Also president Chris Yu showing off the TM-B at a launch event in Oakland, California. Photo / Chris Velazco, The Washington Post
It looks like a bike. It rides like a bike, mostly.
But a new electric two-wheeler from a Rivian spin-off packs more than a few features you would expect from a full-size electric car instead.
The TM-B e-bike, built by a team that spun out of the electric truck maker, recharges its battery when you brake.
A 13cm touch screen it calls the “Portal” offers music controls and navigational cues. When the US$4000 ($7000)-plus e-bike starts shipping next year, your phone will act as a key, unlocking the bike and priming it for a ride when you - or another designated rider - walks up to it.
It’s pretty flexible, too.
You can swap out the standard bike seat for a Vespa-style bench that seats two, or a utility frame that can accommodate a few bags of groceries.
And most notably, its “virtual” drivetrain - which means pumping those pedals doesn’t directly turn the bike’s wheels - makes the TM-B both fun to ride and surprisingly difficult to steal.
I took one for a ride around the start-up’s Palo Alto headquarters and found it nimble, fast off the line and easier to handle than its 36kg frame suggests.
Sales of electric bikes surged in the wake of the pandemic and have become fixtures of city streets and suburbs across the US. But why give them the technological flourishes of a well-specced car?
The idea isn’t just to give existing e-bike riders an upgrade path, Chris Yu, president of the start-up, called Also, said in an interview with the Washington Post. It’s also to catch the eye of Americans who find using their cars for short jaunts kind of obnoxious - and there are more of these people than you might think.
Residents in well-to-do enclaves in sunny states have embraced golf carts, not cars, as their go-tos for running errands and ducking out to dinner. And more than 300 US cities have shared bike or scooter systems in place, which might take on a larger role as some larger cities contemplate congestion charges to tamp down traffic.
There’s a hunger for a “lower-cost, more enjoyable, less hassle-filled way to do short trips” that reduce the stress of sitting in traffic and finding parking, Yu said.
He expects that, within 10 to 20 years, nearly all of the smaller vehicles better suited to those situations will be fully electric.
“There’s going to be a couple of dozen companies like Also that will need to exist to service this transition to an electric future,” he said.
That transition is likely to unfold much faster overseas, where tiny cars, bicycles, and three-wheelers such as tuk-tuks are already woven deep into the fabric of everyday life.
The US is a trickier matter. Large swathes of the country are too spread out for a new breed of tiny electric vehicles to make sense.
Some cities with citizenry that might benefit most from a flexible kind of electric bike are contemplating slower speed limits and other regulatory tools to squash rising e-bike accident rates.
That means Also’s job isn’t just to convince people that the TM-B is a capable stand-in for cars and rival e-bikes - it also has to be a good community citizen.
To do that, Yu said the TM-B was built to strictly adhere to existing US e-bike regulations, unlike some imported models that zip around at much faster speeds than state and federal laws permit.
The company also baked software features into its e-bike that allow parents to set speed limits for their younger riders.
Beyond all that, it also has to be engaging and enjoyable to ride - and that’s where cycling purists might start to take issue.
Because there’s no direct, physical connection between pedals and wheels, the feedback I felt rising up from my legs and feet - even when I dialled the electric assist down to its minimum - felt noticeably un-bike-like.
If someone else swoops in and tries to ride off on it, they’ll soon find that pounding those pedals does nothing at all. Just in case, owners can also remotely lock the bike and locate their missing ride via GPS.
If the battery - rated for up to 100 miles (160km) of range - ever goes dry, users can still ride the bike, but with no motor assist and at much lower speeds than normal.
The company says riders can pop out their batteries and use them as power banks to charge their other devices. It says the battery can recharge an iPhone 17 more than 50 times before it gives out completely.
It’ll be a while yet before we can tell if Also is really onto something here. As it turns out, though, you might not need to buy one of these things to benefit from them.
Similar to its deal to use specialised electric Rivian vans for hauling deliveries, Amazon also inked a multiyear deal with Also to put thousands of four-wheeled versions of its bikes on streets in the US and Europe to haul packages.
They can haul hundreds of kg of packages, far less than a traditional delivery van, but they help “reduce traffic and noise”, said Emily Barber, Amazon’s director of global fleet and products, in a statement.
Even now, with new bikes to sell, a commercial partner to keep happy and an electric transition to spearhead, Yu can’t help but think about what should come next.
One possibility is a consumer-friendly version of those cargo-hauling four-wheelers, minus the big enclosure for packages. Instead, it might ferry something far more precious.
When the start-up showed off a prototype at a launch event in Oakland, California, its open-air rear cargo hold was full of kids.
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