Gadgetory

biking is a great way to get around a big city it's economical it's good for your health but it's not without its hardships you have a long commute or a long way to go you can leave yourself tired and sweaty and you're always worried about your bike or parts of your bike being stolen those are problems that a Dutch company called vanmoof are trying to solve when these two bikes come to the United States this year we try to completely redevelop the bike we think it's strange that in the world there are 10,000 engineers approximately I don't know but approximately 10,000 engineers working to make racing bikes a little bit lighter to make a mountain bike more sturdy but only I guess 10 engineers are working to get a better city bikes and we think that with new technology and we can improve commuter bikes so more people will start commuting now that all starts with this which is the electrified s it's the company's flagship bike now it's important to know this bike is electric assisted that means you can't just power the electric motor there's no throttle or anything what it does is it helps you as you pedal which is nice on a small slope or steeper Hills like we're heading up right now instead of being exhausted by the end of the ride up this hill I'm actually gonna feel really good because it just makes pedaling so much easier and there are different power modes you can go from just a little bit of assist to a lot and a lot makes it go really fast it assists up to 32 kilometers an hour which is I think 21 miles per hour and if you want to go faster you have to pedal faster but that is the level that it will assist you you can change the amount of power that the motor delivers to the bike too so you can have a little or a lot and there's even a button underneath the handlebar that'll give you a bit of a boost you want to go faster at any given moment all of that is powered by an electric motor and a battery that are actually inside the tubes of the bike we have one of the biggest batteries in the entire bike industry it's like a 420 watt hour battery and with that you have a range of approximately 75 miles so you can ride 75 miles electric assisted before you have to charge it again what's strange and really good about the electric motor in here and the electric assist is that it's not overpowering it really doesn't kick in until you're about half a pedals through and even then it eases in it doesn't jerk you forward and even this little boost button here can give you a little bit of a jolt but it's not going to thrill you and scare you now it's nice if the bike is it's not like some luxurious ride with a bunch of shocks or anything it actually kind of hurts when you hit bumps just like a normal bike it's not like the most luxurious experience ever but it is a really nice ride especially because you're not tiring yourself out like you normally would now this bike isn't just about the electric motor it's also about a whole suite of smart features and what that really hinges around is making sure that you never lose your bike that starts with an integrated lock that you could activate from your smartphone or from a little key fob you can put on your keychain after that you've also got wireless connectivity which means that anytime your bike gets stolen you can just hit a button in the app and tell vanmoof that it's stolen and they'll be able to track it down for you this sort of find your bike feature yes it's something that I can pull up right in the app or is do I need like a stoning you you open that and you report bike your bike stolen and then we have a 24-hour support desk around the globe and we will start finding your bike back by ourselves so it's not directly that you open the app and see where it is but we will help you find it find it back and so you talk about them with being something that will change the way people compete with bikes and things like that up until now people have only seen the electric ride s and it looks like this very premium thing it's got the electric assist cost a decent amount of money yeah so up to now we still have the smart bikes and the stupid bikes no we have the smart mics and the regular bikes and we want to but we believe that in any couple of years all the bikes will have the smart features so we will be able to track every bike back we sell and that's really where this comes in this is the smart bike this is essentially the same thing as the electrified s just without the electric motors it has all the same smart components the security features and everything else it comes in a lighter frame and it costs about $1,000 less now these bikes aren't just unique because of what they can do then we've also basically built them from the ground up instead of picking parts off the shelf and putting them together they've built them custom with a purpose and it really shows in the way that they ride and just the overall experience now that comes at a price this one retails about 3,000 and this one retails at about 2,000 so you're gonna have to really buy into the idea if you want these bikes but after spending some time with these bikes I can see why people would want to make that investment I bought my bike off the street for a couple hundred bucks basically expecting it to get stolen at some point if I knew that that wasn't going to happen or that if it did and I was able to get that bike back I'd probably want to make that investment too safe