Here’s what to expect when Lectric XP 4.0 e-bike becomes next best-seller in the US
Lectric Ebikes has long set the standard for other companies to follow in the budget electric bicycle space, continuously rolling out new models that offer never-before-seen value. A new cargo e-bike with more features? They did it. A new off-roader with better components? They did that, too. But what about the company’s best-selling model, the Lectric XP 3.0 folding fat tire e-bike? It’s due for an update, and here’s what you can expect.
Believe it or not, it’s been over two years since the Lectric XP 3.0 was launched in early November 2022. That model has since dominated the industry, giving riders with an under $1,000 budget better bang-for-their-buck than ever before as it rose to the top of the US bestselling e-bikes list.
With 28 mph (45 km/h) speeds, hydraulic disc brakes, suspension, built-in rear rack, heavy-duty cargo/passenger capabilities, and multiple battery sizes, it’s become the go-to $999 electric bike for thousands of new riders every month. It’s even a personal favorite of mine. I’ve put my family members on XP 3.0s, I’ve bought multiple XP 3.0s to donate to the underprivileged, and it’s the model I chose when I went undercover as a food delivery worker to see the world through e-bike couriers’ eyes.
But nothing lasts forever, and two years is a long time in the electric bicycle industry. We don’t yet know quite when a Lectric XP 4.0 will come to replace the US’ current best-selling electric bike model, but you’d better believe that Lectric’s designers in Phoenix have been whiteboarding ideas for a while now. And I’d bet dollars to donuts that these are some of those ideas.
Upgrades in component quality
With every new launch this year, we’ve watched Lectric eBikes flex its purchasing power by bringing us higher quality components than we deserve at these price levels. The XPeak routinely gets oddly high-tier forks. The Lectric One received a transmission that probably costs as much as the whole bike if you were to try to buy it retail. And the Lectric XP Lite 2.0 offers a Gates belt drive for under $900. This is all absurd, or at least it used to be until Lectric started waving its wallet around at the offices of higher-end component makers that aren’t used to seeing customers in this affordable price range.
That means the Lectric XP 4.0 is likely to benefit from that same purchasing power. I can foresee major upgrades including a higher-end suspension fork, better hydraulic disc brakes, and likely even a torque sensor for improved pedal assist. I don’t imagine the derailleur will make a huge jump in quality (maybe just an 8-speed Shimano Tourney?), but a color screen is likely in the cards, as are nicer bolt-on grips and other comfort enhancements. We may even see better suspension seat posts and nicer tires.
But for the love of all things holy in this world, if those do-gooders on Utopia Rd even think about touching that right side half-twist throttle, then by the beard of Zeus we’re going to have words…
More power?
There’s a real chance that the XP 4.0 could be more powerful, especially since Lectric has become quite fond of its M24 electric motor, which has graced models like the XPeak 2.0 and XPedition 2.0. That 750W motor puts out just over 1,300W of actual electrical power, due in no small part to Lectric’s assistance on using higher current electronic speed controllers than most of its competitors.
In fact, the Lectric XP 3.0 is probably the most powerful “500W” e-bike around right now, but that doesn’t mean it will always remain in the five hundred club.
A power increase isn’t a given, and Lectric may still reserve that higher-power motor for its more premium models. After all, they can’t just give us all the good stuff at such a low price. Or can they?
No price change
Speaking of price change, I find it incredibly hard to believe that the XP 4.0 would launch at anything other than US $999. Lectric has only ever changed the price of this model once, increasing it from the original $899 of the XP 1.0 to the $999 of the XP 2.0. Ever since, they’ve steered clear of price increases on the XP line.
Lectric’s Co-founder and CEO Levi Conlow recently explained at the Micromobility America 2024 conference that whenever the company’s increasing efficiency causes the margins to creep “too high” (a foreign concept to most brands), they either lower the price or release a new version of the bike with more features. And so that’s likely exactly what the 4.0 will prove to be – another $999 e-bike, but this time with even more features.
Design and build
I don’t expect we’ll see any huge design changes to the structure of the bike. Sure, there will be a new frame. But I expect the company to retain the same boxy tube structure they’ve used ever since the brand’s first XP bike rolled out in late 2019. They even use it on their XPedition cargo bike despite there being no real reason for it (the batteries aren’t housed inside the frame) other than design continuity with the Lite, XP, and XP Trike lines.
What we are likely to see in the design department are minor updates for improved strength and ruggedness. Lectric has been investing more heavily in third-party certifications, including both structural frame testing and electronic certifications like UL compliance. That’s likely to continue with the XP 4.0, meaning we could see improved certification indicating even more confidence in the bike’s ability to haul cargo and passengers.
The color scheme is unlikely to change heavily. Black and white have been the XP’s MO for years now, and even that’s an improvement from when they were only available in white. We’ve of course seen splashes of Lectric’s blue accent color on most of the brand’s models, and the XP 4.0 is unlikely to be different in that regard. But expect it to be more along the lines of the new XPedition 2.0’s color swatch design, not a radical color departure.
