Last month, I wrote a 35 page report about why New Jersey’s 2026 e-bike law makes little sense on the grounds of public safety. Sadly, a number of other American states are also contemplating similarly wrongheaded crackdowns on e-bikes, which simply aren’t justified if the goal is to minimize traffic fatalities. My report argues that […]
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Last month, I wrote a 35 page report about why New Jersey’s 2026 e-bike law makes little sense on the grounds of public safety. Sadly, a number of other American states are also contemplating similarly wrongheaded crackdowns on e-bikes, which simply aren’t justified if the goal is to minimize traffic fatalities. My report argues that there isn’t empirical evidence to show that normal e-bikes pose more of a threat to public safety than manual bicycles. What is needed is a crackdown on overpowered e-motos, while not burdening people riding street-legal e-bikes with additional regulation, which is the approach taken by California’s excellent SB 1176 bill. The overwhelming threat to public safety is automobiles. This article provides a bit more data from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to buttress that point.
See my report for the arguments why additional regulation on normal e-bike riders is counterproductive and harmful to society, the environment and public safety. However, this article provides the data for every state to demonstrate that automobiles represent the overwhelming threat to public safety, and the focus of lawmakers and government budgets should be on better regulation of automotive design to protect vulnerable road users and providing infrastructure to separate pedestrians and pedal cyclists from the increasingly dangerous automobile traffic.
Unfortunately, the NHTSA does not track traffic fatalities with electric bicycles (or e-bikes for short) as a separate category. In 2019 and earlier, e-bikes were listed under “Moped or motorized bicycle”, but within that category, it was possible to search for “Other Make Electric Motorcycle” to separate out the e-bikes. In 2020, the NHTSA created the category of “motorized bicycle” which includes both e-bikes and bicycles with internal combustion engines. Now there is no way to distinguish electric and ICE motor bicycles in the NHTSA database. There is also no indication whether a fatality occurred with a legal motorized bicycle, which in most states means a motor limited to 750W or 50cc, a throttle limited to 20 mph and pedal assistance limited to 28 mph. The data for motorized bicycles was included under motorcycles, but then switched to bicycles in 2022 and later. Unfortunately, this switch made it impossible to query the NHTSA website for these motorized bicycles, so the raw data files have to be downloaded to find the motorized bicycle fatalities in 2022-24.
According to the data in the NHTSA database, 2 e-bike fatalities occurred in the U.S. in 2018 (both in California), and 6 e-bike fatalities occurred in 2019 (2 in CA, 2 in PA, 1 in FL and 1 in NY). The number of fatalities for users of motorized bicycles in the U.S. rose from 32 in 2020 to 97 in 2023, and then decreased slightly to 92 in 2024. Motorized bicycle fatalities represented 0.08% of the 39,007 traffic fatalities that occurred in 2020 and 0.23% of the 39,254 traffic fatalities in 2024. The current public panic about the dangers of e-bikes is overblown, considering the fact that only 1 out of every 627 traffic fatalities in 2020-24 were users of motorized bicycles.
The growth in motorized bicycle fatalities is concerning, but it is important to recognize that the number of fatalities is growing in line with e-bike sales over the same time period. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of motorized bike fatalities grew by 188% from 32 to 92 according to NHTSA, whereas e-bike sales grew by 288% from 0.44 million to 1.7 million units in the U.S. The U.S. Consumer Protection Safety Commission (CPSC), which is responsible for regulating e-bikes in the U.S. which have 750 watt motors or less, reports that the number of e-bike fatalities grew by 347% from 17 in 2020 to 76 in 2023, which is a faster rate of growth, but fewer fatalities, presumably because it is just counting e-bikes, whereas NHTSA is counting both e-bikes and ICE motor bicycles.
Comparing e-bike and manual bicycle sales and fatalities in the U.S.YearE-bike unit sales (millions)Manual bicycle unit sales (millions)Motorized bicycle fatalities (NHTSA)E-bike fatalities (CPSC)Manual bicycle fatalities (NHTSA)E-bike fatalities per million salesManual bicycle fatalities per million sales20160.2418.0885347.220170.26317.66080645.620180.32516.26687118.553.620190.28715.51685920.955.420200.43821.65321794838.843.820210.8817.51453597639.855.720221.118.636153105648.256.720230.9919.419776106976.855.120241.7921011Sources: US NHTSA (fatalities), US CPSC (e-bike fatalities), eCycleElectric (e-bike sales 2016, 2023-4), Light Electric Vehicle Association (e-bike sales 2017-22), statista.com (bicycle sales).
As my previous report observed (see p. 19), the risk of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for e-bikes and manual bicycles has converged over time, and the same phenomenon appears to be happening with fatalities. In 2018, there were almost 3 times more fatalities for manual bicycles than e-bikes per million in annual unit sales. By 2022, there was little difference between the two types of bicycles, with manual bikes having 56.7 fatalities per million sales and e-bikes having 48.2 fatalities per million sales. In 2023, however, e-bikes jumped to 76.8 fatalities per million sales. This dramatic increase is probably due to the fact that e-bike sales dropped in 2023, but they returned to growth in 2024, so it may have been an anomoly, but it merits watching in the future. The question is whether e-bike fatalities will continue to grow, or they will stabilize, which is suggested by the fact that motorized bicycle fatalities dropped slightly in 2024, according to the NHTSA.
The caveat is that the above graph is comparing NHTSA traffic fatalities for manual bicycles with CPSC fatalities for e-bikes, and they count different things, since CPSC includes fatalities that occur in any place, including accidents and fires in homes and on private property. Nonetheless, the convergence of fatality rates is surprising, considering that Fernandez et al. (2024) found that manual bicycles had three times the fatality rate of e-bikes, when comparing the number of emergency department (ED) visits in the U.S. that resulted in death between 2017 and 2022. 0.12% of ED visits for manual bicycle accidents led to death (3002 fatalities out of 2,499,843 ED visits), compared to 0.04% for e-bike accidents (17 fatalities out of 45,586 ED visits). However, Fernandez et al. includes data from all ages and young children are more prone to fatal accidents on manual bicycles, whereas many accidents with young children riding bicycles don’t get recorded as traffic crashes in the NHTSA database. See pages 15-21 of my previous report for more discussion of this problem.
