Failed SONDORS Metacycle motorcycle was never street legal, reveals employee
A former SONDORS employee has revealed new details regarding the Metacycle electric motorcycle sold by the now-defunct SONDORS e-bike company, describing the project as “a freight train wreck turned into a dumpster fire.”
The Metacycle was the first motorcycle built and sold by SONDORS, a company that had previously built budget-priced electric bicycles.
The Metacycle made waves upon its unveiling in early 2021, both for its novel design and the shockingly low price for a supposedly highway-capable electric motorcycle at just US $5,000.
However, after a series of mismanagement issues and amid accusations of fraudulent business practices, the company was effectively closed and forced into receivership in late 2023. The closure occurred shortly after Electrek exposed the first images of warehouses full of thousands of SONDORS Metacycles sitting unpaid at the Chinese factory that had been contracted to build the bikes.
It is unclear how many Metacycles were delivered to customers, but import records put the number at likely between 1,400 to 1,500 units. At multiple points, SONDORS had claimed to have deposits or full pre-payments from customers for several thousand more Metacycle orders.
Former SONDORS Director of Project Management and Engineering Bill Ruehl recently shared a number of alarming revelations about both the bike and the company during an appearance on The ITC Show podcast.
Bill joined SONDORS after spending nearly 8 years at Zero Motorcycles, where he served as Director of Prototype and Test. His hiring came as SONDORS added several key additions from the automotive and motorcycling industries, including from companies such as Zero, Ducati, and Tesla.
Bill has a long history as an engineer working with electric motorcycle designs and a rider himself. While the Metacycle was already designed and had begun making deliveries before Bill joined the company, he explained that he quickly assumed a role that dealt in large part with solving the rapidly increasing issues discovered in the motorcycle.
“I took it upon myself to learn the nuances of this vehicle as quickly as I could,” Bill explained. “So it was regular calls with the factory. It was regular involvement in doing forensic involvement on failures, going to customers and looking at their problems.”
According to Bill, the issues proved to be widespread, covering everything from technical concerns to business practices and even road legality. On the technical side, the bike’s speed controller, which is essentially the brain of an electric motorcycle responsible for delivering power from the battery to the motor, would often fail due to poor components and construction. On the business side, the company had a tendency to skirt importation tariffs through improper classifications. And during homologation, major issues were overlooked that would render the bike non-street legal.
In the US, all motor vehicles operated on public roads must conform to regulations compiled in the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). Motorcycles have specific design requirements relating to their design, operation, and manufacturing.
The process of homologation refers to preparing and approving a vehicle to meet applicable regulations for sale in a certain market.
Unlike in Europe, the US does not have type approval, where the government or an appointed body inspects and certifies vehicles as road-worthy. Instead, the US uses a system known as self-certification, in which manufacturers are responsible for verifying that they have indeed met or exceeded federal regulations for homologation.
“If you don’t meet those requirements, basically you can’t sell your product for use on US roads, so it becomes unregisterable,” Bill explained. “And there were a lot of issues with the Metacycle. In fact, if you were to hold a gun to my head and ask me if it was legitimately homologated, it was not. There were shortcuts that were taken. The biggest one of these is that the braking system, by FMVSS definition, is not suitable for a vehicle called a ‘motorcycle’ on US roads.”
Bill explained that each time he attempted to raise these concerns, he was pushed aside. “I was told to be quiet, and not repeat this anymore.”
While many riders were able to register their Metacycles at their local DMVs, this was not always straightforward or even possible. Several states would not allow the motorcycles to be registered. And even for those that were registered successfully, the registration is not an indication that the vehicle is actually street legal, but merely that the DMV permitted the application to be processed. Several riders reported having to make multiple attempts on successive days before a DMV worker accepted and filed their registration application.
Another key issue the Metacycle encountered was a high controller failure rate due to poor MOSFET selection and implementation, which Bill attributed to cost-saving measures at the controller manufacturer. The failure tends to occur under heavy loading, such as hill climbing and other high-power scenarios.
The problem doesn’t affect all Metacycles and depends on how well the multiple MOSFET chips in the controller are paired to each other, which is essentially random luck without a process for evaluation during the controller manufacturing stage.
