10 ways Velotric’s electric bikes are built differently: Deep-dive on the Discover 2
Velotric’s electric bikes stand out from all the other electric bike makers for more than just their eye-catching colors. Underneath that paint you’ll find a number of major differences. Everything from component selection, design choices, embedded technology, and a lot more helps to create a unique and high-performing electric bike that separates itself from the competition. Let’s take a closer look at the new Velotric Discover 2 to see just what goes into these premium e-bikes.
Velotric gets UL certification for the battery and bike
This is incredibly important because UL certification is the gold standard for e-bike safety these days. Not only does Velotric go directly to Underwriter Laboratories for the testing and certification, unlike others that often use third-party tests, but both the battery and the entire e-bike received separate testing and UL certifications. You can actually look it up and find their published UL certifications, which can’t be said for most e-bike companies.
The battery is certified to UL 2849 and the entire e-bike’s drive system is certified to UL 2271. That means the motor, controller, charger, electrical system, and battery pack are all UL-certified.
As more cities and states require UL certification for e-bikes to be legally sold, having this important level of testing already secured is a major advantage.
Proprietary drive system – investing where it matters
A lot of e-bike makers simply pull various components off a shelf and assemble them onto a frame selected from a catalog. Velotric is different.
The company builds its e-bikes using proprietary systems like the powertrain to ensure that it is the highest quality and offers the best performance possible. That’s not something you can get when simply selecting parts à la carte like many others.
Velotric has its own manufacturing team and has 42 utility patents and counting (plus more design patents and software copyrights), meaning they develop their own gear to ensure it all works together properly and provides the performance that riders demand. That’s a big part of the secret behind how Velotric’s Discover 2 and other e-bikes in its lineup can offer more torque and longer range compared to other electric bikes with the same specs.
It’s also an important aspect to ensure timely deliveries. By controlling its own supply chain, Velotric averages just 85 days total compared to the industry average of 150-180 days. That means you get better-designed e-bikes delivered more quickly! And with over 500 partner stores, those bikes show up where you can actually test ride them or return for support when you need it.
Bead welded frame that is hand-finished
When you see as many electric bike frames as we do each week, you notice the small details and differences that might slip by an untrained eye. Welding quality is one of them, and it’s an area where Velotric excels.
On the Discover 2’s own in-house designed frame, the Velotric team uses quality hand-finished bead welding for smooth and strong construction.
We’ve seen some shady weld jobs on other e-bikes, and we’ve even seen multiple e-bikes break in half under normal commuter usage. So Velotric’s assistance on quality welding on a purpose-designed frame is a major safety benefit that will ensure long-lasting, good-looking e-bikes that can withstand the test of time.
The attention to detail in quality manufacturing might also explain how they can offer a two-year warranty when many e-bike companies offer just half of that.
Included battery handle
This might sound like a small feature, but it makes a big difference. When you carry an e-bike battery around, having a convenient and secure handle is about more than comfort, it’s also a safety feature. Most e-bikes have bulky batteries without any good way to carry it other than gripping around the entire chunky battery shell. But the Velotric Discover 2 has a built in handle that folds away when you battery is installed but lifts up to give you a convenient way to carry it with just a few lazy fingers.
It’s another great example of taking the time to design and include small but important features that help differentiate the bike from others that haven’t been able to match Velotric’s attention to detail.
The Velotric Discover 2 is surprisingly waterproof!
This might sound strange, but you can actually toss the Velotric Discover 2 battery into a tub of water and it will be fine! The battery is IPX7 rated, which means it can withstand being submerged in over three feet of water!
In fact, the company demonstrated that feature by putting the battery in a washing machine for an entire cycle!
The rest of the bike is nearly as waterproof, carrying an IPX6 rating. That means you can pressure wash it without any issues.
If you read the fine print on most e-bikes, they explicitly warn against pressure washing and may even void your warranty if you use a pressure washer. But Velotric actually encourages it because the Discover 2 is designed to withstand high pressure water jets, making it easier to clean it after a dirty ride. And even if you never plan to pressure wash your e-bike, it sure does give us some nice peace of mind to know that getting caught in a rain storm won’t have any negative effects on the bike!
Peak performance that you can really feel
A lot of electric bikes claim to have 750W motors, but that’s often a “peak rating”, meaning the motor is actually more like a 500W motor that is capable of short bursts of 750W. But with the Velotric Discover 2, you’re getting a true 750W continuous-rated motor. That means the peak rating is actually much higher, allowing the motor to do bursts of power up to 1,100W. For anyone who enjoys strong acceleration or needs to climb big hills, that’s the kind of power you want!