While the relative dangers of manual bikes versus e-bikes can be debated, the overriding conclusion is that governmental agencies need to collect better data before rushing to over-regulate e-bikes, which cause very few fatalities compared to other types of motor vehicles. In the five-year period between 2020 and 2024, users of motorized bicycles suffered 327 fatalities in the U.S., compared to 30,386 fatalities among motorcycle users and 131,717 fatalities among automobile users.
Much of the public panic about e-bikes is due to the fact that some youth ride them irresponsibly, which has filled the news and social media with videos of boys misbehaving on e-bikes (1,2,3,4,5,6). However, the empirical evidence shows that very few teenagers are injured or killed on e-bikes. Only 2 of the 92 motorized bicycle fatalities in 2024 were teenagers under the age of 18. Moreover, e-bikes represent little danger to others on the road. Of the 193 e-bike fatalities in the CPSC database between 2017 and 2023, only 8 were pedestrians struck by e-bikes. Looking at bicycles, which include motorized bicycles in the NHTSA database, 99.1% of the traffic fatalities associated with bicycles were suffered by the riders themselves between 2020 and 2024. In 5 years, there were only 48 fatalities where users of motorcycles and automobiles were killed when hitting or swerving to avoid hitting bicycles. This same pattern holds with motorcycles, where the risk is overwhelmingly borne by the riders themselves, since they cause very few deaths to pedal cyclists and pedestrians. In contrast, 4680 pedal cyclists and 31,171 pedestrians died after being struck by automobiles between 2020 and 2024. There were 6 times more traffic fatalities associated with motorcycles than bicycles and 31 times more fatalities associated with automobiles than bicycles.
Motorized bicycle fatalities rose from 0.08% to 0.24% of U.S. traffic fatalities between 2020 and 2023, but then decreased slightly to 0.23% in 2024. It remains to be seen whether 2023 was the peak, or the fatalities will continue rising, but it is important to keep in mind that almost all these motorized bicycle fatalities occurred in collisions with automobiles and the majority of them occurred on arterial roads. In 2024, 65% of the motorized bicycle fatalities occurred on arterial roads. If the U.S. had good separated bike lines on its arterial roads to protect bicycle riders, most of these fatalitities could have been avoided.
For the text version of this table, see the appendix below.
Most of the motorized bicycle fatalities happen in a few key states, according the NHTSA data. Between 2020 and 2024, 57% of the 327 motorized bicycle fatalities occurred in the five states of New York (69), California (44), Florida (33), New Jersey (21) and Arizona (20). The national average is 0.98 motorized bicycle fatalities per million inhabitants, but four states stand out as having high rates: New York (3.42), Louisiana (3.01), Arizona (2.80) and New Jersey (2.26). Surprisingly, California, which stands out as having a plethora of proposed laws to regulate e-bikes, has a motorized bicycle fatality rate of 1.11 per million inhabitants, which isn’t much higher than the national average.
Only in the case of New York were there enough fatalities to justify the kind of public outcry that e-bikes have received in recent years, and most of those fatalities occurred in New York City, which does keep good public records on fatalities involving e-bikes, unlike most cities. Between 2020 and 2025, there were 88 fatalities of e-bike users in New York City, which represented 5.8% of the 1507 traffic fatalities during that time period. What is interesting is that e-bike fatalities peaked in 2023 in New York City, which hopefully will be the trend nationally. New York has invested in the construction of protected bike lines on a number of arterial roads, which appears to be reducing the number of traffic fatalities.
Appendix: Traffic Fatality Data by State
Motorized bicycle fatalities by state in the U.S. (NHTSA)State20202021202220232024TotalNo.%No.%No.%No.%No.%No.%per M pop.Alaska11.43%10.29%1.36Arizona50.47%70.53%50.38%30.24%200.33%2.80Arkansas00.00%10.17%10.03%0.33California40.10%40.09%120.26%120.30%120.31%440.21%1.11Colorado20.26%10.14%10.15%40.11%0.69Delaware10.62%10.15%1.01Florida70.21%60.16%40.11%110.32%50.16%330.19%1.53Georgia20.12%20.14%40.05%0.37Hawaii10.86%11.08%20.41%1.37Illinois10.08%10.07%20.16%30.24%40.34%110.18%0.86Indiana20.22%20.04%0.29Iowa10.27%10.06%0.31Kansas00.00%10.29%10.05%0.34Louisiana20.24%30.33%40.49%50.66%140.33%3.01Maryland00.00%50.87%50.17%0.81Massachusetts20.46%30.87%41.10%90.47%1.28Michigan10.09%70.64%30.27%110.20%1.09Minnesota10.23%10.05%0.18Missouri20.20%20.20%10.09%20.20%60.63%130.26%2.11Nebraska10.44%10.09%0.51Nevada10.30%10.26%10.26%20.48%50.26%1.61New Hampshire00.00%10.75%10.16%0.73New Jersey40.58%20.29%71.16%81.19%210.65%2.26New Mexico10.23%10.05%0.47New York60.57%171.47%141.18%171.53%151.36%691.23%3.42North Carolina10.06%20.12%30.04%0.29Ohio10.08%10.08%20.17%40.06%0.34Oklahoma10.15%10.13%20.28%10.14%20.31%70.20%1.77Oregon10.20%00.00%10.17%10.17%30.56%60.21%1.42Pennsylvania20.18%60.49%10.08%50.41%20.18%160.27%1.23Rhode Island11.41%11.92%20.66%1.82South Carolina10.10%10.10%20.04%0.39Tennessee10.08%10.02%0.14Texas10.02%30.07%40.02%0.14Utah20.63%10.36%10.36%40.27%1.22Washington10.13%10.12%20.06%0.26Total320.08%450.10%610.14%970.24%920.23%3270.16%0.98
Below is the traffic fatality information between 2000 and 2024 for each U.S. state and the District of Colombia. Note that the motorized bicycle fatalities are included in the bicycle fatalities. The motorized bicycle fatalities which were classified under the motorcycles category in 2020-21 by NHTSA were moved to the bicycles category.
The rise of social media over the last 2 decades has dramatically transformed how people learn about and interact with the products that they buy. Traditionally, people were largely passive recipients of commercial advertising, but social media has dramatically changed that relationship. People could turn down the TV or radio or switch the channel, but […]
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The rise of social media over the last 2 decades has dramatically transformed how people learn about and interact with the products that they buy. Traditionally, people were largely passive recipients of commercial advertising, but social media has dramatically changed that relationship. People could turn down the TV or radio or switch the channel, but people didn’t have much ability to chose what their eyes would see, and their ears would hear. Social media has totally changed that dynamic with people becoming active participants in selecting what content they consume.
