An early pioneer in the North American electric bicycle market, Juiced Bikes appears to be in collapse. According to many customers, the San Diego-based e-bike company has largely ghosted them and failed to respond to repeated customer service inquiries. At the same time, the company’s website is out of stock on all products and its assets appear headed for auction.

There’s no confirmation from the company, but several signs are pointing toward financial distress and a likely closure of the company.

Juiced Bikes is one of the oldest continuously operating e-bike brands in the country. I’m something of a dinosaur of the industry, and even when I got involved with e-bikes back in 2010, Juiced was already a major player (albeit known as Juiced Riders back then).

The company pioneered electric cargo and utility e-bikes in the US with its ODK model, launched a decade before the popular RadRunner. The brand then continued to evolve, becoming one of the first to offer higher-speed and higher-power models for adventurous riders.

But now the brand appears to be in deep enough financial distress to potentially lead to a closure of the company, and radio silence from the brand has only stoked the rumor mill.

Social media is full of customers complaining about a lack of communication from the company. Several have shared instances of their bikes being stuck in service limbo while the company has broken off communications about their repairs or return schedule for the bikes.

Others have shared instances of purchases that have gone unfulfilled for months.

“$2k out for a bike ordered in July, and which I canceled in September after getting continually fed a line about shipping delays,” explained one user on Reddit. “Filed a dispute with my bank but still waiting.”

Juiced Bikes’ website is still operating, yet all of the company’s many e-bike models are currently listed as out of stock.

I’ve reached out to several leaders at the company but have yet to receive an official comment on the brand’s status.

Despite a lack of clarity from the company, the latest development in Juiced’s potential financial collapse saga appears to have sealed the deal, so to speak. The company’s assets are now showing up on an auction house platform commonly used for companies that have gone out of business.

Everything from the company’s existing inventory of products and its tooling in China to its intellectual property rights appears to be listed for sale at auction. Even the company’s Sprinter cargo van with Juiced Bikes branding is up for sale.

The last few years have been a tough period for the electric bike industry. Following the massive wave of e-bike sales in the post-pandemic period, the market cooled significantly leaving many e-bike makers with huge overstock situations.

Venture capital funding also began drying up after the easy money period following the pandemic, further crunching many e-bike companies.

At the same time, dozens of new Chinese-based electric bike brands have opened their doors in an attempt to snag a piece of the massive e-bike pie, often dangling enticingly low prices that several of the US-based brands couldn’t compete with. Leaders in the US budget e-bike market, such as Lectric Ebikes, have further squeezed competitors with aggressive pricing that has helped scoop up massive market share.

We’ve already seen several other large e-bike companies go under in the last year, including SONDORS in the US and VanMoof in Europe. If Juiced Bikes is headed for the same ending, it is unlikely to be the last.

Electrek’s Take

While there’s still no official word from the company, at this point, it appears that Juiced Bikes’ closure is a foregone conclusion. With its assets up for auction, there doesn’t appear to be an endgame for the company as we know it.

This is truly a sad event for the industry and just another reminder that we’re in a reckoning period for the hundreds of e-bike companies all competing for the same customers. Every year there are more e-bikes on the road than ever before, yet the meteoric growth of the post-pandemic years obviously wasn’t sustainable. Just like the American automotive industry eventually pared down the hundred or so car companies in business a century ago, the e-bike market is likely headed in a similar direction.

This is also uniquely painful for Juiced’s customers who have been left waiting for bikes they ordered or hoping to receive service on the products they already own. Fortunately, someone at Juiced appears to have set the website’s inventory to zero to prevent phantom sales that would likely never be delivered, but that doesn’t help those already left out to dry.

If there’s any room for hope, it’s that this doesn’t necessarily mean there is no future for Juiced Bikes. The brand and its assets could still be purchased by an investor or company hoping to revive the e-bike brand. If so, this doesn’t have to be the last mile marker on Juiced’s 15-year-long ride.

Manage push notifications

Tesla held its Robotaxi event tonight to introduce a whole new vehicle that will function exclusively as a driverless vehicle. But in addition to the Robotaxi, it also unveiled another robo-vehicle – an autonomous van that can be used for either 20-person mass transit or for cargo hauling tasks.

The “We, Robot” event was primarily expected to focus on the upcoming 2-seat Robotaxi, with an expected update on Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot.

We got updates on both of those, with Robotaxis shuttling passengers around the Warner Bros. backlot where the event was held, and Optimus robots serving drinks and handing out goodie bags to attendees.

