out of warranty, I did not contact support and went with just riding it this way until yesterday, when I finally got around to fix the (mechanically defective) eshifter using parts from the old (electronically defective) eshifter that I replaced last year. Now it is running fine again. Wouldn’t get another VanMoof as my next bike though.
I was thinking about Tesla while posting. It's the natural counter argument. That's why I specifically mentioned the target market (in my opinion): bikes. (One of the reponses above is critical of my target market definition. Hey, I'm Netherlands-based. Two wheels is a bike. Whether € 10 or € 10k. I can understand that theft and bike services are more of a US value proposition.)
The thing is I think Tesla pulled off a near miss with their repairs, waiting times and general inavailability of spare parts. That was a very big issue for a few years. Tesla got a helping hand (in several European countries at least) in tax breaks for the electric early adopters. With the tax brakes came the premier buyer: lease companies (say NED / BEL). You know what lease companies are good at? Supply chain management on behalve of their customers. If a Tesla was out for repairs for a month, the lease company had to deliver a temporary car. The tax brakes for the consumers kept the demand up, no matter the service record. No tax incentives helping VanMoof.
Second is that I think the disruption Tesla caused in the car market at that time was a lot larger than that of VanMoof. As others point out: VanMoof didn't leapfrog (e-)bike market and didn't get a temporaty moat. They were actually a late to pivot to electric. Their earliest models were based on non-electric, affordable and robust (as a buyer at that time: they weren't robust at all). Then by playing the high margin-high marketing angle they just weren't a viable option in the price range where quality starts to matter.
All in all: Tesla got a temporary technological head start with some favourable tax headwind giving them just enough runway to manage the supply chain. VanMoof had no technological head start, no tax incentives and crashed and burned on the supply chain.
Part of a premium product is the number of failures to expect.
To reduce the number of failures, they need a fleet of thousands of bikes in the field to monitor and redesign any component that might break.
But those bikes aren't yet reliable - so they shouldn't be putting their brand name on them.
Other manufacturers get this right. It is pretty common I buy something from Aliexpress for really cheap and it is clearly a premium product that has had the logos removed and is being sent out for user testing. They normally come with a card in the box saying "If this breaks, email this gmail address and we'll exchange it for a new one for free". They do that because they really want to know about failures. That lets them redesign the product to make it reliable, which in turn lets them put the premium brand name on it.
You simply can't make a product reliable with lab testing alone. The only way is with real users and time.
This is why I only buy bikes with mid-to-high-end Shimano components. My bike is my daily transportation many days; putting up with this kind of unreliability is unthinkable.
Blitzcaling to achieve monopoly is not the only reason for funding. A manufacturing company like this has high up-front costs for R&D and manufacturing, orders of magnitude more than a typical software companies. You also don't need to chase a monopoly to make expanding to new market with investor money a sound decision. Obviously VanMoof didn't make it work here and had horrible OPEX due to expanding to markets without getting the sales to support it.
Van Moof bikes are EVERYWHERE in Amsterdam. They obviously shouldn’t have taken so much investment. But if you can capture a latent market need like that, there probably is a lot of opportunity at scale, too.
There is a lot of bikes in Amsterdam in general. Van Moof just stands out because of their 1 marketing, 2 annoying signature noise whenever people bump into them, 3 loud owners that general use it as a status symbol and 4 joke status due to national Dutch publications writing about all the shortcomings of owning this bike.
I live in Groningen, a Dutch city that is even more suited for bikes, and I rarely spot any Van Moof here. There is a big amount of Swapfiets though, because there is a bigger demographic for a sturdy bike that costs 20 euro as month. You can have that bike in theory for 8 years and it still will not have the same cost as a Van Moof.
If you rent a swapfiets for 8 years, you have owned a shitty 100€-bicycle for 8 years for the price of 1920€. I can buy a shitty bike for 100€ every year and still be less than half as expensive than swapfiets. Their business model are people who are unwilling to do and/or learn basic maintenance on their bikes.
and (4) because they don't have a removable battery so people are always charging them in annoying places like common stairwells or with a cord through the mail slot of the front door.
Isn’t the assumption that they are losing money on the cost of expansion, not the material cost? Eg, if they were only selling in the Netherlands it would be profitable—but they are paying for international growth and that isn’t profitable.
The point is that it might have made sense as a big business but not necessarily as an international growth story. If you can sell 100k bikes with $1000 profit (~15% of cost) that’s still 100M profit.
