Non-bike bike gear tested: Turning any helmet into a headlight with BioLite
The best way I’ve found to reduce or eliminate car usage in a city is with an electric bike. But in the winter, nights come at you early, and it’s more important than ever to ensure that as cyclists, we’re visible to the biggest danger on the roads: car drivers. I’ve been testing out a new headlamp called the BioLite HeadLamp 800 Pro that isn’t specifically meant for cyclists, but has proven perfect for me as a way to add both front and rear LED lighting to pretty much any helmet.
That’s a major part of this series, often finding cool gear that might not have been originally meant for us as e-bikers, but that works great and can be co-opted to make car-replacing electric bikes even better and easier to use.
I love helmets that have built-in LED illumination. While most electric bikes come with their own headlights, having a higher-mounted LED makes riders even more visible. These are usually lower power be-seen lights, though the ability to actually shine light in an area you want to quickly glance at is a major superpower for those early winter nights on poorly lit trails and bike lanes. Light is good, but directional light is great.
The downside of helmet-based lights is that you’re limited to the few manufacturers that actually do incorporate them, and even then the lights are usually fairly weak. Even though there are great options out there (I love the helmet offered by Electric Bike Company for its 100% customizable paint job and built-in LED lighting), adding lighting to your own helmet can save money and give you a wider range of options for helmet features. I’ve been testing out the HeadLamp 800 Pro from BioLite for use as a cycling light, and this thing is darn near perfect for riding at night or in other low-visibility scenarios like rain/snow storms.
Like most headlamps, it’s easy to adjust it to fit just about any helmet, instantly giving you old-school mining helmet vibes. It’s also got a coating inside the bands that makes it lock onto the shell without sliding around like an old underwear waistband. I don’t ride without a helmet often, but it’s still comfortable right on your head or over a knit hat, if you like to go sans brain bucket.
Unlike my hiking headlamps that have been dancing around in my camping gear bags for nearly a decade, this thing is much lower profile so it doesn’t add a lot of bulk or momentum when turning my head around while cycling. I do a lot of shoulder checks, so not having something heavy out for in front of my face is important to me.
As far as lighting levels, there are plenty. The low brightness mode is just 5 lumens, so I don’t really use that one except when all I want is to be seen by drivers. Usually I like having more light thrown out in front of me to serve as my own headlight. The 250-lumen medium mode and 500-lumen high mode are great for everyday cycling use. There’s an even higher 800-lumen mode, but that’s more than I need and I don’t want to blind drivers, either. And it’s easy to adjust between the front spot light modes, flood light, strobe light, and dimming options.
There’s also a red light on the rear that is perfect for cyclists like us, as it gives you a high-mounted tail light – something you’ll almost never see on a bike. Lower-mounted e-bike lights under the seat are often blocked by backpacks or winter jackets that hang lower, so a high-mounted tail light on the back of your head is a great idea. That one can also either be full-on flood light or a strobe, depending on how you prefer. I like solid lights as opposed to strobes, and your head motion will likely give the rear LED enough movement to catch drivers attention, but the strobe option is there if you like it. The front light also has a red option, which is great for when I’m camping, but I wouldn’t use that front red mode while riding as it could cause some directional confusion for other drivers and is really meant as a night vision-preservation tool outside of cycling. For camping and hiking, it’s great.
As far as run-time, I find that the built-in battery is longer than any typical commuting trip I’ll ever make. The say medium power lasts four hours of constant use and high power lasts for two hours on constant use, which I haven’t really measured because I just try to charge it around once a week to not get too low. It uses a micro-USB port to charge, which I wish was USB-C since I have more of those cords laying around, but it’s not a deal breaker for me.
If you want to keep the power up high and still have an even longer run-time than several hours, the BioLite HeadLamp 800 Pro has pass-through charging that allows you to run the light from a powerbank like you’d use to charge your phone.
I’ve tried it with the Charge 80 PD battery that BioLite sent me with the headlamp, which has massive capacity yet still fits in your pocket. It’s barely larger than a smartphone, yet can recharge a smartphone around 5 times. You could even use it to charge a laptop (which I have also done in a pinch while traveling) with the 18W USB-C PD port. I like my gear to be multi-use, and I try to avoid carrying single-use tools on principle whenever possible. So a power bank that can run my headlight, charge my phone, or come on flights with me to keep my laptop charged is a major force multiplier. (With a note towards travel, I once had to talk my way into not getting my 110Wh powerbank confiscated in a German airport, so this 75Wh power bank is a lot more airline-friendly in countries with 100Wh flight-approved battery limits).