Fancy features?
This one is a bit of a wild card, and I don’t expect Lectric to go overly nuts with fancy features. I don’t think we’re going to be getting any crazy phone apps or wireless charging through the kickstand anytime soon. But we just might see the inclusion of value-added features like tracking for anti-theft.
This could be done fairly easily through the use of existing technology like the Apple FindMy network – something that Lectric’s competitor Velotric has leveraged beautifully. Such a feature would likely add little cost but could be of major value. In fact, I recently tried to plant that exact bug in Lectric Co-founder Robby Deziel’s ear. Robby has been wrist-deep in the design of these e-bikes since as early as 2019, when he personally helped me with the wiring on one of the first Lectric XPs ever. So let’s see if he listens on the integrated tracker idea.
When is the Lectric XP 4.0 coming?
I pride myself in having a bit of a crystal ball for the electric bike industry, but even I have no idea when Lectric is planning on releasing the XP 4.0. From everything I can gather, it’s not imminent.
I may have teased you with all the cool things Lectric could do on XP 4.0, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing any of those updates anytime soon.
Suffice it to say that if you’ve been wanting to join in on the XP fun and somehow you’re one of the few Americans who doesn’t yet have an XP 3.0, that’s still a killer e-bike for an amazing $999 price. One day the XP 4.0 will likely make us all “ooh” and “ahh” again, but it doesn’t appear to be in the cards yet.
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In a high-tech move that we can all get behind and isn’t dystopian at all, the City of Barcelona is feeding camera data from its city buses into an advanced AI, but they swear they’re not using the footage to to issue tickets to bad drivers. Yet.
Barcelona and its Ring Roads Low Emission Zone have earned lots of fans by limiting ICE traffic in the city’s core. The city’s latest idea to promote mass transit is the deployment of an artificial intelligence system developed by Hayden AI for automatic enforcement of reserved lanes and stops to improve bus circulation – but while it seems to be working as intended, it’s raising entirely different questions.
“Bus lanes are designed to help deliver reliable, fast, and convenient public transport service. But private vehicles illegally using bus lanes make this impossible,” explains Laia Bonet, First Deputy Mayor, Area for Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing at the Ajuntament de Barcelona. “We are excited to partner with Hayden AI to learn where these problems occur and how they are impacting our public transport service.”
Currently operating as a pilot program on the city’s H12 and D20 bus lines, the system uses cameras installed on the city’s electric buses to detect vehicles that commit static violations in the bus lanes and stops (read: stopping or parking where you shouldn’t). The Hayden AI system then analyses that data and provides statistical information on what it captures while the bus is driving along on its daily route.
Hayden AI says that, while it photographs and records video sequences and collects contextual information of the violation, its cameras do not record license plates or people and no penalties are being issued to drivers or owners of the vehicles.
So far so good, right? But it’s what happens once the six mont pilot is over that seems like it should be setting off alarm bells.
Big Brother Bus is watching
The footage is manually reviewed by a Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) officer, who reportedly reviewed some 2,500 violations identified by AI in May alone. But, while the system isn’t being used to issue violations during the pilot program, it easily could.
And, in fact, it already has … and the AI f@#ked up royally.
AI writes thousands of bad tickets
When AI was given the ability to issue citations in New York City earlier this year, it wrote more than 290,000 tickets (that’s right: two-hundred and ninety thousand) in just three months, generating nearly $21 million in revenue for the city. The was just one problem: thousands of those drivers weren’t doing anything wrong.
What’s more, the photos generated by the AI powered cameras were supposed to be approved only after being verified by a human, but either that didn’t happen, or it did happen and the human operator in question wasn’t paying attention, or (maybe the worst possibility) the violations were mistakes or hallucinations, and the human checker couldn’t tell the difference.
In OpenAI’s tests of its newest o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, the company found the o3 model hallucinated 33% of the time during its PersonQA tests, in which the bot is asked questions about public figures. When asked short fact-based questions in the company’s SimpleQA tests, OpenAI said o3 hallucinated 51% of the time. The o4-mini model fared even worse: It hallucinated 41% of the time during the PersonQA test and 79% of the time in the SimpleQA test, though OpenAI said its worse performance was expected as it is a smaller model designed to be faster. OpenAI’s latest update to ChatGPT, GPT-4.5, hallucinates less than its o3 and o4-mini models. The company said when GPT-4.5 was released in February the model has a hallucination rate of 37.1% for its SimpleQA test.
I don’t know about you guys, but if we had a local traffic cop that got it wrong 33% of the time (at best), I’d be surprised if they kept their job for very long. But AI? AI has a multibillion dollar hype train and armies of undereducated believers talking about singularities and building themselves blonde robots with boobs. And once the AI starts issuing tickets to the AI that’s driving your robotaxi, it can just call its buddy AI the bank to send over your money. No human necessary, at any point, and the economy keeps on humming.
But, like – I’m sure that’s fine. Embrace the future and all that … right?
SOURCES: Hayden AI, via Forbes, Motorpasión.