People are able to indicate their preferences, based on how many times they click, how much they watch and whether they decide to subscribe to a channel. While people can be influenced to click more and watch more, and bots can be used to juice the numbers, the usage of social media does indicate some level of people’s interest and engagement. Looking at social media is one way to measure whether a product draws people’s attention and how invested they are in that product.
This is especially important when considering a new type of vehicle like the Aptera solar car, which hasn’t yet been released on the market. There are few ways to measure whether there will be demand for a new type of vehicle, since there isn’t an existing market for it that can be studied. One of the few ways to gauge whether there will be demand for something in a new category is to check how people engage with it on social media. What happens online often doesn’t translate into the real world, but it does provide some clues about how well a company is both getting its product in front of people’s eyes and how interested people are in the product.
In the case of the Aptera solar car, it has done quite well on some social media platforms, but not so well on others, so it is worth studying to see what that can indicate about the demand for the new vehicle. Partly because the Aptera is such an unconventionally shaped vehicle and because it promises to be the first production solar car on the market, it has generated quite a bit of controversy online about whether there is enough demand for the car in order for it to be financially viable. Supporters passionately predict that the Aptera will pave the way for a new solar vehicle industry, just like Tesla sparked a whole new industry of electric vehicles. Critics just as a vehemently argue that there is limited demand for the Aptera beyond a small niche of early adopter enthusiasts, and it will be a commercial flop.
I recently posted an article arguing that the Aptera represented a major paradigm shift for the auto industry, and it stirred up the long-running debate on r/ApteraMotors about the amount of demand for the three-wheeled, two-seat solar car. In response, Massive_Shunt stated: the market for a compromised solar vehicle that has to be parked outside and exposed to the elements but also has the most expensive bonded glass roof of any car on the market, whilst only having seating for 2 and being as wide as a full-sized truck just doesn’t make enough sense to justify more than niche, “quirky” interest. Maybe someone will buy some, but outside of an extreme narrow use case with substantial pre-conditions and assumptions, the group of people for whom this actually makes sense is incredibly small. Strange_Cockroach326 voiced a similar sentiment with this comment: Carrying a shell of solar panels, thus requiring 20+ vehicle compromises, this won’t work for 95% of vehicle buyers. At double the price of a standard EV vehicle layout and with Aptera deliveries likely to be 3+ years away, a timeframe when many other EV vehicle choices will exist, perhaps then only 1% percent of prospective EV buyers will consider an Aptera. Hardly a paradigm shift and 95% likely to lead to Aptera failing.
I responded that Aptera’s social media numbers indicate that there is substantial public interest in the Aptera. However, I needed to check that assertion, so I looked up the social media numbers for 16 other EV brands to compare with the Aptera. What I found is that the solar car company based in Carlsbad, California is punching well above its current status as an EV startup that hasn’t yet started shipping vehicles. Aptera has better social media numbers than TELO Trucks and Slate Auto, which are two other EV startups which are still in the preproduction stage like Aptera. Aptera also does significantly better than Arcimoto, which also produces 3 wheeled vehicles, although Arcimoto halted production in early 2023, and it is unclear whether the company will survive. However, Aptera’s influence on social media varies greatly by platform, which indicates weaknesses in some demographics.
In terms of the number of subscribers or followers on the social media platforms, Aptera does very well on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, but its numbers are close to the median for the 17 EV brands on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) and its numbers are below the median for LinkedIn. It is worth going through each social media platform and examine what these numbers mean.
For the links in the above tables, see the appendix at the end of this article where the tables are posted in text form.
While this data is global (i.e. the world outside China), the social media that matters most for the Aptera in the next couple years is from the United States, where 86% of the vehicle’s preorders are located (as of June 2024). Only 7% of the Aptera’s preorders are located in Europe, 4% in the rest of North America (Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean), 2% in Asia and Australia and 1% in the rest of the world. While Aptera Motors hopes to open 6 to 8 assembly plants by 2030 around the world, it clearly has to first succeed in the U.S. market in order to survive as a company. The Aptera is 7’4″ (222 cm) wide in the front, which will limit its appeal in Europe, where the average car is 180.3 cm wide, and roads and parking spaces are even narrower in many parts of Asia.
YouTube is an online video sharing platform founded in February 2005 that is owned by Google. It is the second most visited website in the world after Google Search and has more than 2.70 billion monthly active users worldwide, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of video every day.
Aptera has a very strong presence on YouTube. Its channel has 289 thousand suscribers, which is the third highest number among EV brands. Tesla has over 10 times more YouTube subscribers than Aptera, but Telsa has over 10 times more social media followers than its closest competitor on all the other social media platforms as well (where the company chooses to participate). Despite the negative views around the world regarding Elon Musk, his auto company still enjoys an unrivaled lead on social media. Perhaps this is simply inertia, since people rarely unsubscribe for a social media channel after subscribing. Nonetheless, Tesla has unrivaled direct access to the public through its social media, which undoubtedly helps the company market its electric vehicles.
What is remarkable about Aptera’s YouTube channel is the fact that none of its videos have gone viral, yet the channel has such a high number of subscribers. The video with the highest number of views is the Aptera Launch video to start the pre-orders for the solar car on December 4, 2020, which got 1.69 million views. In comparison, Rivian, Lucid Motors, VinFast, MG and Polestar have videos with 4M, 14M, 11M, 4.1M and 8.4M views, respectively, yet all those brands have fewer subscribers than Aptera. EV brands like Rivian, Lucid, NIO, Xpeng, BYD, VinFast and MG have a few videos that get high view counts, but the rest of their videos are not widely watched. In contrast, Aptera’s videos tend to get a large number of people watching with between 200k and 600k views. Aptera doesn’t put out a lot of videos compared to other EV brands, but the last five vidoes that Aptera has released got an average of 394k views. Only Tesla gets a higher view count for its videos than Aptera, averaging 485k view for its last 5 videos. MG’s last five videos averaged 823k views, but one video with 4.1M views was an outlier that distorted the average, since MG’s other 4 video averaged just 4.1k views.
