Manufacturers chasing power figures for short-term sales externalize the cost onto the broader riding community.
Let me be clear about where I’m coming from before I say any of this.
I like e-mtbs. Most of the time, anyway. I bought my dad, who is a still-sometimes bike racer approaching 70, a Class 1 Trek e-MTB a few years ago. It has 350 watts of peak power, 250 watts sustained. I ride trails with him when he visits, and I love every minute of it. The bike doesn’t make him crazy fast. It makes him as fast as me on a cross-country bike. It gives him access to rides here in Colorado that would be too much for the sea-level lungs of a man who did his time in the saddle and doesn’t really want to train anymore. That’s technology doing something genuinely good and cool. He’s having fun, I’m having fun.
So when I say the e-bike industry urgently needs regulation, understand that this is not the argument of someone who wants all e-bikes off the trails. It is the argument of someone who is (mostly) happy with them on trails today and wants them to still be on the trails in 30 years. E-bikes recently had some big wins, including the opening of more than 200 miles of US Forest Service trails near Moab and another big swath of USFS trails near Bend, Oregon, both to class 1 e-bikes.
Yet all is not well. This week, mountain bike legend Hans Rey (who, in full disclosure, is sponsored by motor maker Bosch) penned an open letter to the bicycle industry, making a case I largely agree with. His call for clearer definitions and firmer power limits is not the protectionism or technophobia some might accuse it of. I view it as a straightforward reckoning with where the industry is heading if it doesn’t get its house in order. Rey is requesting self-regulation, which is an improbable ask, but regulation needs to come from somewhere, and the brands need to get behind it.
The risks are real. As Enduro-MTB wrote last year: “In the worst case, e-bikes could lose their legal status as bicycles, leading to mandatory helmets, type approval, registration, insurance, denial of trail access, and riding bans in certain areas.” That’s bad, and it’s already started happening. New Jersey just passed laws doing exactly that. Time for everyone involved to get their act together.
What we call these things
I don’t like that my dad can’t ride his e-mtb everywhere. Most of our trails here in Durango don’t allow them. His pedelec bike, which poses no meaningful threat to trail sustainability or other users, gets swept up in a broadly negative reaction to motorized trail users. I believe a significant part of the reason he can’t ride that bike everywhere is the existence of machines with three times as much peak power that are nonetheless marketed and sold in exactly the same way. I run into these bikes every so often. Often, they’re coming up at me on a downhill trail, the sort that no sane mountain biker would or could ride up on a pedal-only bike. In these moments, I am reminded that these are not mountain bikes by any definition I adhere to.
These ultra-high-power e-mtbs, commonly referred to as “full power” by the industry and media (as if the ones with an entire 500 watts of Tadej Pogačar in the down tube are not “full power”?) can hit peak power figures over 1,000 watts. They are not the same vehicle as my bike, or my dad’s. They do not behave the same on a trail, nor do they pose the same risks. To the brands selling them, the ability to do things regular bikes can’t do, even under the most skilled of riders, is a feature, not a bug. The fact that the industry has allowed all of these vehicles to shelter under the same “e-bike” label is doing real harm, not to some abstract regulatory category, but to actual riders, on actual trails, right now.
“E-bike” currently functions as a marketing umbrella broad enough to cover everything from a lightly pedal-assisted gravel bike to a vehicle that can sustain throttle-powered speeds no human cyclist approaches. That lack of precision creates the confusion Rey describes in his letter. It is confusion that spreads to land managers, insurers, lawmakers, and the general public, who are all trying to figure out what these things actually are.
Rey proposes a clean taxonomy: e-bicycle (currently Class 1, pedal-assist to 20 mph, 750w peak maximum), e-moped (throttle-equipped and/or assist to over 20 mph – currently Class 2/3 – and/or peak power over 750w), and e-motorcycle (high-power machines clearly beyond bicycle performance).
“Instead, the label has expanded to cover vehicles with throttles, higher speeds, and significantly more power,” Rey writes. “That blurring of categories puts access at risk.
Using Rey’s definitions would put nearly every high-end, “full power” e-mtb released in the last 18 months into the e-moped category. Next year, industry folks tell me it’s only going to get worse.
The 750-watt ceiling is not arbitrary
One of the more technically important points in Rey’s letter concerns the difference between peak and nominal power ratings. It’s a distinction that has become a significant loophole.
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