Theoretically bicycle rental services are a great thing, as they give anyone the means to travel around comfortably without immediately having to rent a car, hail a taxi or brave whatever the local public transport options may be. That is until said services go out of business and suddenly thousands of increasingly more proprietary and locked-down e-bikes suddenly are at risk of becoming e-waste. So too with a recent acquisition by [Berm Peak] over at YouTube, featuring a ‘Gotcha’ e-bike by Bolt Mobility, which went AWOL back in 2022, leaving behind thousands of these e-bikes.
So how hard could it be to take one of these proprietary e-bikes and turn it into a run-off-the-mill e-bike for daily use? As it turns out, very hard. While getting the (36V) battery released and recharged was easy enough, the challenge came with the rest of the electronics, with a veritable explosion of wiring, the Tongsheng controller module and the ‘Gotcha’ computer module that locks it all down. While one could rip this all out and replace it, that would make the cost-effectiveness of getting one of these go down the drain.
Sadly, reverse-engineering the existing system proved to be too much of a hassle, so a new controller was installed along with a bunch of hacks to make the lights and new controller work. Still, for $75 for the bike, installing new electronics may be worth it, assuming you can find replacement parts and got some spare hours (or weeks) to spend on rebuilding it. The bike in the video costed less than $200 in total with new parts, albeit with the cheapest controller, but maybe jailbreaking the original controller could knock that down.
I don’t know what else the company could have done. If you plan for failure and build your bike to be unlocked when the company goes under, you’ll have half your stock stolen overnight, chipped and shipped overseas.
At least they’re being sold. At these e-waste prices too. They’ll find new owners happy to invest the absolutely little required to turn these back into ebikes.
You don’t have to plan for failure, you just have to be willing to dump enough documentation into a github repo once you’ve given up to allow someone to reverse engineer what they need.
Just do it like those export 10 meter radios, open the controller and move a little jumper or cut the little white wire loop and the bike is unlocked for the new owner
What are you referring to??
Those 10 meter radios, they are like big fancy CB radios that go from 28 to 29.7 MHz when stock, but easy to modify to get CB radio frequencies, usually open the cover and there will be a jumper on the board to move or a little loop of wire to cut then the radio will go from 24 to 30 MHz
You got a make/model of one capable of this hack?
Quangsheng UV-K5 probably. It’s absolutely incredible what the hardware is really capable of!
The issue, like stated above, is if you do that people are going to be stealing them immediately and jailbreaking them.
Does it really matter if you don’t have something because it’s locked down, or don’t have it because someone stole it? You can’t use it either way.
Ehhh. Requiring one secret key to unlock the bikes, kept in trust by the relevant govenmental body or a contracted bank, should be relatively easy to implement. If they want to generate demand for a bunch of rare earth metals and lithium, they should be on the hook for making sure it doesn’t just turn to e waste.
Then again, I feel the same way about smartphones (I think there should be strong requirements to open source all drivers after end of support or lose a hefty deposit and the privilege of selling more devices) and the increasingly locked-down “optimized” laptops.
We keep letting companies extract value and leave us to pay for their externalized costs.
You mean like the DVD and BD encryption master keys that people hacked immediately?
Sure! I don’t care if they fail at basic precautions.
Dude just bought an aftermarket controller and display? He didn’t jailbreak anything.
Sounds like he nuked em when he sent vBat to a logic signal that runs between the display and driver.
In the first case, these things don’t give me or anyone without some traceable ID containing “cash” a way to travel even one block. It looks clunky and heavy as all get out with hard tail and fork. Just like the situation with dead satellites and soon to be old computers they need to decommission to public use or pay to recycle. Those shots of e-two-wheels in China grave yards, the more I think about it it’s disgusting.
Its a tech industry smash grab against consumers and related small businesses. Charging $12.50 for one day of use is an astronomically bad deal. Thats about $630 a year for a full time employed commuter. You could easily purchase a 2nd hand bike and perform necessary tuneups at this rate and save money.
Sure, if you are going to use one every day, it would be cheaper to buy one assuming you can get the up-front cost together. That’s true for almost anything you rent.
Around here (Denver suburbs) I notice two or three rental e-bikes sitting on the sidewalk on my typical 5-10 mile trip. I’ve seen less than 10 people riding one in the last five years or so. Perhaps the ratio is less disastrous in Denver proper.
A reasonable business model would have to account for the insanely low usage rates. The failure rate of the rental e-bike companies suggests they are assuming much higher usage rates than they are getting.
It seems to me that these companies pop up for the express purpose of milking naive investors.
Pretty much.
Usually you can get perfectly working bicycles for about $20-50 by searching your local facetubelist-community for used bikes. There’s always people looking to get rid of their cheap supermarket grade 21-speeder that they bought and rode for a month, and decided they’re not going to bother. I once bought a bike in the morning, rode it for the day, and sold it on in the evening.
Sounds like we’re forgetting here that these are ebikes and the whole appeal of them for many people is that you can get somewhere and not be covered in sweat. Especially if you’re not super fit. For many showing up to work sweaty is an absolute no go. Your $25 craiglist special isn’t going to do that.
Of course using one every day would be a really bad deal. So would taking a cab or Uber to work every day. I have used one a handful of times – when I was staying in a different city and the event I was attending was a long walk from the hotel. It was quicker, cheaper and more convenient than taking a cab or Uber.
I’ve never used one of these, but that doesn’t seem like that bad a deal if you’re visiting an area and need a bike temporarily. Because of all the support logistics I don’t think it’s reasonable that they could compete with and owned bike.
You’re both right. My commuting scooter pays for itself in less than half a year (closer to 3mo probably) relative to the local rental companies. I work with a number of techs that I know commute on them. It can be hard to get out of debt/subscription cycles like that, it’s kind of what modern markets are designed to push us towards. While one shouldn’t make use of them, you can now pay for your fast food or eBay car part in four easy installments, and rampant credit card debt and payday loan sharks have been around forever. This is just another faucet of that world.
On the other hand, sometimes I find myself somewhere without my scooter and will happily pay ~$10 to get somewhere that’s a little farther than I want to (or have time to) walk and that doesn’t have a good bus running to it.
Huh? What is the math?
Year has about 220 workdays at least (hier in Germany), so it is $2750. That gives a very fine e-bike.
of course you could. just like you could drive a 30 year old car and do all your own maintenance. it’s for people who don’t want to own or maintain a bike. there’s no mindset more foreign to me personally but it’s not hard to understand that it exists.
These aren’t for people travelling to work, usually. It’s for tourists. Take the ebike from the center to the beach to save on parking costs, or go from one museum to the next.
Part of the reason they lock this stuff down is liability. If they make it too hard to open up/repurpose and someone jacks with the safety hooks the company could be held liable. If you have to ditch the controller and wire your own guts it’s a whole lot harder to make that case.
Austin has a $100 penalty per unit in case of bankruptcy
Deposited and cashed before bankruptcy, or how do you enforce it?
It’s Austin local government…
Expect ‘they haven’t thought of that’ yet…
Only slightly less ‘head up ass’ than Portland.
Funniest comment on here!!
Awesome video!
Thanks for sharing.
It reminds me of the handpuppet show featuring kasperl and petzi @ CCCamp2023
They took apart a rentable scooter and did a lot of reverse engineering on the scooter, resulting in a full unlock of the batteries and the actual motor controller.
Its in german, but there are english subtitles available.
https://media.ccc.de/v/camp2023-57019-leihroller_hacken_ein_kasperltheater
I wonder what kind of chip is on the board. Would be really cool to get some dump from the controller board and jailbreak it via software.