Xpeng has a higher number of YouTube subscribers than Aptera and it puts out a lot more videos than Aptera, but its last 5 videos averaged just 22.4k views. Aptera likely has the second highest number of YouTube subscribers in the U.S. after Tesla, since Xpeng doesn’t export its autos to the American market, and most Americans haven’t heard of the Chinese brand.
The fact that Aptera has so many subscribers and high view counts shows that Aptera has a very loyal following, which is the kind of social media which indicates that many of its followers are likely to convert into buyers of its cars.
One of the reasons why Aptera has such a large number of people following the company is the fact that the company was primarily financed through crowdfunding. 17,000 people have invested in Aptera Motors, and roughly $130 million of the $157 million in capital that the company has raised since it was refounded in March 2019 has come from equity crowdfunding. Aptera tried repeatedly to find large investors, but it wasn’t able to, so it had to turn to the general public to finance its operations. In addition, 49,000 people by the end of 2025 have preordered the Aptera. Judging from the comments on YouTube videos, many of the people who actively follow the company are investors or reservation holders.
By turning to the public for financing, Aptera not only developed a passionate following of supporters, but also a passionate following from people who publicly critique the company. Social media is filled with both groups, who clash in the comment section of videos and articles posted about the company. The diametrically-opposed comments from the two groups is jarring when reading the comment section of a YouTube video about the Aptera. For example, Aptera Motor’s latest funding update video contains these discordant comments: @david.e.h.: Chris, thank you for the update! I love seeing all the progress at Aptera! Go Aptera!!!! @knelletv: In 20 years from now we will see Chris (white hairs and walking with a cane) announcing the first production vehicule… Is Aptera only a manufacturer of prototypes and validation units ? @The-Rest-of-Us: Thanks for the update, appreciated! Next time it would be great to learn how many validation vehicles there will be in total, when they will be done and what they’ll be used for (presumably crash tests, among other things?). Godspeed! P.S.: I love the vibrancy of this community! @ronnardelli5483: WHAT A SCAM !!!!!!! They have been building this fantasy car since 2006 —-IT WILL NEVER BE PRODUCED !!!!!!! @NYCCEJ: Go Aptera Motors, we believe in you! The production line and the Aptera vehicle are really coming together. @PerpetualRetrospect: Oh look the Aptera grift must need another cash injection! The product is an albatross riddled with issues, you will never achieve scale production, you’ve taken peoples money for nearly 20 years and returned zero value all while collecting your paycheck. Just another tech parasite skimming society till you move on to the next ‘big thing’, sad part is the everyday investors in the comments getting excited when their cash has long since been incinerated. @HeadPack: You are building the most amazing car of our time on a shoestring. Incredible. @SeanBaker-rr4or: Aptera is a scam!!! They’ve been claiming that they’ll make this care since ~2010. They stole the deposits of most of their first investors and they’ll steal your deposit too! SCAM! SCAM! SCAM!
One would never guess from reading these comments that people are talking about the same company. However, the controversy helps drive views, which may partly explain why Aptera videos get more views that most other EV brands. I also suspect that many of the people subscribe to Aptera’s channel, because the car does appeal to certain types of people. The Aptera is simply fascinating for solar enthusiasts, engineers who love the efficient design, environmentalists who love the low carbon footprint, designers who love the unconventional shape of the car, and avante gardists who want to try out the latest novelty.
YouTube is the most popular social media platform in the U.S., according to a Pew Research survey in May – September of 2023. 83% of American adults say that they have used YouTube, compared to 95% of American adults who used the internet in 2023. Unlike other social media, both genders equally use YouTube. YouTube usage is higher among young adults, but the video sharing platform is used by older generations more than most other social media. Among the Americans aged 18 to 29, 97% report using the internet and 93% use YouTube. In contrast, 88% use the internet and 60% use YouTube among Americans who are 65 years or older. YouTube usage is a little higher among people who are wealthy, better educated, urban and Asian, but over 3/4ths of Americans who are poor, less educated, rural and non-Asian also use YouTube, so it is widely used in all sectors of American society. With such wide usage, not much can be inferred about the types of people who follow Aptera on YouTube.
Facebook was founded in February 2004, and it is the most widely used social media platform in the world. It was the first platform to gain global usage, reaching 1 billion users on October 2012 and 2 billion users in June 2017. Parent company Meta reported that Facebook had 3.07 active monthly users worldwide as of December 2023, and it is currently the third most visited website in the world after Google Search and YouTube.
Aptera has 338.1 thousand followers on Facebook, which is the 6th highest number of the 17 EV brands. However, most of the EV brands with a higher number of Facebook followers (#1 VinFast, #3 BYD, #4 Xpeng and #5 AITO) don’t sell in the U.S. #2 Polestar, with 675.6 million Facebook followers, does offer a few models in the US, but it only sold 3026 vehicles in the US in 2025, which represented just 0.2% of the U.S. EV market. Most American have never heard of the Swedish Polestar brand, which is majority owned by the Chinese conglomerate Geely Holding.
Facebook does not provide a public breakdown where followers are located, but Aptera likely has more American Facebook followers than any other EV brand, which is truly a remarkable achievement, considering that Aptera is a tiny company with 84 employees and a market capitalization of $116 million, according to Pitchbook. Of course, Aptera wins among Americans on Facebook, because Tesla doesn’t bother with the platform, but it is still impressive that Aptera beats Rivian and Lucid, which have both been shipping vehicles since 2021 and have market capitalizations which are 184 and 23 times larger than Aptera, respectively.
Facebook is used by 68% of American adults and is more favored by women than men. Usage is highest among people who are aged 30 to 49, but it widely used by people of all age groups. There isn’t much difference in usage of Facebook by race, income level, education level and urban vs rural. Because Facebook is so widely used, little can be inferred about the type of people who follow Aptera on its platform.
The other social media platform where Aptera does well is TikTok. Aptera has 159.2k TikTok followers, which is the third highest among the EV brands. Aptera’s high ranking is surprising because it produces few videos compared to other EV brands. BYD and Xpeng have significantly higher number of followers than Aptera, but they aren’t sold in the U.S. The only brands that have a presence in U.S. that do well on TikTok are Aptera and Slate Auto, which are both not yet in production.