“There are good Metacycles out there. I’m not trying to say that all Metacycles are bad and all Metacycles have this controller issue, but many of them do,” he added.
Bill had choice words for several other components on the bike, including the Metacycle’s security system.
“Honestly, I believe that the security system they used on the Metacycle was probably the worst thing ever unleashed on the American public.”
Bill attributed the many problems at SONDORS to its leadership, namely the company’s founder and CEO Storm Sondors.
“I will say there were a lot of people behind the scenes at SONDORS who were really trying hard to make a difference. They were not all Storm. But the problem is when you have an individual like Storm at the head of a company like that, the lies and the BS trickle down.”
After SONDORS closed and the company entered receivership, Bill decided to put his experience with the bike to use in helping owners who need support or spare parts. He now consults by appointment and is currently working with the former Metacycle factory in China to hopefully provide original Metacycle equipment to owners.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
A worker repairs a power line in Austin, Texas, U.S., on Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2021.
Thomas Ryan Allison | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The rapid expansion of data centers in Texas is driving electricity demand higher during the winter, compounding the risk of supply shortfalls that could lead to blackouts during freezing temperatures.
The Lone Star state is attracting a huge amount of data center requests, driven by its abundant renewable energy and natural gas resources as well as its business friendly environment. OpenAI, for example, is developing its flagship Stargate campus in Abilene, about 150 miles west of Dallas-Forth Worth. The campus could require up to 1.2 gigawatts of power, the equivalent of a large nuclear plant.
The North American Electric Relibaility Corporation warned this week that data centers’ round-the-clock energy consumption will make it more difficult to sustain sufficient electricity supply under extreme demand conditions during freezing temperatures like catastropic Winter Storm Uri in 2021.
“Strong load growth from new data centers and other large industrial end users is driving higher winter electricity demand forecasts and contributing to continued risk of supply shortfalls,” NERC said of Texas in an analysis published Tuesday. Texas faces elevated risk during extreme winter weather, but the state’s grid is reliable during normal peak demand, NERC said.
During Uri, demand spiked for home heating in response to the freezing temperatures at the same time power plants failed in large numbers due to the same weather. Texas grid operator ERCOT ordered 20 gigawatts of rolling blackouts to prevent the system from collapsing, according to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report. The majority of the power plants went offline ran on natural gas.
It was the “largest manually controlled load shedding event in U.S. history” resulting 4.5 million people losing power for several days. At least 210 people died during the storm. Most of the fatalities were connected to the outages and included cases of hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, and medical conditions exacerbated by freezing termperatures, according to FERC.
Data center requests surge
In the years since Uri, Texas has received a staggering amount of requests from data centers, crypto mining facilities and industrial customers seeking a grid conenction. More than 220 gigawatts of projects have requested connection as of this month, a 170% increase over the 83 gigawatts of project requests back in January, according to data published Wednesday by ERCOT.
About 73% of the projects requesting connection are data centers, according to ERCOT.
If all of those projects were actually built, they would be equivalent to the average annual power consumption of nearly 154 million homes in Texas, according to a CNBC analysis based on 2024 household electricity data. But the Lone Star state only has a population of about 30 million people.
Beth Garza, a former head of ERCOT’s watchdog, said she is very skeptical these projects will all get built, describing the scale of the numbers as “crazy big.” More than half the projects have not submitted planning studies, according to ERCOT.
“There’s not enough stuff to serve that much load on the equipment side or the consumption side,” said Garza, who served as director of ERCOT’s Independent Market Monitor from 2014 through 2019. “There’s just so much stuff in the world to make those kinds of numbers work.”
Phantom data centers are showing up in grid connection requests across the U.S. as developers shop the same projects around to mutliple jurisdictions, said John Moura, the director of NERC’s reliability assessments. This makes it difficult for utilities to forecast future demand conditions.
Reliability at risk
The projects that ERCOT has approved to actually connect to the grid is much smaller at 7.5 gigawatts, but this is still a subsantial amount of new demand. By comparison, the six county region in southeastern Pennsylvania that includes Philadelphia, with a population of 1.7 million people, had a peak demand of about 8.6 gigwatts in 2024, according to the state utility board.
Texas’ supply and demand balance can become tight during winter and potentially fall into deficit. The state has 92.6 gigawatts of available resources and peak demand in an extreme Uri-like scenario could reach about 85.3 gigawatts, according to NERC.
