Unpopular opinion: Why we need more ‘motorcycles for children’, not fewer
A recent string of anti-ebike articles in the New York Times has attempted to spread fear around the increasingly popular transportation method of electric bicycles. But it’s not just the typical e-bikes you see students riding to class or adults cruising to work on. One of the main e-bike targets of late has become electric balance bikes, or what the NYT referred to as “motorcycles for children.”
However, instead of fearing these rider training tools, we’d be better advised to embrace them and encourage more parents to put their kids on one.
The main bike at issue in the recent NYT hit-piece was a model named the “K1D”, or kid. It’s produced by California-based electric bike manufacturer SUPER73 and is the company’s first two-wheeler specifically designed for children.
It’s not a new concept though. Let’s be honest: SUPER73 basically looked at the massive amount of money another company known as StaCyc was making selling electric balance bikes and said “We can do that too, only cooler”. And they did.
For those unfamiliar, balance bikes are essentially tiny bikes for small children. There are no pedals, so kids push off against the ground and then rest their feet on the platforms. The aptly-named balance bikes teach kids how to balance a bike by developing the intuition to slightly steer to the side they are leaning towards. Until they get it and balance on their own, they can just put their feet back down.
It’s the modern day alternative to how your dad used to push you on your bike in a grassy field while yelling “Now pedal! And turn! TURN!” before running after you as you fall, then watched as you get back up to try again. Except instead of falling, kids now just put their feet down and push off again. In fact, children are learning to control a bike without even realizing they’re learning. To them, it’s just fun to push and glide.
Balance bikes are replacing training wheels as the go-to method for learning to ride a bike. Unlike training wheels, which don’t teach how to balance and only make kids reliant on something else to balance for them, these types of balance bikes teach kids to be reliant on themselves to stay up. Balance bikes are not only safer (fewer falls), but kids actually learn on their own by discovering what works. They feel what steering inputs make the bike more stable, then learn to repeat it, all by themselves.
Balance bikes have been around for a while, but electric balance bikes are fairly new. They’re basically the same thing, except they have a tiny electric motor and battery added on to the frame. Kids still have to push off to get going, but instead of slowing down and stopping after a few seconds, they can push a button or twist a throttle to engage the motor and keep going. It’s more fun for the kid (obviously, “vroom vroom”) and it actually helps them learn to ride a bike faster because they spend more time upright and balancing, developing the muscle memory and neural pathways needed to steer and balance a bicycle.
My wife and I are enjoying playing life on easy mode without kids, so from time to time we borrow our nieces and nephews whenever we feel like experimenting. I recently got a hold of an electric balance bike from Hiboy and put my 4 year old niece on it. Time to experiment.
She already has a small pedal bike with training wheels, but my brother hasn’t been able to remove them yet because she doesn’t know how to balance the bike without the training wheels. They try, but it just proves frustrating and she gives up. Each time I saw those damn training wheels, I wanted to take them off, but I couldn’t since she’d just fall over.
To my niece, the electric balance bike was immediately “cool”. She’s seen her older brothers ride electric scooters and so she naturally wanted to try her own electric ridable thing.
We left the power off at first and she practiced rolling downhill on her driveway, learning to balance on the way down.
After a few tries, she was getting the hang of it. Then we turned the power on. And something amazing happened. She reached the bottom of the driveway, pushed the throttle and just kept going.
She was a bit wobbly, like a small drunk person struggling to ride home from an Amsterdam bar, but she was rolling on two wheels. After a few more minutes, she was doing it! She was actually riding and balancing all on her own.
But that’s not the end of the story. Because to continue the experiment, we next took the training wheels back off her pedal bike to see what would happen.
And she immediately succeeded to ride her pedal bicycle, something she had never been able to do before. Literally just a few minutes on an electric balance bike did what months of training wheels couldn’t: it taught her to ride a bike.
Of course anecdotal evidence is merely evidence of an anecdote, but I don’t think my niece is anything special. She’s rather ordinary (and also loud… oh so loud! Hanging out with small children is the best birth control in the world). But it still goes to show just how powerful of a learning tool electric balance bikes can be.