The high number of Aptera followers on TikTok is significant, because its user base is overwhelmingly young. 62% of Americans aged 18 to 29 use TikTok, whereas that percentage is only 10% among Americans aged 65 and older.
What is interesting is that Aptera only has a moderate presence on Instagram, which is a platform owned by Meta that focuses on photo sharing. Aptera has posted 798 times and has 89.9k followers on Instagram, which ranks it 10 out of 17 EV brands. Like TikTok, Instagram is used overwhelmingly by younger adults and more by women than men, but Instagram is used more by people who are wealthier, better educated and more urban, which is different from TikTok, which is used more by people who are lower income and less educated and there is no urban/rural divide.
Aptera also has a mediocre presence on X (formerly Twitter), where it has 24.5k followers and ranks 9th out of 17 EV brands. What makes this result disappointing is the fact that Aptera has posted 3846 times on X, so its mediocre standing on the platform is not for lack of trying. Like Instagram, X users tend to be younger, wealthier, more educated, but the big difference is that X users are more likely to be male.
Finally, there is LinkedIn were Aptera does the worst of the social media platforms. Aptera has 25.6k followers on LinkedIn, which ranks it 12 out of 17 brands. 30% of Americans report using LinkedIn. The social media platform is heavily skewed toward people who are wealthier, better educated, more urban and more Asian, since it is predominately used by people who are white-collar professionals.
What is striking is that Rivian and Lucid do so well on Instagram, X and LinkedIn, which are the three platforms where Aptera has a mediocre presence. All three of those platforms tend to be used by people who are wealthier, better educated and more urban, which one assumes would also fit the profile of the typical Aptera buyer.
However, I suspect that those platforms also tend to be used by people who are married and have kids (which is a criteria that the 2023 Pew Research survey on social media didn’t cover). There is a horseshoe effect where the two seat Aptera appeals to young, single people and elderly people who no longer have kids in the house, but not middle-aged adults who are getting married and having kids. Aptera does well on TikTok, because there are many single people or young couples without kids who are renting or can’t install a Level 2 charger. Aptera is the perfect vehicle for those types of people, because it can be used with an ordinary 110V 15A outlet, where it can charge 142 miles in 12 hours. For people with no access to an electric outlet, the Aptera is also the ideal car since it can charge itself from the sun, and it requires a third of the energy per mile compared to a typical EV, so it will cost much less to operate using electricity from public chargers. People with that kind of housing tend to be not only younger, but also poorer, which fits the TikTok demographic.
However, the biggest market for the Aptera appears to be men who are older, and that is certainly the type of people who show up at Aptera community events (1,2,3,4). Edmunds reports that 67% of EV buyers in the US are male. Steve at Aptera Owners Club says that his YouTube audience is 96.3% male, and most of the comments on his videos come from middle-aged men who are more educated and have technical backgrounds.
The reason why Aptera has so many subscribers on Facebook and YouTube is probably due to the fact that those two platforms are the ones most favored by older users of social media. Among Americans who are 65 or older, 60% and 58% use YouTube and Facebook, respectively, whereas those percentages are only 15%, 10%, 12% and 6% on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Twitter, respectively.
Aptera probably has the most American followers of any EV brand on Facebook and TikTok and the second highest number of American subscribers on YouTube. The large number of subscribers and views/visits on these platforms buttresses the argument that there will be plenty of demand for the Aptera when it is brought to market.
One caveat, however, is the fact that social media statistics have limitations as a means to measure online interest in EVs. For example, looking at the number of Google searches for pre-production EV brands, Slate Auto has nearly three times more searches than Aptera Motors over the last three months. Perhaps more people are seeking to learn about Slate Auto because it is a newer brand than Aptera, but it is surprising how much Slate leads Aptera in searches, considering that Aptera is beating Slate in 3 of the 6 social media platforms.
On the other hand, Google Trends also indicates that there has been a growing number of searches for “solar car” in the U.S. in the last year, which peaked with the war with Iran and the problems getting petroleum through the Strait of Hormuz. These searches indicate that there is growing interest in the idea of a solar car, which should help Aptera as the first production solar car that will hit the market.
The two-seat Aptera solar car is arguably the most important automobile currently under development, despite the fact that some don’t consider the three-wheeled autocycle to be a “real car” at all. The Aptera represents a paradigm shift in the auto industry, not just because it will be the first production solar car on the market, […]
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The two-seat Aptera solar car is arguably the most important automobile currently under development, despite the fact that some don’t consider the three-wheeled autocycle to be a “real car” at all. The Aptera represents a paradigm shift in the auto industry, not just because it will be the first production solar car on the market, but because it has design goals which fundamentally challenge the dominant paradigm governing the auto industry. For the last 4 decades, the auto industry has used its gains in technological advancement to produce bigger, taller and more powerful vehicles. The Aptera, however, is designed with the goals of being as energy efficient as possible and minimizing the capital costs of its production, and those two design criteria lead to a fundamentally different kind of vehicle, which promises to revolutionize the auto industry.
The three-wheeled, two-seat Aptera with an aerodynamic dolphin-like shape, butterfly doors that swing upward, a composite body made of large CF-SMC and GF-SMC panels and 4 solar panels.
Nothing in the Aptera is truly new, but it is the combination of many innovations in a new type of vehicle which represents the paradigm shift, just like IBM and Apple shifted the computer and mobile phone industries, respectively, by combining a number of good ideas that already existed in the microcomputer and mobile phone industries to launch the first “PC” in 1981 and the first iPhone in 2007. The innovation in the Aptera that receives the most press coverage are the four solar panels on the car’s front hood (30 cells), dash (20 cells), roof (50 cells) and rear hatch (89 cells). Since Sono Motors and Lightyear have scrapped their plans to produce solar cars and Squad keeps postponing production, the Aptera promises to be the first production solar car on the market.
Aptera Motors says that its electric vehicle will provide up to 40 miles of solar-powered miles per day and over 10,000 miles per year. When parked in the sun to trickle charge from its solar panels, the Aptera Launch Edition will be able can store up to 400 miles in its 44 kWh battery with 2,304 cylindrical NMCA INR 21700 M52V cells from LG Energy Solutions. Despite being just a two-seater, the long tapered front hood and rear tail of the Aptera allows the vehicle to hold a total of 2.95 square meters of solar cells. I calculate that the 189 Maxeon Gen 7 solar cells on the Aptera will provide 751W of solar capacity and a maximum of roughly 550W in real world output.