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A new report from global energy think tank Ember says batteries have officially hit the price point that lets solar power deliver affordable electricity almost every hour of the year in the sunniest parts of the world.
The study looked at hourly solar data from 12 cities and found that in sun-soaked places like Las Vegas, you could pair 6 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels with 17 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of batteries and get a steady 1 GW of power nearly 24/7. The cost? Just $104 per megawatt-hour (MWh) based on average global prices for solar and batteries in 2024. That’s a 22% drop in a year and cheaper than new coal ($118/MWh) and nuclear ($182/MWh) in many regions.
Ember calls it “24/365 solar generation,” and it’s not just a theoretical model. Cities like Muscat, Oman, and Las Vegas can hit that steady power mark for up to 99% of the hours in a year. Hyderabad, Madrid, and Buenos Aires can reach 80–95% of the way there using that same solar-plus-storage setup with some cloud cover. And even cloudier cities like Birmingham in the UK can cover about 62% of hours annually.
“This is a turning point in the clean energy transition,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global electricity analyst at Ember. “Around-the-clock solar is no longer a distant dream; it’s an economic reality of the world. It unlocks game-changing opportunities for energy-hungry industries like data centres and manufacturing.”
This is an enormous opportunity for sunny regions in Africa and Latin America. Manufacturers and data centers could also tap into solar-plus-storage and skip long waits (and big bills) for new grid connections.
It’s not a silver bullet for grid-wide reliability, but it lets solar carry much more of the load, especially where sunshine is abundant. Batteries also help avoid costly grid expansions by allowing up to five times more solar to plug into existing connections.
In 2024 alone, global battery prices dropped 40%, which helped drive down solar-plus-storage costs by 22%. Record-low tenders from countries like Saudi Arabia point to even cheaper options coming soon.
Real-world projects are already online: The UAE built the world’s first gigawatt-scale 24-hour solar facility. Arizona is already home to solar-powered data centers. And as battery tech keeps improving, round-the-clock solar could become the backbone of clean energy systems in the world’s sunniest places.
Read more: This solar canopy cools wastewater and powers a city utility
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The Honda Prologue continues to surprise, ranking among the top ten most leased vehicles (gas-powered or EV) in the US in the first quarter. It was the only EV, outside of Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3, that made the list.
Honda Prologue EV ranks among most leased vehicles
After launching the Prologue in the US last March, Honda’s electric SUV took off. In the second half of the year, it was the second-best-selling electric SUV, trailing only the Tesla Model Y.
The Prologue remains a top-selling EV in the US this year, with over 13,500 units sold through May. That’s not too bad, considering it only sold 705 through May of last year.
According to a new Experian report (via Automotive News), Honda’s success is being driven by ultra-affordable lease rates. In the first quarter, nearly 60% of new EV buyers in the US chose to lease, up from just 36% a year ago.
Three EVs ranked in the top ten most leased vehicles, including the Tesla Model Y, Model 3, and Honda Prologue.
Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3 took the top two spots, while the Honda Prologue ranked number seven. Those who leased Tesla’s Model 3 paid $402 per month, Honda Prologue lessees paid $486 a month.
Given the average loan rate was $708 a month for those who bought it, it’s no wonder nearly 90% chose to lease. Under 9% chose to buy, while less than 2% paid cash.
The discounts are piling up, but for how long?
To give you a better idea, the average monthly payment for a new vehicle lease in the US in the first quarter was $595.
With over $20,000 in discounts, Honda’s luxury Acura brand is selling a surprising number of EVs in the US. The nearly $65,000 Acura ZDX is sold for under $40,000 on average in May, according to Cox Automotive’s EV Market Monitor report for May.
The trend is primarily thanks to the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which is being passed on to customers through leasing.
With the Trump administration and Senate Republicans aiming to kill off federal subsidies, the savings could soon disappear. If the Senate’s recently proposed bill is passed, the $7,500 credit would expire within 180 days. It would not only make electric vehicles more expensive, but it would also put the US further behind China and others leading the shift to electrification.
Some automakers, including GM, are expected to continue offering the incentives. “GM has been very competitive on the incentives on their end, and that is not scheduled to end.”
After outselling Ford, GM’s Chevy is now the fastest-growing EV brand in the US through May. Chevy is starting to chip away at Tesla’s lead, largely thanks to the new Equinox EV, or “America’s most affordable +315 range EV,” as GM calls it.
According to Xperian, those who leased a new Chevy Equinox EV in Q1 paid $243 less than those who financed it. The electric Equinox stood out in Cox Automotive’s EV Market Monitor report with an average selling price under $40,000, even without incentives.
The Chevy Equinox EV remains one of the most affordable EVs on the market. Starting at just $34,995, the base LT FWD model offers an EPA-estimated range of 319 miles.
Looking to test out some of the most popular EVs for yourself? With Honda Prologue leases as low as $259 per month and Chevy Equinox EV leases starting at just $289 per month, the deals are hard to pass up right now while the incentives are still here. You can use our links below to find models in your area.
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