They’re essentially a way to Trojan horse bike-riding skills into kids. It’s the same idea of hiding math problems in educational video games. You take something inherently fun for kids, and you sneak important skills and lessons into it. It’s a win-win.
With these new-fangled contraptions of electric balance bikes, the kids still get exercise (you have to push off to get going before the motor will activate) and they get more fresh air from outdoor time.
At a time when childhood obesity rates are at depressingly high levels, we should be doing everything we can to get kids away from screens and onto bike saddles. If an electric balance bike, something that critics like to refer to as “motorcycles for children”, are cool enough to get kids interested in going outside and learning to ride, then we need more of them. Hell, include little leather vests that say “Heck’s Angels” to go with them, I don’t care. If a few Pulitzer Prize-winning NYT journalists need to get their feathers ruffled in order for scores of young kids to more quickly learn to ride bikes, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
Just make more of these fun tools and get more kids on them. We need more kids learning to ride, more quickly and in larger numbers.
The obvious counterargument here is “But they aren’t pedaling so they’re just being lazy”. But stick with me here. Again, you’ve got to push off before you can engage the motor, so there’s some physical activity required. And balancing engages your core and other muscles too. But also, keep in mind that exercise isn’t the point at this stage. We’re talking about toddlers. If they aren’t sleeping, they’re either running or being annoying (both of which burn calories). And they’re going to outgrow these tiny electric balance bikes quickly anyway. If they can fit on it for a year, you’ll be lucky. By the time they’ve outgrown it, put them on a pedal bike. They’ll enjoy the new larger bike with a fun new propulsion method and will feel like a “big kid” on their new pedal bike, which they are instantly good at riding thanks to honing their balance skills from an earlier age on an electric balance bike.
Luddites that fear electric motors can and likely will continue to hold these things up as two-wheeled boogeymen that are coming for your kids, but I say let them come for your kids. Because if electric balance bikes are this quick as a learning tool to teach kids an important life skill of riding a bike and in a way that is more effective and more fun for the kids, then they’re obviously doing something very right.
Anything that encourages kids to get outside, get on a bike or just go be kids away from screens is a good thing.
Of course that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be adult supervision. Electric balance bikes are effective tools for teaching kids bike balance skills but adults should still be watching those kids to make sure they’re safe during that learning process. An orange flag wouldn’t be a bad idea either. But I’d argue that the process is even safer since kids can more quickly learn the balance part and then move on to more critical safety lessons like learning to check for cars before entering the street, etc.
The NYT can try to scare parents away from electric balance bikes for kids, but perhaps fear mongering news isn’t where we should be getting our cycling advice. The NYT makes money when people click on their articles, and a headline “Nothing wrong with effective cycling learning tool” doesn’t carry the same clickability. As a journalist who also only makes money when you read my articles, I’m going to take that risk. I probably won’t earn very much today, so I’ll just skip my millennial avocado toast until tomorrow. But that’s a small sacrifice to pay for helping a few more kids learn to ride a bike.
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Autonomous taxi company Waymo faced scrutiny last month when a car was caught on video illegally passing a stopped school bus that was letting children off in Atlanta. Now, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is looking into it.
Georgia State Representative Clint Crowe seemed stunned after being presented with video of a Waymo driverless car illegally passing a stopped school bus on Briarcliff Road in Atlanta last month. “I’m a big fan of new technologies and emerging technologies and I think that driverless cars are going to become more prevalent,” he told local NBC news affiliate WBIR. “But we got [sic] to think about how they’re going to comply with the law.”
WBIR | Waymo illegally passes school bus
Crowe co-sponsored Addy’s Law in 2024. The legislation was named after 8-year-old Addy Pierce, who was killed in Henry County after being struck while crossing the street to get to her bus. The law stiffened penalties for illegally passing a stopped school bus, carrying penalties of up to $1,000 in fines and even jail time.
According to Crowe, those rules still apply to autonomous vehicles. “The majority of our traffic laws, the penalty is usually a fine and or driver’s license suspension. These cars don’t have a driver, so they don’t have a driver’s license and so we’re really going to have to rethink who’s the responsible party, who’s going to be responsible for being in control of that vehicle and who’s going to be the operator of that vehicle,” he said.
Crowe believes manufacturers should face stronger consequences when their vehicles break the law, saying the $1,000 fine doesn’t go far enough.
