[jonasdegendt]

Both Van Moof and Cowboy are losing money too, both of them have been close to running out of runway, who knows if they'll survive in the long run. As for maintenance, the main critique on Van Moof is that almost everything on the bike is a custom made component, I'm sure it's a similar story for Cowboys. So even if you took it to a generic repair shop, they wouldn't be able to get parts that fit.

When my Van Moof broke, I had to ship it to Amsterdam for repairs, it took three weeks. My friends with Cowboys generally get faster service because they have the Tesla model of sending a repair person out to you. Other friends with bikes that have generic Bosch and Shimano parts seem to fare better, they can walk into your average bike shop and they're able to take care of it.

I got into Boosted Board electric skateboards early on, and if their story is anything to go by, these more lifestyle oriented brands tend to not fare so well once the market matures and you're better off with your Bafang/Bosch bike, instead of an expensive brick.

[tda]

as an owner of a Van Moof I think they had their moment, but now it's time for the company to go bankrupt. They have made too many mistakes, and focus on the wrong things, so it is time for some darwinian pruning.

Let me explain: they were early to introduce a cheap e-bike with a nice design (the S3 came in at €2o00 + €400 3 year service). Cheap is of course relative,but at the time most reputable brand ugly as hell bikes sold for €3000+.

Where they went wrong is that they took minimalism too far. The combination of automatic shifting (and there are no buttons), absence of a pedalling force sensor (cause cheap) and an internal gear hub (can't really shift under load) is basically a recipe for disaster. Combine that with general lack of QA and all of a sudden you have a company burdened by it's repair costs almost to the level of bankruptcy...

[vanilla_nut]

Odd, I thought repairs were supposed to be the business model? Get folks hooked on a cool ebike witha bunch of proprietary parts they can't fix themselves. Force them to pay you ongoing fees to tune up and repair the bikes. Bike-as-a-Service.

Hilarious to think that the decision to make their devices unrepairable is actually bankrupting them. But also very sad to think that many of those bikes are destined to become ewaste once the company folds and nobody can repair them.