Putting solar panels on electric vehicles is not a new idea. It was first demonstrated in 1962 when International Rectifier Co. mounted 10,640 solar cells on a vintage 1912 Baker electric car. The Karma Revero, Fisker Ocean, Toyota Prius Prime, Toyota bZ4X and Hyundai Ioniq 5/Sonata Hybrid all have offered solar charging roofs, but they have not gained much traction in the auto industry, because they don’t provide much extra mileage for an EV. MotorTrend estimates that the 185W solar roof option for the Prius Prime XSE Premium only provides up to 900 extra miles per year in sunny Los Angeles. The solar option on the Toyota bZ4X appears to be roughly 250W and provides up to 1800 extra km (1120 miles) per year. Similarly, Hyundai’s 204W solar roof option provides up to 1500 extra km per year on the Ioniq 5 and up to 1300 extra km per year on the Sonata Hybrid. The Aptera Launch Edition will use cutting-edge solar cells with 24.1% efficiency (compared to 22.8% efficiency in Hyundai’s cells) and will have three to four times more solar capacity that Toyota and Hyundai’s cars, because it covers all its top surfaces in solar cells.
Aptera’s 4 solar panels on front hood (30 cells, 119.1W), front dash (20 cells, 79.4W), roof (50 cells, 198.5W) and rear hatch (89 cells, 389.1W). Notice the different color of the anti-reflective dashboard cells and the rear view camera above the V-shaped rear brake light on the rear hatch.
The Launch Edition, however, sacrifices visibility through the rear hatch and adds extra glare to the dashboard in order gain more solar capacity. Aptera has addressed the lack of a rear window by adding a rear-view camera, mounted in the brake lamp at the top of the rear hatch, which is displayed in the center digital mirror, and another backup camera, located beneath the license plate, that is displayed on the center screen when reversing. Aptera also added a matte, anti-reflective coating to the dashboard solar cells to counteract the glare.
The fundamental reason why solar charging makes sense on the Aptera, whereas it is a gimmicky option on other EVs, is because the Aptera was designed from the ground up to be as energy efficient as possible. Aptera Motors is aiming to get the energy consumption of its vehicle down to 100 Wh/mile, which is 2 to 4 times more energy efficient than the typical EV. With optimal sun, Aptera’s solar panels should be able to generate up to 4 kWh per day, which would propel the Aptera 40 miles, but that same amount of energy would propel a typical EV 13 miles, which is far less than the 37 miles per day that the average American drives.
The Aptera has an aerodynamic dolphin-shaped body that is designed to slip through the air. Its long tapering tail, which is designed to minimize the low-pressure turbulent wake that pulls the vehicle backward, provides a large flat area not found on conventional cars to capture more sun. The Aptera is anticipated to have a drag coefficient (Cd) of 0.13, which will be the lowest Cd of any production passenger car. Aptera Motors claims that the whole vehicle has as much drag as just the side mirrors of an F-150 pickup truck. Aptera’s co-CEO Chris Anthony observes: “At highway speeds, modern vehicles use about 70% of their energy just pushing air out of their way. People don’t realise how much energy is used simply in aerodynamic losses.”
The Aptera’s long tapering tail reduces the pressure drag by minimizing its turbulent wake. Source: National Air and Space Museum
The most aerodynamic car on the market today is the Lucid Air Pure with a Cd of 0.197, so Aptera represents a 34% improvement over the current state of the art. The Lucid Air Pure consumes 258 Wh/mile, which is 2.6 times more than the Aptera. Of course, it isn’t fair to compare a 4-wheel, 5-seat sedan to a 3-wheel, 2-seat dolphin, but the Aptera is expanding what people think of as a “car”.
There are trade-offs to making such an aerodynamic vehicle. Reviewers report that the wells to rest passengers’ feet are a little cramped because the round shape of the body leaves less room at the bottom. The designers decided to use butterfly doors that open upward, which work better with a curved body, rather than conventional doors that open sideways, that work better with cars that have flat sides. However, swinging the doors upward means that there needs to be more side space around the Aptera when parking. To keep the curved shape of the body that is more aerodynamic, the designers had to divide the side windows with a crossbar, that obstructs the view of the driver. The lower-side windows can be rolled down, but the upper-side windows are fixed, which makes it hard to pass large objects like bags of food through the windows. The seats in the Aptera sit lower to the ground than in most of today’s cars, and getting into the car takes some practice. People who have ridden in the car recommend sitting down butt first, and then swinging the feet into the car, rather trying to step into the seat like in a normal car. To minimize drag, the designers made the rear view mirrors as small as allowed by U.S. regulations, and added two screens over the steering yoke with rear views from the two sides of the car.
Video of a 6’4″ man getting into the Aptera Alpha prototype. Notice the curved shape of the body and the butteryfly doors with side windows divided by a sidebar.
Only having one wheel in the rear cuts down on the drag, but it also forces the two front wheels to be placed wider apart to maintain stability. The Aptera is 7’4″ (222 cm) wide in the front, which is 20 inches more than the average car, which is 5’8″ (173 cm) wide. This won’t be a problem in the U.S. where the most popular vehicle is the Ford F-150 pickup, which is 8’0″ wide (244 cm) with its mirrors extended, but the Aptera will be harder to export to Europe and Asia where streets and parking spots are narrower. The wide-set front wheels give the Aptera a wider turning radius than most cars. Reviewers also report that that they can’t see the edges of the passenger-side front wheel when driving, so drivers used to narrower cars are likely to scuff up the front wheel pants, because they misjudge their width. The Aptera has replaceable bumpers made of EVA foam on the bottom of the wheel pants that are designed to handle bumps and scraps as new drivers become accustomed to the car’s extra width.
Aptera Motors’ quest for efficiency led the design team to make the car as light as possible, since a lighter vehicle requires less energy to move. The Aptera Launch Edition will weigh 2200 lbs, which is half the weight of the average new American automobile, which weighed 4329 lbs in 2022. Compared to the Aptera Launch Edition, the Tesla Model Y weighs 85% – 109% more, has 45% – 91% more battery capacity, and has 11% – 20% less range (depending on the variant).