When used with my headlamp, the Charge 80 PD powers the light with a “Run Forever” cord that includes a band clip so that the USB port isn’t put under stress while connected. That means I can keep the battery in my pocket and still have it powering or charging the headlamp. In practice, I tried this to test it out and it works well, but I’m never biking for more than a few hours in a row at night, so I haven’t really needed to run the headlamp off auxiliary power in a real-world use case – at least not yet. But if you’re taking it on a night hike then I can absolutely see that scenario being useful.
The only downside that jumps out at me is the price, since the BioLite HeadLamp 800 Pro is rather expensive at $99.95. Since I’m used to my 10-year-old camping headlamp from REI that owes me nothing, that seems steep initially. But then again, this thing lasts so much longer, doesn’t require AAA batteries, is around 8x as powerful, is built out of aluminum for long-lasting ruggedness, and gives me a rear red LED light that’s perfect for cyclists.
It’s also not light, at 5.3 oz or around 150g. That’s a third of a pound or so. But I find that I don’t notice the extra weight after a minute or two, and the low-profile design helps it stay close to the helmet.
BioLite also has other models with some of the same features, though not quite as tricked out, for significantly less. So if you like the idea of adding front and rear LED lights to your helmet and can get away with fewer lumens or other features, they’ve got other options there too.
Lastly, I should probably note that helmet manufacturers usually say not to add things to helmets as it changes how they react in a crash.
Your bike helmet was certified in its naked form, so adding things like lights, GoPro mounts, and other foreign attachments is considered a “no-no” by helmet companies, even if everyone still does it.
The nice thing about adding something like the HeadLamp 800 Pro is that it is merely held on by an elastic band and thus likely has more freedom to move or slide out of the way in a crash. That doesn’t mean it necessarily will, and anything external added to a helmet probably reduces its performance in a crash compared to stock, but I feel like the ability for an elastic band to simply slide off is better than rigidly mounted objects like GoPro mounts that create non-moving stress risers. But hey, that’s just my two cents. Helmet manufacturers will still tell you to keep it clean.
Read more: Non-bike bike gear review: Foldylock Forever is the most secure folding bike lock
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Tesla has announced that it now offers interest-free loans on the Cybertruck until the end of the month. The move is the equivalent of a roughly $10,000 discount and shows that Tesla has reached a new level of desperation in trying to sell the Cybertruck.
Following the unveiling of the Cybertruck in 2019, Tesla reported having accumulated over 1 million reservations for the highly anticipated electric pickup truck.
However, after launching the production version in 2023 at almost twice the price and with less range than previously announced, the vehicle program became a total flop.
Tesla had planned for a production capacity of 250,000 vehicles per year at Gigafactory Texas, and CEO Elon Musk said that he could see the automaker doubling to half a million trucks per year.
However, Tesla ended up having issues selling 40,000 Cybertrucks in its first year, and the delivery rate fell even further in 2025 with inventories piling up.
To address the demand issues, Tesla began throttling down production earlier this year and offering deeper discounts on its new vehicles.
Today, Tesla announced its biggest Cybertruck discount yet: 0% APR financing for those who order the truck with its $8,000 Full Self-Driving Package:
As we recently reported, Tesla has virtually given up on delivering Autopilot on Cybertrucks – pushing many buyers toward its more expensive FSD package.
Now, Tesla is doubling down on the strategy by subsidizing financing with FSD.
The automaker has already been offering 0% financing in Model 3 and cheaper financing on Model Y, but it is going to be quite costly on the more expensive Cybertruck.
At a cost of $88,000 (Cybertrcuk Dual Motor plus FSD), it should cost Tesla about $10,000 in loss revenue to subsidize the loans at the current rate.
Inventory trackers indicate that Tesla’s Cybertruck inventory in the US exceeds 3,700 units, valued at over $300 million.
The fact that Tesla is extending this offer only through June 30th points to the automaker trying to reduce its inventory by the end of the quarter.
Electrek’s Take
It looks like Tesla is delivering the Cybertruck at an annual rate of about 25,000 units in its second year of production – down from ~40,000 units in its first year.
There’s no way to put it nicely: this is a commercial flop.
It’s especially bad when you consider that Tesla prepared for a production of 250,000 units per year.