But avalaible power could fall to around 69.7 gigawatts in extreme winter weather, leaving a supply deficit of more than 15 gigawatts. This is due to typical power plant maintainence and forced plant outages as well as reductions in power capacity due to winter conditions.
“What’s important to understand is the tightness we’re seeing,” Moura said. NERC’s winter assessment only included data center facilities that have reached certain milestones to filter out speculative projects, he said.
“I can’t stress enough how much of a monumental change this is for the electric industry,” Moura said of the data center requests. One solution is for data centers to show flexibility in their electricity consumption to help keep demand and supply in balance during extreme winter scenarios, he said.
In the case of Uri, natural gas plants made up 58% of all the unplanned outages in Texas, according to FERC. Freezing tempartures reduced gas production, led to challenges delivering fuel and problems transmitting electricity as power lines fell.
Texas has adopted rules to harden natural gas infrastructure for extreme winters in the wake of the storm.
When gas plants go out in such a large way, solar and battery storage also face challenges, according to NERC. Peak demand in winter is in the early morning hours when sunlight is lower and batteries may not have had enough time recharge, Moura said.
With data centers running around the clock, “maintaining sufficient battery state of charge will become increasingly challenging for extended periods of high loads, such as a severe multi-day storm like Winter Storm Uri,” NERC said in its analysis.
“Power shortfalls and rolling outages really could happen in the next few years in certain regions” of the U.S. as demand from facilities like data centers outstrips supply, said Rob Gramlich, president of power consulting firm Grid Strategies. “Those are unacceptable to everybody in the United States.”
Garza said she’s confident that the reliable demand from data centers will bring new supply. “Plants love that kind of of opportunity,” she said. “My expectation is that then attracts additional private capital investment to meet those supply needs.”
Environment
Activist Ananym Capital sees upside if Baker Hughes spins off its oilfield services business
First Solar just cut the ribbon on a huge new factory in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, and it dwarfs the New Orleans Superdome. The company’s $1.1 billion, fully vertically integrated facility spans 2.4 million square feet, or about 11 times the size of the stadium’s main arena.
The factory began production quietly in July, a few months ahead of schedule, and employs more than 700 people. First Solar expects that number to hit 826 by the end of the year. Once it’s fully online, the site will add 3.5 GW of annual manufacturing capacity. That brings the company’s total US footprint to 14 GW in 2026 and 17.7 GW in 2027, when its newly announced South Carolina plant is anticipated to come online.
The Louisiana plant produces First Solar’s Series 7 modules using US-made materials — glass from Illinois and Ohio, and steel from Mississippi, which is fabricated into backrails in Louisiana.
The new factory leans heavily on AI, from computer vision that spots defects on the line to deep learning tools that help technicians make real‑time adjustments.
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry says the investment is already a win for the region, bringing in “hundreds of good-paying jobs and new opportunities for Louisiana workers and businesses.” A new economic impact analysis from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette projects that the factory will boost Iberia Parish’s GDP by 4.4% in its first full year at capacity. The average manufacturing compensation package comes in at around $90,000, more than triple the parish’s per capita income.
First Solar CEO Mark Widmar framed the new facility as a major step for US clean energy manufacturing: “By competitively producing energy technology in America with American materials, while creating American jobs, we’re demonstrating that US reindustrialization isn’t just a thesis, it’s an operating reality.”
This site joins what’s already the largest solar manufacturing and R&D footprint in the Western Hemisphere: three factories in Ohio, one in Alabama, and R&D centers in Ohio and California. Just last week, First Solar announced a new production line in Gaffney, South Carolina, to onshore more Series 6 module work. By the end of 2026, the company expects to directly employ more than 5,500 people across the US.
Read more: First Solar pours $330M into a new South Carolina solar factory
If you’re looking to replace your old HVAC equipment, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you’re finding a trusted, reliable HVAC installer near you that offers competitive pricing on heat pumps, check out EnergySage. EnergySage is a free service that makes it easy for you to get a heat pump. They have pre-vetted heat pump installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high quality solutions. Plus, it’s free to use!
Your personalized heat pump 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. – *ad
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment3 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024