One of the ways that the Aptera eliminates weight is by using large composite body panels instead of metal. The Aptera body structure is made of six large pieces of carbon fiber sheet molding compound (CF-SMC), which are reinforced with a steel roll cage. Aptera co-CEO Chris Anthony asserts: “As for strength, the composites are very strong. In our last roof crush strength (test), our body had the highest roof crush strength of any passenger car on the road.”
Unlike traditional carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) construction, which is a slow process of laying down successive layers of carbon fiber plies and binding them with epoxy resin, CF-SMC uses chopped carbon fibers in compression molding, which only takes 2 to 3 minutes to set at around 150 °C, so it is suitable for high-volume production. The tub of the Aptera is one of the largest CF-SMC production pieces in the world. These CF-SMC parts are glued together with outer-facing glass fiber (GF-SMC) parts. The weight reduction of using composite materials is substantial, considering that CF-SMC weights 1.37 – 1.6 g/cm³ and GF-SMC weights 1.8 – 2.0 g/cm³, compared to 2.7 g/cm³ for aluminum and 7.8 g/cm³ for steel.
Aptera’s inner CF-SMC parts in black with the outer fiber glass parts in white at JEC World 2024
Of course, the Aptera is hardly the first car to use carbon fiber to reduce its weight. Carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) components have been used in Formula 1 racecars since 1975. BMW pioneered the large-scale use of CFRP in mass-produced cars, starting with the release of the i3 in 2013. The problem is that CFRP as a material in cars costs roughly 20 times more than steel and 10 times more than aluminum.
The short carbon fibers in CF-SMC make it less strong and stiff than the long continuous fibers with the same orientation in CFRP, but CF-SMC parts are substantially faster and cheaper to manufacture, and CF-SMC has good flow in molds, so it can form complex shapes that can replace many separate components. The 2003 Dodge Viper Convertible pioneered the use CF-SMC in the automotive industry, with nine different CF-SMC components in its fender support, windshield pillars and inner door structure. However, use of CF-SMC as a body material has mostly been limited to expensive supercars. The CPC Group which supplies the CF-SMC body parts for the Aptera is trying to demonstrate with the solar car that large structural body panels made of CF-SMC can work in inexpensive, mass-market cars. Just like Tesla’s use of aluminum alloy “gigacasting” is now being widely copied by many companies in auto manufacturing, Aptera’s use of large-sized CF-SMC structural body components could spark a similar paradigm shift in the industry toward making lighter composite vehicles.
In seeking to reduce the weight, Aptera engineers simplified the design and eliminated many components found in a typical car. For example, the car eliminates external door handles by using a RFID card or mobile app plus a knock-knock sequence to open the doors. Most of the buttons and knobs found in a typical car are replaced with virtual controls on a central touchscreen, which can be accessed by both the driver and passenger. There are no window controls on the inside of the door, so passengers have to reach for the central touchscreen to roll down the windows. There is a zipped bag to hold papers in place of a glove box. The heating/cooling vents in the dashboard are replaced with vents around the touchscreen. The simple cloth seats and lack of creature comforts may appeal to engineers who can appreciate the efficiency, but Aptera’s minimalist approach won’t appeal to some consumers.
The minimalist cockpit in the Aptera with as few physical controls as possible. Notice the heating/cooling vents around the center touchscreen, the zipped bag to hold papers in place of a glove box and the lack of window controls on the doors.
A conventional electrical system runs the wires directly from the central processor to all the controls (locks, windows, lights, fans, sensors, etc.) in the car. Instead, the Aptera engineers designed a zonal architecture, which is semi-decentralized and more modular to reduce the weight of the wiring harness from 90 to 30 lbs. The architecture contains nine Point of Use Controllers (PoUC) connected by five Local Interconnect Network (LIN) buses, which is a simple 20 kbps serial communication protocol that runs on a single 12V wire. LIN buses are lighter and more energy efficient than conventional CAN buses, which require 2 or 4 wires, more complex microcontrollers and typically run at 125, 250 or 500 kbps.
Aptera’s zonal architecture with 9 point of use controllers (PoUC) and 5 LIN buses, powered by an absorbent glass mat (AGM) battery.
Aptera Motor’s second design goal of lowering the capital costs of automobile manufacturing is less appreciated than its first goal of efficiency, but it is also fundamental to determining the design of the car. The determination of Aptera’s co-CEOs, Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony, that they can create their aerodynamic solar car without needing to raise billions of dollars from venture Capitalists is based on their bitter experience watching the first iteration of their Aptera company fail, because it couldn’t raise enough funds to produce the car.
Fambro founded Aptera in January 2006 and hired Anthony to serve as the company’s COO due to his experience creating composite wake boats as the CEO of Epic Boats. In 2008, investors in the startup company pressured Fambro and Anthony to hire automotive veterans from Detroit to run the company. The new management spent years lobbying the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) to get a low-interest loan to begin manufacturing the Aptera. When the DoE projected that there wasn’t enough demand for a 3-wheeled, two-seat car, the management switched the design to a 4-wheeled, 4-seat sedan. The company finally folded in Dec. 2011, after Aptera failed to raise $80 million in private capital demanded by the DoE in order to get a $150 million loan from the government. In 2012, Zhejiang Jonway Group bought the assets of the bankrupt company in 2012, but also gave up on the car in 2014.
When Fambro and Anthony bought the intellectual property for the Aptera and refounded the company in March 2019, they determined to take an unconventional path to production. Fambro stated in an interview: The whole way that Aptera builds this vehicle is different than how other people do it. We have less than 10 parts for the BinC [body in carbon]. We have so many fewer tools. We have almost an order magnitude lower tooling cost, and so everything about how we build this vehicle, how we will launch production, requires far less capital by design, because we made the company, we made the vehicle, that way. We set out to make it that way. Now if we had set out to build a conventional steel vehicle with all of the attendant parts and things necessary on the assembly line, then we would have had to raise billions of dollars as well to get in production, but we chose, we purposely chose not to go that route. We leveraged all of Chris’s thinking from his boat manufacturing history and our collective experience together to say we have to find a different way. We have to find a way that needs an order of magnitude less capital.