And speaking of hill climbing, the 75Nm of torque found in the motor is a big part of flattening those hills. While many electric bikes struggle to climb steeper hills, the Velotric Discover 2’s torquey motor eats hills for breakfast.
Don’t believe me? Consider that the Discover 2 is rated to tow 880 lb (400 kg) of weight, showcasing just how powerful it truly is!
Tested tougher than necessary
Standard e-bike torture tests usually involve loading a bike with a certain amount of weight on a test machine and then running it for a certain number of miles. But Velotric prefers to exceed those standards so that they know the bike can truly last longer than the competition.
The standard ISO-4210 testing protocol provides a series of tests to confirm the safety and robustness of a bike, but Velotric doesn’t use the normal values for the test. Instead, they increase them to 150% of the test standards, turning the torture test into an even more torturous test.
While nearly every other company settles for the minimum standard, Velotric voluntarily raises the bar to test their e-bikes at 50% tougher conditions. Not only does it result in stronger bikes designed to handle anything thrown their way, but it also speaks to the company’s ethos, designing and building e-bikes that riders can trust to overcome the unexpected.
More PAS levels for more pedaling options
Having a torque sensor is a nice feature, and the Discover 2’s torque sensor provides comfortable, responsive, and natural feeling pedal assist for riders who enjoy feeling like they’re part of the pedaling experience. But Velotric goes beyond merely including a torque sensor, and has included an unprecedented 15 levels of PAS (pedal assist system) settings, meaning riders will have a lot more variation to choose from. It’s all right there on the brightly-lit color LCD screen, making it easy to choose your optimum assist level.
Whether you’re looking for a relaxing and easy cruise along the beach or you want a fast workout ride that has you sweating by the end, you can find it in the Discover 2’s wide range of PAS levels. There are even other nice features like the included cruise control so you can set your desired speed and then forget about it!
Sure, it’s nice to have the throttle there for times when you just want to fly along without pedaling and quickly increase speed at a moment’s notice. But for the other times when an easy-going pedal ride is what you’re after, that torque sensor combined with the unprecedented 15 levels of pedal assist settings make the pedal experience so much nicer than any other commuter or recreational e-bike on the market.
Serious suspension designed with quality in mind
Quality suspension makes a major difference. If you’ve ever tested a budget bike with a loud, clickity-clackity front fork, you’ve experience cheap suspension. It doesn’t feel very good because it isn’t designed to truly absorb bumps and road vibration the way a true hydraulic suspension fork does.
The Velotric Discover 2 features a quality hydraulic suspension fork with 80 mm (over three inches) of travel. Whether you’re staring down a speed bump, pot hole, branch across the road, or any other obstacle in your path, this is the kind of suspension you want to actually protect your bike and body from the bruising bumps along the way.
Apple FindMy integration
In a perfect world, we’ve never need to worry about protecting our e-bikes from going missing. But until then, having a built-in tracking device is the best chance you’ll ever have of getting your e-bike back in a case of theft.
Apple’s FindMy technology is the leading low-cost tracking solution that uses a network of hundreds of millions of phones, computers, and other Apple products to wireless transmit AirTag tracker locations. Devices like the Velotric Discover 2, which have the hardware found in AirTags built into their own design, make use of that network to protect the device with constant tracking ability. We still recommend a good lock, but if your e-bike some how goes missing, the Apple FindMy technology included in Velotric’s e-bikes can show you or the police exactly where it’s now sitting.
Or, you know, you can also use it if you forget where you parked!
Attention to detail makes the difference
There is so much about an e-bike that impacts its ride and ownership experience. Power and speed are nice, but all the other little things truly affect how the bike feels, rides, and fits into your life.
Velotric obviously took the time to consider those important differences and design them into the Discover 2 and many of the company’s other new models of e-bikes. In the end, that makes a huge difference when comparison shopping between a field of electric bikes that all claim to offer similar speeds, power levels, and prices.
When it comes time to make a decision, the bikes that offer all the other features that improve longevity, comfort, safety, and security, those are the ones that truly stand out!
You can learn more at the company’s website and use the promo code electrekv1rv60 to get $60 off your new e-bike!
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Environment
Trump wants coal to power AI data centers. The tech industry may need to make peace with that for now
President Donald Trump wants to revive the struggling coal industry in the U.S. by deploying plants to power the data centers that the Big Tech companies are building to train artificial intelligence.
Trump issued an executive order in April that directed his Cabinet to find areas of the U.S. where coal-powered infrastructure is available to support AI data centers and determine whether the infrastructure can be expanded to meet the growing electricity demand from the nation’s tech sector.