Now, thanks to pressure from social media and politicians like Crowe and Geoirgia State Senator Rick Williams, who helped co-author Addy’s Law, it seems like NHTSA is getting involved.
Prompted by media reports, the US Department of Transportation issued an investigation regarding Waymo’s AV, which states that, “the AV initially stopped, but then drove around the front of the bus by briefly turning right to avoid running into the bus’s right front end, then turning left to pass in front of the bus, and then turning further left and driving down the roadway past the entire left side of the bus. During this maneuver, the Waymo AV passed the bus’s extended crossing control arm near disembarking students (on the bus’s right side) and passed the extended stop arm on the bus’s left side.”
While it remains to be seen how much work NHTSA is actually doing amid the ongoing shutdown of the Federal government, it’s worth noting that, regardless of the outcome, Senator Williams said he plans to introduce new legislation that would hold driverless car companies accountable with higher fines if their vehicles violate traffic laws. If that passes in Georgia, it could set the stage for politicians across the US and even abroad to use similar fins to halt the spread of autonomous taxis in their states.
“Driverless cars should be stopped until it can be figured out,” said Williams. “We should not have this on the road. It’s too dangerous for our children.”
You can read NHTSA summary, below.
We’re typically pretty tech- and autonomous-forward here, but as a parent I would absolutely lose my s*** if a Waymo or Robotaxi or whatever else ran over my kid. but I’ve also seen plenty of human drivers blow past a school bus with a knee on the steering wheel and both eyes glued firmly to their phones. Let us know who you’d be more ready to trust with your kids’ lives in the comments.
SOURCES: WBIR, NHTSA, via School Transportation News.
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![Lion Electric school bus warranties voided, leaving districts stuck [update]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/07/unforgivable.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Nobody ever says “this is business” before doing something nice, and the recently reborn Lion Electric company is keeping that streak alive by doing the unthinkable to cut costs: they’re going to void the warranties on hundreds of electric school buses.
UPDATE 01NOV2025: two Lion Electric buses caught fire, now they’re in more trouble.
This past summer, the fallout from Lion Electric’s dissolution reached a critical mass, and the company’s new owners — the Quebec-based real estate giants Groupe MACH — decided to cancel the warranties on electric school buses sold in the US, leaving many districts with unsafe or broken down buses and no recourse to get their money back while the brand continued to take orders and make money in Canada.
Now, it seems like even the Canadian fleets have some serious safety concerns. School Transportation News and the CBC report that The Quebec Ministry of Education has ordered Lion school bus models be taken out of service immediately after a pair of LionC electric buses caught fire in Montreal, Quebec on Sept 9th, leading to disruptions across the province and a renewed scrutiny of Lion bus safety (Lion360 diesel-powered school buses, which Lion manufactured prior to only producing electric vehicles in 2017, were also affected by the issue).
Lion Bus (the company’s new, official name), has issued an inspection bulletin detailing a four-hour repair, which reads, “We have identified some potential anomalies in a sub-component of the HVAC system that Lion obtains from a third-party supplier … in the interest of safety above all else, we request that Lion bus operators perform the following inspections and modifications: mandatory inspection of several low-voltage electrical connections, replacement of certain electrical connectors, replace fan fuses with less powerful ones, adding a fuse to an HVAC control panel circuit. This inspection and modification procedure must be carried out on all Lion360 (diesel) and LionC 3rd generation and earlier buses (Gen3, Gen2 and Gen1).”
No word yet on whether the issue impacts any of the few Lion Electric buses still on US roads, but remember: Lion Bus wouldn’t help you if it did.
You can read about Lion’s decision to leave US school districts holding the bag on its troubled products in the original July post, below, then let us know how you feel about Groupe MACH’s handling of the situation in the comments section at the bottom of the page.
The warranty story
In a letter issued to exiting Lion Electric customers last week, Deloitte Restructuring announced that the warranties on all Lion vehicles purchased outside of the company’s home Province of Quebec are null and void – leaving dozens of school districts in the lurch with stranded assets that won’t get fixed, and can’t be sold to generate funds for replacements.