But another rumor was about a potential “Robovan.” We talked about this briefly before the event in our Electrek watch party, and there have been various rumors for years, with Tesla supposedly making a 12-passenger van for Boring Co. tunnels and seeing a leak of a peoplemover prototype in recent years.

And today we saw the first glimpse of what the final version might feel like, as it pulled up and emptied several occupants during the event.

We didn’t get much information about the van, except that it will be capable of carrying 20 people (though the above photos show only 14 seats), or also be capable of carrying cargo. The configuration we saw was the people-carrying version, and Tesla has put up several photos on its website to see what the interior of the van might look like.

These are just the passenger configuration – we don’t have any photos of the cargo configuration yet. Although the passenger configuration looks to have significant cargo space available (this could certainly be useful for something like an airport shuttle).

Tesla CEO Elon Musk stated that the Robotaxi would be able to get the cost of transport down to around 20 cents a mile, but that the Robovan would take that even further, down to 5-10 cents a mile.

A vehicle like this could be useful for shuttle routes that need frequent pickups (like airport or student shuttles), for municipalities that don’t have enough ridership for a normal 80-passenger bus, and of course for city last-mile delivery in a cargo configuration.

Musk also repeated his line that “the future should look like the future,” which is certainly apparent in the design of the Robovan, which looks kind of familiar…

The design of the Robovan is certainly quite out-there, but given Tesla’s history with out-there concepts, it might actually come to fruition in a state somewhat like this.

However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a change in ground clearance. It seems doubtful that the perhaps ~1-2 inch ground clearance on the demo vehicle will be particularly useful on city roads….

Unlike the Robotaxi, Tesla did not share a launch date for the Robovan. While Musk said the Robotaxi would be available in the next two years, he gave no date for the Robovan.

Electrek’s Take

One thing that the Robotaxi has been criticized for is its number of seats. While 2 seats is enough for a lot of driving tasks, you’re not going to be able to bring a whole family, or a bunch of friends, etc.

And adding a bunch of 2-seat cars to the road does nothing to reduce congestion, because we’ll still end up with about the same average vehicle occupancy as we have right now – or maybe even less occupancy because you wouldn’t have the occasional 3-5 person vehicle. Which could even mean more congestion.

But the Robovan offers the promise of being able to carry an actual significant number of people, and with its larger capacity, deadhead miles might be reduced as well because it could run hop-on hop-off routes.

I could certainly see this running on any number of smaller shuttle routes that would benefit from frequent pickups. There’s a summer shuttle where I grew up in California which just runs people to and from the beach to help alleviate parking issues, and this would be perfect for that. Or how about the new electric shuttles at Zion National Park.

But like every Tesla promise, this one needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

After all, Tesla plans to change the world in 6 huge ways next year already (Robotaxi, Semi, an affordable EV, next-gen Roadster, unsupervised FSD, and Optimus), and now we have yet another unreleased product to add to that pile. And most of those existing ones have been pushed back multiple times. I guess at least Robovan can’t be pushed back, if it doesn’t have a date yet to begin with.

Tesla also showed a vision of the future it wants tonight, with parks taking the place of parking lots in various urban settings.

Which is all well and good, except that the CEO who presented this vision has recently donated $180 million to a candidate who wants to harm EVs, and who just today said he is “concerned” about autonomous vehicles and would ban some of them from the road if he wins. Odd horse to hitch yourself to, really.

As for the Robovan, we only saw it pull up and park, it didn’t shuttle people around during the night, beyond the initial pul up. The Robotaxi was at least driving people around, albeit in a heavily mapped area at low speeds, rather than in a real world situation with all the unexpected nonsense that comes up.

Funny thing though, I actually think the Robovan might be more possible than Robotaxi from an autonomy perspective, because these sorts of vehicles are more likely to run a set route, and thus can have a more limited operational space which is easier to program for. So it almost seems like it could/should come sooner than Robotaxi, which will need to essentially be SAE level 5 capable (whereas a set route would definitionally be level 4).

And if it does happen (again, big grains of salt here), the more mass-transit-focused nature of this is more exciting to me than Robotaxi. We have to cut congestion and sprawl, so having vehicles that can help to enable this is quite important. For certain cities, where subways or light rail are unfeasible for whatever reason, a mid-size electric shuttle like this could be a fantastic way to clean up the roads.

Now, let’s see if it ever happens…..