Trump has repeatedly promoted coal as power source for data centers. The president told the World Economic Forum in January that he would approve power plants for AI through emergency declaration, calling on the tech companies to use coal as a backup power source.
“They can fuel it with anything they want, and they may have coal as a backup — good, clean coal,” the president said.
Trump’s push to deploy coal runs afoul of the tech companies’ environmental goals. In the short-term, the industry’s power needs may inadvertently be extending the life of existing coal plants.
Coal produces more carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt hour of power than any other energy source in the U.S. with the exception of oil, according to the Energy Information Administration. The tech industry has invested billions of dollars to expand renewable energy and is increasingly turning to nuclear power as a way to meet its growing electricity demand while trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that fuel climate change.
For coal miners, Trump’s push is a potential lifeline. The industry has been in decline as coal plants are being retired in the U.S. About 16% of U.S. electricity generation came from burning coal in 2023, down from 51% in 2001, according to EIA data.
Peabody Energy CEO James Grech, who attended Trump’s executive order ceremony at the White House, said “coal plants can shoulder a heavier load of meeting U.S. generation demands, including multiple years of data center growth.” Peabody is one of the largest coal producers in the U.S.
Grech said coal plants should ramp up how much power they dispatch. The nation’s coal fleet is dispatching about 42% of its maximum capacity right now, compared to a historical average of 72%, the CEO told analysts on the company’s May 6 earnings call.
“We believe that all coal-powered generators need to defer U.S. coal plant retirements as the situation on the ground has clearly changed,” Grech said. “We believe generators should un-retire coal plants that have recently been mothballed.”
Tech sector reaction
There is a growing acknowledgment within the tech industry that fossil fuel generation will be needed to help meet the electricity demand from AI. But the focus is on natural gas, which emits less half the CO2 of coal per kilowatt hour of power, according the the EIA.
“To have the energy we need for the grid, it’s going to take an all of the above approach for a period of time,” Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centers, said during a panel discussion at conference of tech and oil and gas executives in Oklahoma City last month.
“We’re not surprised by the fact that we’re going to need to add some thermal generation to meet the needs in the short term,” Miller said.
Thermal generation is a code word for gas, said Nat Sahlstrom, chief energy officer at Tract, a Denver-based company that secures land, infrastructure and power resources for data centers. Sahlstrom previously led Amazon’s energy, water and sustainability teams.
Executives at Amazon, Nvidia and Anthropic would not commit to using coal, mostly dodging the question when asked during the panel at the Oklahoma City conference.
“It’s never a simple answer,” Amazon’s Miller said. “It is a combination of where’s the energy available, what are other alternatives.”
Nvidia is able to be agnostic about what type of power is used because of the position the chipmaker occupies on the AI value chain, said Josh Parker, the company’s senior director of corporate sustainability. “Thankfully, we leave most of those decisions up to our customers.”
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said there are a broader set of options available than just coal. “We would certainly consider it but I don’t know if I’d say it’s at the top of our list.”
Sahlstrom said Trump’s executive order seems like a “dog whistle” to coal mining constituents. There is a big difference between looking at existing infrastructure and “actually building new power plants that are cost competitive and are going to be existing 30 to 40 years from now,” the Tract executive said.
Coal is being displaced by renewables, natural gas and existing nuclear as coal plants face increasingly difficult economics, Sahlstrom said. “Coal has kind of found itself without a job,” he said.
“I do not see the hyperscale community going out and signing long term commitments for new coal plants,” the former Amazon executive said. (The tech companies ramping up AI are frequently referred to as “hyperscalers.”)
“I would be shocked if I saw something like that happen,” Sahlstrom said.
Coal retirements strain grid
But coal plant retirements are creating a real challenge for the grid as electricity demand is increasing due to data centers, re-industrialization and the broader electrification of the economy.
The largest grid in the nation, the PJM Interconnection, has forecast electricity demand could surge 40% by 2039. PJM warned in 2023 that 40 gigawatts of existing power generation, mostly coal, is at risk of retirement by 2030, which represents about 21% of PJM’s installed capacity.
Data centers will temporarily prolong coal demand as utilities scramble to maintain grid reliability, delaying their decarbonization goals, according to a Moody’s report from last October. Utilities have already postponed the retirement of coal plants totaling about 39 gigawatts of power, according to data from the National Mining Association.
“If we want to grow America’s electricity production meaningfully over the next five or ten years, we [have] got to stop closing coal plants,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC’s “Money Movers” last month.