Let’s see how successful a 0% APR promotion is. I’m sure it would have a positive impact, but I doubt it will help increase the annualized rate to more than 30,000 units.
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Tesla stock dropped over 50 points today, primarily in response to a very public feud between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and convicted felon Donald Trump.
But, as we pointed out in November, this doesn’t have anything to do with company performance, and rather only reflects a change in the market’s expectation of potential benefit to Tesla from government corruption.
Tesla stock has had a wild few months, with big rises and falls that has had little to do with company performance (which is, perhaps, nothing new for the stock, which has always been a speculative vehicle).
Much of the movement of TSLA has been centered around CEO Elon Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump.
Musk very publicly supported Mr. Trump’s run for president, giving hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Mr. Trump’s campaign, despite the latter’s openly anti-EV positions (and despite that there exists a clear legal remedy stopping insurrectionists from holding office in the US).
Musk even went on to spew climate denying nonsense alongside Mr. Trump during the campaign, and later said nothing when Mr. Trump opposed the Paris Agreement, even though he previously opposed a similar move in 2017.
This led to Musk being invited into an advisory role, which was dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency despite it not being a real government department, and having a supposed mission redundant with the already-existing Government Accountability Office.
And in the immediate aftermath of the election, TSLA stock rose swiftly, purely because of expectations of corruption. But after that swift rise, it gradually fell as the reality of economy-destroying tariffs, anti-EV legislation, and Tesla’s brand perception problem due to Musk’s actions all became apparent. Despite Musk’s position as a top republican party donor, the party still seems more interested in catering to its traditional base in the fossil fuel industry.
Despite some recovery from that big post election rise-and-drop, TSLA took another big hit today, and it’s all due to the current rift forming between these two egomaniacs.
A rift over spending becomes something greater
During his tenure in his advisory position, Musk claims to have saved the government hundreds of billions of dollars, but independent accounting has shown that it is in fact likely to increase the deficit, not decrease it.
Nevertheless, it seems like Musk was fooled into believing his own propaganda, and into thinking that deficit reduction was ever a goal of Mr. Trump, despite that he previously oversaw the highest nominal deficit of any person in the history of the United States.
At least, he believed that until now. In the last few days, after leaving his advisory position, Musk has loudly opposed the new republican budget bill, which he now correctly points out will add trillions of dollars to the US deficit (as any lucid person might have predicted from the party of waste).
The criticism came to a head today, with Musk going through one of his patented tweetstorms, acting more like a jilted lover than a CEO in charge of a company that has many people’s retirement invested into it.
There’s been a lot of back and forth, but over the course of the day, Musk has posted many statements about how dangerous the budget bill will be for the US debt and deficit.
Mr. Trump responded, stating that Musk should have known these things before now, but that Musk is only acting this way because he cut the “EV mandate.”
To be clear, the bill in question does not cut any EV mandate, as there was never an EV mandate to begin with, but it does cut EV tax credits which Tesla has gained more benefit from than any other company, though Tesla lobbied in support of these cuts. The bill does not cut support for oil and gas companies, which are orders of magnitude higher than the support EV companies get.
In response to this, Musk claimed that he personally swung the election in favor of the republicans, and that Mr. Trump is showing “ingratitude” by not recognizing this fact.
Mr. Trump responded by suggesting that the government could save money by terminating all of the subsidies and contracts for services with Musk’s various companies. To this, Musk said that he would immediately decommission the Dragon capsule, which has been the main spacecraft used by NASA to service the International Space Station.
Then, Musk went on to state that a recession will happen in the second half of this year due to Mr. Trump’s position on tariffs, and also to accuse Mr. Trump of being on Jeffrey Epstein’s list (which is not the first time Musk has publicly accused someone of pedophilia, though it is the first time he’s said that about someone who he claimed to “love as much as any straight man can,” and knowingly worked alongside), and to agree with a call for his impeachment.
The market sees this as a negative sign
The public rift seems to have shaken the stock market out of its stupor, as Tesla went down more than 50 points since the start of today.
While nothing significant has changed for Tesla’s business today – it’s still suffering from falling sales in an otherwise rising market, and it still has a bad CEO – what has changed is the possibility of the company benefitting from corruption.
As I stated during TSLA’s meteoric post-election rise, the stock price was merely a reflection of the market’s expectation that Mr. Trump, a person with an enormous history of corruption, would thank Musk for his election participation by rewarding him and his companies. Nobody quite knew how that might happen, but everyone expected that it would.