“We are working with alternate vendors at the expense of the school district to help keep our electric buses functional and on the road,” explains Dr. Richard Decman, Superintendent of Herscher CUSD No. 2 district in Herscher, Illinois. “Currently, six of our 25 (Lion) electric buses need some type of repair.”
Student Transportation News reports that Lion buses represent fully half of Herscher’s overall fleet of 50 buses, and that the district has received nearly $10 million for the purchase of 25 electric buses and the related charging stations from various state and utility incentive programs.
Herscher isn’t the only district having problems with Lion buses. “All four Lion buses that we own are currently parked and not being used,” Coleen Souza, interim transportation director of Winthrop Public Schools, told Clean Trucking. “Two of them are in need of repairs which would cost us money which we are not willing to invest in because the buses do not run for more than a month before needing more repairs.”
More of the same in Maine, where Yarmouth School Department bought two Lion Electric buses in 2023 with the state covering the costs. According to Superintendent Andrew Dolloff, the buses almost never worked. “We’ve had some sporadic service over the past two years, but as soon as the tech leaves, the buses produce error codes again,” explained Dolloff. ” and “Then the technician quits or is released, and we wait a few months for the next response.”
Dolloff added that Yarmouth’s electric buses did not operate during the 2024-25 school year.
Lion’s new owners are seemingly uninterested in their customers’ plight – which might be easily dismissed if those new owners, Groupe MACH, weren’t also the old owners of Lion Electric.
That’s right, kids. Quebec-based real estate company Groupe MACH, which stepped in to “save” Lion Electric earlier this summer, along with Ontario-based Mirella & Lino Saputo Foundation, bought $90 million of equity in Lion Electric back in 2023. And, while the MACH people may not have been the ones who ultimately made the call about voiding the warranties (that decision was made by the Deloitte bankruptcy team), it is absolutely Group MACH who have, to date, not announced plans to continue to honor those warranties, either.
Make of that what you will.
Deloitte Lion letter
SOURCES: School Transportation News, Clean Trucking, Deloitte.
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The first-ever Liebherr MK 120-5.1E electric crane in customer hands has rolled into the narrow, historic streets of Bern’s old town at 20 meters tall with a 45 meter reach and (of course) zero emissions, no vibrations, and almost no noise.
Deployed by Swiss construction firm Zaugg AG Rohrbach, the new Liebherr electric mobile crane is working hard placing temporary roofs above operational construction sites. It’s precise work, since the narrow streets of Bern’s historic old town weren’t even built for cars — much less massive, five-axle construction machinery. The prices controls and smooth operation of the electric drive mean the MK120-5.1E’s operators could confidently navigate the narrow streets without causing damage and creating new, unpaid jobs for themselves.
“The all-wheel steering allows us to manoeuvre easily in the narrow alleyways,” explained Stefan Stettler, head of the crane department at Zaugg AG Rohrbach. In reverse gear, the crane worked its way along the historic Rathausgasse to its construction site, past the arcades typical of the old town.
In addition to on-board power, the mobile crane can also be plugged into on-site grid power where available, or any mobile power sources capable of offering a steady 63 AMP output for lifting work. A mobile Liebherr Liduro Power Port LPO 100 was on hand in Bern, made available to Zaugg expressly for this purpose. With the Liduro LPO 100 fully charged, Liebherr says the stored energy is good for two full days of crane work.
“The low-noise and emission-free crane work is naturally pleasant for (Bern’s) residents, tourists and passers-by,” explained Stettler. “Especially as we only extended the crane support on the side facing away from the construction site by 50 per cent, allowing pedestrians and cyclists to pass through at all times.”
The MK120-5.1E electric mobile crane offers 8,000 kg (~17,650 lbs.) of lifting capacity, and all of the crane’s drives and winches are powered by electric motors, eliminating both the need to “warm up” or service oil-based hydraulics. It can be had with either a 98 kWh on-board battery (shown) or a 544 hp Liebherr diesel genset.
Electrek’s Take
From compact wheel loaders to radical two-wheeled dumper concepts to massive battery electric retrofit excavators, Liebherr is absolutely killing it in the heavy equipment electrification race. Their electric equipment offerings are proving that EVs can get even the heaviest jobs done, and save big fleets even bigger money while doing it.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Liebherr, via Construction Equipment.
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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
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