Bike shops are starting to get massive insurance hikes if they allow e-bikes into their shop (even for a tire issue or similar).
This thread:
(
https://www.reddit.com/r/ebikes/comments/19d7l4l/ebikes_and_the_bike_shop_it_might_be_over )
shows a bike shop owner receiving a threat to cancel their insurance,
unless they pay > $23k/year (it's unclear how much of an increase this is, some people are saying it's 90-120%)
.
(SNIP)
E-bikes and the Bike shop. It might be over.
It’s unfortunate, but 1000s of shops are going to be getting these letters over the next few weeks.
One of the largest insurers of bike shops in the USA is dropping policies for shops that work on, sell, and rent e-bikes.
A lot of us on the inside of the industry have seen the writing on the wall for sometime.
We personally have been warning brands we work with over the potential issues of not having proper UL 2849 certifications,
and now this will be the new reality.
I found out insurance policies alone for these brands should range from $25k-50k annually,
for the longest time they were trying to push the insurance onto the shops, but now the policy makers are changing things up.
We were the only shop in our metropolitan city to work on e-bikes in the first place.
We’re going to fight it to the best of our abilities and look for other options, but if we’re not insured to work on something, we can’t touch it.
This is more or less a warning for the general public that there will likely be new policy changes in your neck of the woods.
Shops that use to work on e-bikes may not be able to or afford to anymore.
In reality, this is individual brands faults.
They want to pump bikes into the market as quickly as possible without proper certification and this is the result.
Of course they don’t want to hold the policies and push that onto the rest of us just trying to run a business.
The more you know…
To me, this is not specifically a to a brand issue, since there are only a handful of UL certified e-bikes.
Seems like this might have to change soon.
Shops will require certification of each bike model, so brands selling a ton of models (that are actually unique to the brand)
are going to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in certifications, if not more, in the future.
Simple solution would be to require batteries to removed and kept at owners house for mechanical servicing.
If this is happening then home insurance companies could exclude ebike battery fires.
https://ebikeescape.com/ul-certified-ebikes-batteries-list/