I claimed, at the time, that this was unlikely to turn out the way the market thought it would, because the republicans would likely continue to favor fossil fuels, and that regulatory blockages were not the thing holding Tesla back from its automation goals.
Musk did attempt to use the government in corrupt ways, as detailed this week in a report by Senator Warren, and as we all remember from the White House Auto Mall infomercial (remember, folks, “everything’s computer!“).
But none of that was ever going to justify the addition of hundreds of billions of dollars to Tesla’s market cap.
The market seems to be realizing that more today, as over $100 billion has been shaved off of Tesla’s market cap since the start of the feud. That’s quite a lot of priced-in expected benefit that has been wiped away, all by a single tweetstorm.
Fight shows how vulnerable Tesla is to Musk’s whims
While it’s all well and good to see the worst two people you know fighting each other, and to finally see the inevitable fallout between two narcissists who frankly held out much longer than any reasonable person thought they would, this fight does show the significant vulnerability that Tesla has to the whims of a CEO who has shown poor ability to control his impulses in the past.
The last year or more has been highlighted by several poor business decisions by Musk, not the least of which is his support of one of the larger anti-EV entities on the planet right now.
But beyond the politics, his leadership has still been erratic for the company. Not only has he paid more attention to the many other companies he runs, when he has turned his attention to Tesla, it hasn’t been positive for the company.
After mostly ignoring Tesla for a few years, he went through a flurry of activity in the run-up to last year’s shareholder advisory vote on his compensation package. This flurry involved firing everyone including important leadership and successful teams, canceling an all-important affordable car project (and lying about it) and holding Tesla’s AI projects hostage while shifting both resources and staff from Tesla to his private AI company, even as he claims that AI is the future of Tesla.
Now, TSLA investors have another thing to worry about – whether Musk will continue to try to “poke the bear” and get more government opposition to his company, even as he continues to make himself distasteful globally (by, for example, showing support for German neo-Nazis, agreeing with a defense of Hitler’s actions in the Holocaust, or his many other white supremacist statements). These actions have driven protests against the company, embarrassed owners and pushed many customers away – and those protesters aren’t planning on stopping.
While some may cheer this new rift that has formed between Musk and one of the environment’s greatest enemies, Donald Trump, it seems unlikely that Musk’s erratic behavior will be beneficial for Tesla the company in the long run.
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It’s been a bad week for DOGE. And a really bad week for dogecoin.
The meme coin, which gained popularity in part because Elon Musk once dubbed it “the people’s crypto,” fell about 10% on Thursday and is down 22% over the past week. That drop corresponds with Musk’s official departure from the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was the centerpiece of his effort to radically downsize the federal government.
Musk and Trump had been sparring in recent days, with Musk slamming the president’s spending bill, and Trump withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman, a Musk ally, as his pick to run NASA.
But the war of words escalated dramatically on Thursday. After Trump said he was “very disappointed” in the Tesla CEO, Musk fired back on X, claiming Trump would have lost the election without his support.
Trump called Musk “CRAZY” and threatened to cancel his government contracts, sending shares of electric vehicle maker Tesla tumbling to close down 14% for the day.
Dogecoin and Tesla shares drop as Elon Musk beefs with the president.
Musk responded on X, “Go ahead, make my day.” He later said that following Trump’s comment about canceling contracts, his rocket company SpaceX “will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.” Dragon is the only U.S. option for delivering crew to and from the International Space Station.
The spat wouldn’t necessarily have an impact on the price of dogecoin, which, like most meme coins, has no attached asset or underlying value. But it’s a particularly volatile coin that can move up or down based on consumer sentiment, celebrity hype, internet memes and Musk news.
Musk’s public backing of dogecoin has long been a major driver of its price, making it particularly sensitive to shifts in his political standing. The price jumped more than 15% on a single day in 2022 after Tesla began accepting the cryptocurrency as payment for some merchandise. The next year, dogecoin spiked more than 30% in a day after Musk replaced the blue bird on the Twitter (now X) website with an image of a shiba inu, the digital coin’s logo.
Dogecoin, along with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, soared after Trump’s election victory in November on optimism that the new administration, which was heavily backed by Musk and the crypto industry, would return the favor with friendly policies and deregulation.
Buyers of the coin are now paying the price for the Musk-Trump breakup.
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