The sophisticated bicycle has attracted fans in Europe and the U.S., but repairs under warranty have bled the company of money.
A few canals away at a bike repair shop, Joram Hartogs says he refuses to repair VanMoofs, “because they’re impossible to repair.”
“They’re so sealed off with their own equipment that nobody else except them can fix it,” he says.
“All bike brands have a certain standard,” says Hartogs about VanMoof, “and they went around every standard that was available because they didn’t want to do anything with regular bike parts. So now they created everything themselves, and it keeps breaking because they wanted to over-design it.”
Sounds like it’s good that they went under. Nobody should support a manufacturer that does that.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But the brand, considered by many bicyclists the Tesla of e-bikes, has gone bankrupt; its cofounders are in talks with outside groups to revive the failed company.
Rueterkemp bought his VanMoof nine months ago for around $4,000, and he’s ridden it nearly every day since, frequently pressing the bike’s “boost” button to pass fellow commuters on his way to his startup in downtown Amsterdam.
Hartogs says VanMoof’s creators fancied their company to be like Apple — creating unique products that would spawn its own ecosystem — but Hartogs says the company ran out of money because, unlike Apple’s products, VanMoof’s specialized bikes often broke down, and their maintenance shops and generous warranty policies couldn’t keep up.
With VanMoof no longer paying him to fix bikes under warranty, Tamor Hartogs is now left negotiating complicated repairs with individual customers.
He’s also been reduced to taking out the company’s patented cylindrical batteries from VanMoof bike frames by carefully breaking them apart and installing new internal components.
When asked for comment, VanMoof’s global head of communications replied by email: “I’m afraid I can’t make anyone available at the moment — seeing that we’re all fired except for the founders.”
The original article contains 696 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I mean… you can still use the pedals, right? 😁
Not necessarily, depending on how you’ve set it up, the bicycle has to connect to their servers to unlock. So if they shut down the servers, you can’t even use the pedals.
Here’s a video about it. (in German)
Something similar happened last year. A company that made eye implants to help blind people see went bankrupt, and suddenly they weren’t around to repair/replace/remove the implants anymore.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Ttbl6Jx4ltQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
