Andrew Schnell, a sales employee at the bike shop, says he thinks they’ve been able to hone in on an important market of people who want functional, non-luxury electric bikes at an affordable price.īut the downside to Rad Power’s business model is that customers have to figure a lot out by themselves. (According to Rad Power’s website, local mobile bike repair service Velofix is still available to help.) This has left some bike shops in a lurch.Įmployees at the The eBike Store in the Piedmont Neighborhood express skepticism about direct-to-consumer electric bike companies like Rad Power. They used to operate a mobile repair service in some other cities, including Portland, so people could get help directly from Rad Power, but they cancelled that program a few months before the big sale. Rad Power is based out of Seattle, and they have brick-and-mortar service centers in some other cities in the United States and Canada (but not in Portland).

The popularity of such programs in places like Colorado has shown that people are interested in buying e-bikes at reduced rates and once they have the bikes, they often become game-changers for reducing their car use.īut Dagny’s experience made me wonder if there are more people who have had trouble with their new Rad Power bikes and how local bike shops are dealing with it.

Some e-bike advocates saw the success of this sale as an indication that there’s a demand for electric bikes that should be met with more rebate programs. One particularly exciting anecdote was from someone who said that the person who delivered their bike was so inspired by all the boxes of bikes he was delivering that he decided to get one for himself. On my own Twitter feed, I heard dozens of accounts of people buying their first electric bikes because of this sale. The e-bike company’s recent sale was very popular – turns out, $500 e-bikes sell like hotcakes. Right now, the bike is sitting in our basement waiting for someone to figure out what went wrong and get it back in commission.ĭagny isn’t the only person who just bought a Rad Power bike. (No, it wasn’t dead.) Eventually, we got it going again, but only briefly before it puttered out once more and she had to ride to back without any electric assistance or lights. Dagny and I were riding with a group of other people on bikes deep in the north Portland peninsula this past weekend when all the sudden, the lights on her bike turned off and the pedal-assist stopped working. When the bike came, Dagny put it together and charged it up, excited to hit the bike path.īut she’d only had it for a few days when the honeymoon period ended. My roommate and friend Dagny Daniel was in the market for an electric bike, and when she saw Rad Power Bikes was selling their entry-level e-bike for a $500 ($700 lower than its usual price), she jumped at the opportunity to buy it. It’ll all get sorted out eventually, but there will be a lot of heartbreak in the process.” – Andrew Schnell, The eBike Store

Dagny and her e-bike during the halcyon days.

Rad electric bikes stock