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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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