But natural gas and renewables are the future, Sahlstrom said. Some 60% of the power sector’s emissions reductions over the past 20 years are due to gas displacing coal, with the remainder coming from renewables, Sahlstrom said.
“That’s a pretty powerful combination, and it’s hard for me to see people going backwards by putting more coal into the mix, particularly if you’re a hyperscale customer who has net-zero carbon goals,” he said.
A federal court judge in Michigan has placed the once-promising electric truck brand Bollinger Motors’ assets into receivership following claims that the company’s owners still owe its founder, Robert Bollinger, more than $10 million.
Bollinger Motors first came to fame in the “draw a truck, get a billion dollars” stage of the EV revolution that saw Nikola rise to a higher market cap than Ford for a brief time. Robert Bollinger wasn’t able to capitalize quickly enough to get his trucks into production, though – and a late stage pivot to sell the brand to Mullen Automotive and launch a medium-duty commercial truck doesn’t appear to have been enough to save it.
Now, Automotive News is reporting on some of the more convoluted details of the Mullen purchase deal, with Robert (for ease of distinguishing the man from the brand) claiming that Mullen Automotive owes him more than $10 million for a loan he made to the company in 2024.
Just how Robert ended up giving Mullen Automotive $10 million to take his eponymous truck brand off his hands is probably one of those capitalistic mysteries that I’ll never understand, but Mullen’s response was perfectly clear: they didn’t even bother to show up to court.
Bollinger claims that at least two suppliers are also suing Mullen for unpaid debts. As such, the Honorable Terrence G. Berg has put the Bollinger brand into receivership, and its assets have been frozen in preparation for everything being liquidated. Worse, for Bollinger, the official court filings reveal a company that is really very much doing not awesome:
The testimony and evidence—which Defendant’s counsel conceded accurately reflected Defendant’s finances—showed that Defendant is in crisis. For months Defendant has owed more than twenty million dollars to suppliers, contractors, service providers, and owners of physical space. These debts are owed to parties who are critical for Defendant’s functioning. CEO Bryan Chambers testified that Defendant was locked out of its production facilities on May 5, 2025, and that the owner of the production facilities was seeking to permanently evict Defendant. The Court heard that Defendant had been prevented from accessing its critical manufacturing accounting system for a short time at the end of April 2025, before making a partial payment to restart services.
US DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN
I’m not sure if you caught all that, but Bollinger’s CEO has been locked out the company’s facilities and getting evicted, the company is more than $20 million in debt, and that debt is owed to people Bollinger absolutely needs in order to keep going.
You can read the full court decision, which I’ve embedded here, below. Once you’ve taken it all in, feel free to rush into the comments to say you told me so, since I really thought hoped the Bollinger B1 had a shot. Silly me.
Bollinger v. Bollinger case
SOURCES: Automotive News, Justia, Yahoo!.
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Mammoth Solar, a 1.3 gigawatt (GW) solar farm in northern Indiana, is now powering into its biggest construction phase yet, cementing its place as one of the largest solar projects in the US.
The solar farm is set to increase Indiana’s solar capacity by more than 20% once it’s fully online. And with construction ramping up this month, developer Doral Renewables has given Bechtel Full Notice to Proceed on the design, engineering, and construction of three major phases of the project: Mammoth South, Mammoth Central I, and Mammoth Central II. Together, these phases will generate 900 MW of clean energy.
That’s enough electricity to power around 200,000 homes with clean energy, helping Indiana shift away from fossil fuels while boosting the local economy.
Construction is already underway, and over the next two years, Bechtel will install around 2 million solar panels, with about half of them made in the US. The company is also handling all engineering, procurement, and construction work, using its digital project management tools and autonomous tech to keep everything on track.
At the peak of the buildout, Mammoth Solar is expected to create over 1,200 jobs, with at least 15% of those set aside for apprenticeships.
Bechtel says its success will hinge on strong collaboration with local trades and vendors. The company is working closely with craft professionals and is committed to being a reliable community partner throughout construction.
Once the solar farm is complete in 2027, Doral Renewables plans to roll out agrivoltaics across the site. That means livestock grazing and crop cultivation will happen right alongside energy production, giving farmers in the area a way to keep working their land while supporting clean energy development.
Read more: Solar adds more new capacity to the US grid in 2024 than any energy source in 20 years
If you live in an area that has frequent natural disaster events, and are interested in making your home more resilient to power outages, consider going solar and adding a battery storage system. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. They have hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisers to help you every step of the way. Get started here. –trusted affiliate link*
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