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Parents Are Accidentally Buying Their Kids Electric Motorcycles Instead Of E-Bikes
(www.jalopnik.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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micromobility - Bikes, scooters, boards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
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Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles, heelies, or an office chair: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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As with everything, parents refuse to do any research and just buy whatever for their children. Next steps will be attempting to ban them.
Nobody's banning shit, we haven't banned anything in decades. We'll just re-label it so that the labels are more clear that's all. You don't have to get all excited.
Juuls
Can still be purchased
It WAS banned
Right? How fucking hard is it to just fucking google something like this, in this day and age? It's not like the 80s and 90s where you had to call around to find information about something your kid wants. You can just look it up online, easily. Epitome of shit parents.
Googling anything in this day and age can be pretty monotonous, with AI results and SEO garbage filling every page.
At a certain point it should be reasonable to expect things that are sold to be safe without the responsibility of investigating every purchase like an archeological dig.
I have to imagine it's easier than starting a coalition to ban things, but I've been wrong about that before
Well that's the issue. This is artificial to try to prevent e-bikes from taking over any other transportation market probably. It isn't actually the parents trying to solve a problem. It's corporations trying to solve a problem, using parents as an excuse.
Listen, Google is new technology. It was only invented 30+ years ago...
Even a quick googling on my end got me results for what I'm hoping is a suitable kid's e-bike. Class 2 (20mph max), 500W, and cargo space for any bulky school projects.
Putting aside that the internet definitely existed in the 80s and 90s. That’s what magazines were for, that’s why there was a zine for everything.
I mean, it wasn't exactly widely available and the average household didn't have Internet until the mid to late 90s, and a lot of times it was a shared line, so if Mom was taking to Great Aunt Millie for the first time in months, you weren't getting online that night lol.
I don’t feel like you read my whole comment.
Ban parents? Only sensible take.
I know tech nerds scoff about this for video games and, in this case, e-bikes; but I imagine when you’re buying so many categories of item for kids, there’s always something you don’t think about enough - especially if, being a parent, your time is at a premium.
I’m not trying to shoulder blame 100% on manufacturers, just describing why it’s an understandable mistake to me.
Video games have ratings right on the box, ebikes have top speeds written on them. I put the blame on the parents.
You compared video games having content ratings to ebikes having wattage labels in another comment. Video games predate the current rating system. That's where we are now with ebikes.
There isn't an ebike equivalent to the ESRB. There are different guidelines everywhere, and manufacturer enforcement basically nowhere.
Putting all the blame on parents is equivalent to saying climate change is the fault of people that don't put their yoghurt cups in the recycle bin. We shouldn't engage in the trickle-down blame game.
I didn't say wattage, I said speed. As a parent you should know that putting your child on anything that has a motor means you need to pay attention. My ebike said right on the box, on the website, and in the store what the speed was. It was no secret how fast it could go. Any parent should be able to know that putting your child on something that goes over 20 mph that it's dangerous, it's not rocket science. If they buy a device which moves their child that fast, that is 100% on them. They can take responsibility.
I see what you're getting at, though personally I want guardrails on the overpass rather than trusting individual drivers to stay within the painted lanes.
I'd be okay with an age rating on there similar to ESRB for parents, but I don't want restrictions on devices because parents can't be bothered to research the products they buy for their children. We deserve freedom to buy what we want without having safety padding on everything because other people can't be bothered to do the basic minimum research.
Age ratings I think would be one of those things that gets enforced only after an incident occurs, and may not result in a significant reduction in the dangerous activity.
Tricky business, determining what should and shouldn't be reasonable to research. It's a bit individualistic though to say what is and isn't 'basic minimum research'. Your value of what should be researched prior to a purchase is likely different than mine. There's also a near infinite number of things this research could be done for. Nobody has that kind of time.
Ignoring power and top speed, perhaps a finer detail is whether that top speed can be achieved by pushing a button or if you have to put physical efforts in. Anyone could tell by my silhouette that I am not a 'fit' individual, but I can achieve 20mph on each of my bicycles. Someone younger and fitter could surpass me. There's no reason to though, because so many of these cheap ebikes have throttle control and not pedal assist.
The guidelines for these things are too broad or simply nonexistent. For years the limiting factor was the technology, and so it wasn't worthwhile to make a legal framework when it was just the village tinkerer that could make a battery power a bicycle up to car-like speeds. We need some limitations. Power, age, speed, function - each have their own difficulties in limiting.
It'll probably need to be some combination. Hopefully it doesn't take too long.
I disagree. It's on the individual to decide what speed they can themselves handle. it's not a car where you're going to hurt someone else by plowing into them or into a group of people, on an ebike for the most part you're only going to hurt yourself. (Yes yes you could hurt someone else by running into them but compared to a car it's a much different thing). So I disagree, since you are taking on most of the risk yourself then you should be allowed to choose what you are comfortable with. Streets already have speed limits, as long as you're respecting that then I think it's enough. Is it safe? I don't care, that's on the individual to decide.
If parents are uncomfortable with that then it's on them to regulate their own children, not force their wishes on everyone else. It's a freedom issue, and I'm not willing to give up my freedom to choose a bike I want because other people are worried about their kids. The solution is incredibly simple: don't buy your kids something that they can get hurt on.
I can't help but notice the parallel between the freedom being described here and the car centric dominance that plagues society. In a micromobility community nonetheless.
You're not wrong that when someone rides at a ridiculous speed on an ebike, barring direct collision, the rider is the only one being injured if an accident were to occur. However, if everyone were to behave with such disregard, serious accidents would occur all the time. Speed limits don't do anything - speed bumps do. The former is reactionary and might only matter for the few that get speeding tickets, where the latter is preemptive and has a direct impact on everyone because everyone has to drive over it. Infrastructure is what keeps the train on the rails, not paint or signage.
Parents regulating their children is one thing, but I'm suggesting any group be permitted to force their wishes on the majority. I suggest that there is a middle ground that could be decided on as being a happy medium between safety for the masses and freedoms for the individual. However that doesn't seem to be resonating here when the responses lean so heavily into personal freedoms outweighing the good of the whole - which is the same thing as a parent forcing their will for extreme safety measures on everyone else only in reverse.
I will bring this to a close by framing it as broadly as is your incredibly simple solution: if an adult is not willing to abide a minor inconvenience for the sake of another person's wellbeing, that isn't an adult worth benefiting from the labours of society.
Cheers.