The sophisticated bicycle has attracted fans in Europe and the U.S., but repairs under warranty have bled the company of money.
A few canals away at a bike repair shop, Joram Hartogs says he refuses to repair VanMoofs, “because they’re impossible to repair.”
“They’re so sealed off with their own equipment that nobody else except them can fix it,” he says.
“All bike brands have a certain standard,” says Hartogs about VanMoof, “and they went around every standard that was available because they didn’t want to do anything with regular bike parts. So now they created everything themselves, and it keeps breaking because they wanted to over-design it.”
Sounds like it’s good that they went under. Nobody should support a manufacturer that does that.
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I mean… you can still use the pedals, right? 😁
Not necessarily, depending on how you’ve set it up, the bicycle has to connect to their servers to unlock. So if they shut down the servers, you can’t even use the pedals.
Here’s a video about it. (in German)
The more I hear about this company the more I am convinced that it deserved to die off.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot :D
Something similar happened last year. A company that made eye implants to help blind people see went bankrupt, and suddenly they weren’t around to repair/replace/remove the implants anymore.
Holy shit. That one lady was just walking around the New York subway and her eye implant went dark. That’s wild. Imagine if that happened to a wheelchair user, or someone with a prosthetic leg. Or an artificial internal organ! The company just shuts down and so do your body parts? Truly terrifying.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Ttbl6Jx4ltQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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*insert StarWars meme.
I thought they went a month or 2 ago ?
Feel sorry for owners but that is the price of being cool.
Feel sorry for owners but that is the price of being cool.
How often do we need to repeat that cycle of “Product needlessly locked in becomes useless because manufacturer goes bust” before people are surprised that it happens?
I’ve been recommending not to buy locked in shit for pretty much two decades now, and I’m still considered a nutjob for doing so. Only thing I have left for people stupid enough to buy into something like that is schadenfreude.
Contempt for the conman, compassion for the conned .
Reality is that the yahoos that jump on the latest trends probably won’t missthe money, and will still bore people a work talking tech, but stilll.
Seriously, seeing these proprietary locked down garbage products die the death they rightfully deserve makes me happy. Sucks that people lost their jobs, but there are other ebike companies that don’t make horribly anti-consumer garbage that they could work for. Shitty tech companies who prioritize anti-repair and lock-in strategies simply need to go away. It’s bad for consumers and it’s bad for the environment.
I don’t feel sorry for them. It was a stupid purchase.
Thanks Hugh
OK I’m totally out of my depth here but isn’t it an induction motor with a battery attached to it?
afaik, tyres and brakes are proprietary too
edit: nonstandard would be a better term
Yeah but the way the battery and electronics are integrated into the frame is probably the problem here