The Aptera uses a modular design where almost all of its submodules are fabricated by outside suppliers, which dramatically lowers the cost of the final assembly plant. Aptera’s factory in Carlsbad, California consists of just 14 assembly stations, that do a total of 136 assembly steps. Each station in the Aptera factory will take roughly 12 minutes to do 9 or 10 assembly steps. Aptera is already validating its assembly line in the manufacturing of 10 production-intent prototypes that will be used for testing and promotion. Because very little labor is required to assemble the cars, Aptera Motors can operate in expensive California. The company plans to open 6 to 8 assembly plants by 2030 which are located around the world close to its customers.
Aptera completed its first production-intent vehicle on its validation assembly line on Mar 3, 2026.
This reliance on outside companies to lower its capital costs is the opposite strategy of other startup automakers, like Tesla and BYD, which have in-sourced their production in order to reduce their costs and speed up their R&D, since components produced in house can be modified more easily and quickly. Aptera Motors, however, has focused on getting to production with minimal startup costs, so it only handles a few key areas in house, which give the company some core competencies.
The San Diego-based startup does its own solar panel lamination and created its own maximum power point tracking (MPPT) firmware and designed its own battery management system (BMS) to get the most power from its panels, which has allowed Aptera Motors to become an automotive solar provider. Aptera Motors also developed the software for its customer user interface which uses Python and QT/QML in Linux, plus it designed the circuit boards and wrote the firmware for the 14 electronic control units (ECU’s) in the car, in order to lower its costs and make the vehicle as energy efficient as possible. However, Aptera will support Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in order to get access to a wide variety of apps for its infotainment system. In addition, Aptera Motors is partnering with Comma.ai, so that its open-source Openpilot can provide an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) for the car.
I suspect that Aptera Motors originally designed its circuit boards, solar charging system and battery management system in house, because it couldn’t find an adequate outside supplier for its requirements. However, doing these tasks in house has given the company a strategic advantage over other automakers in terms of solar charging and energy efficiency, plus the flexibility to change its software and circuitry more quickly than other automakers. Aside from solar panel lamination, the other things that Aptera Motors decided to do in-house don’t add to the capital costs of manufacturing, and in fact, writing their own software and firmware probably allowed the company to cut its manufacturing costs, since they could choose components that cost less and were more energy efficient than outside suppliers might have chosen.
What is surprising is that Aptera has managed to do all this work in-house with just the $157 million in capital, that the company has raised since it was refounded in March 2019. Aptera is currently building 10 production-intent vehicles on its validation assembly line. Aptera’s 2025 financial report (p. 36) estimates that the company needs an “additional $45 million to $50 million to complete vehicle validation and prepare for low volume production”, which should take 12 to 18 months, meaning low-volume production will start in mid-to-late 2027 if the company can secure the capital. Aptera has secured a $75 million equity line of credit from New Circle Capital that it can use. Plus, the company needs to spend an additional $140 to $160 million to ramp to high-volume production of 20,000 vehicles per year at its 77,000 square foot factory in Carlsbad, California.
These capital costs are peanuts compared to what other automotive startups have spent to get to production. Rivian took 12 years to get to production and raised a total of $10.5 billion in capital before it started producing its R1T pickup. Lucid took 14 years to get production and raised a total of $5.7 billion in capital before starting production of its Lucid Air sedan. In comparison, Aptera is currently on track to take roughly 8 years to get to low-volume production for a total capital cost of roughly $210 million.
Only Tesla managed to do it faster and cheaper, spending $145 million in 5 years to start producing the Roadster in early 2008, but it took a major shortcut of using Lotus to produce its gliders (i.e. vehicles without a powertrain). Tesla designed the motor, inverter and battery for the Roadster, but outsourced the manufacturing to external companies, in order to avoid building an expensive factory. In contrast, Rivian invested $750 million in revamping an existing auto factory in Normal, Illinois, and Lucid’s factory in Casa Grande, Arizona cost $700 million to build.
The problem was that Tesla’s production of the Roadster was not scalable, since Lotus only agreed to provide 2500 gliders. Tesla was basically assembling each vehicle by hand and paying for expensive low-volume production, which is why Tesla had to raise the base price of the Roadster from $98,500 to $120,000. Tesla’s second vehicle, the Model S, was mostly produced in house using conventional auto manufacturing with metal stamping and body painting at GM-Toyota’s old NUMMI factory in Fremont, California. Tesla spent $649.0 million on R&D and $486.2 million on capital expenditures between 2008 and 2012 when it was developing the Model S.
In contrast, the Aptera is designed to eliminate metal working and body painting, which are the two most expensive components of auto manufacturing. By designing a composite body made of a few large CF-SMC and GF-SMC pieces, Aptera Motors was able to eliminate the need for expensive metal working equipment altogether in its assembly factory. Using CF-SMC that easily flows into molds with complex shapes gets rid of hundreds of metal pieces in the car body and thousands of manufacturing steps involving stamping, welding, riveting, brazing and polishing. Metal working in an auto factory requires a large labor force with thousands of hours of training and hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment. Unlike working with metal, which introduces minor variations and tolerances, once the molding is perfected, composite components should fit perfectly every time. Using jigs and glue to bond together a small number of composites pieces to form the body is far simpler and much cheaper for a startup auto company than learning how to work metal. Because composite parts are light, with Aptera’s heaviest body part only weighing 75 lbs, the workers can easily move and assemble the body parts without using expensive hoists and robots.
The downside of using composites is the fact that making the molds is very expensive and it costs a lot to change the molds. Tweaking the design and trying out new designs is often cheaper with metal, but making the molds for CF-SMC and GF-SMC components proves its worth when moving to production, where it lowers the per unit costs.
Another design choice which will save Aptera Motors hundreds of millions of dollars in capital costs is the decision to use a wrap instead of painting its body to protect the composites from UV degradation. A modern automotive paint shop is extremely expensive and typically consumes 70% of the energy in an auto factory and roughly 30% of the total costs of an automobile. Paint emissions make it hard for auto plants to get governmental approval, especially in places like Southern California that have strict regulations and are already dealing with unhealthy levels of ozone and particle pollution. The downside of using a wrap is that it doesn’t last as long as paint, but Aptera is using STEK paint protection film (PPF) which is 4 times thicker than a normal vinyl wrap and comes with a 10 year guarantee. A STEK representative interviewed by the Aptera Owners Club says that the damage after 10 years is mostly due to discoloration, so it probably won’t be necessary to change the wrap if Aptera owners don’t mind the color fade from being out in the sun.
Another way that Aptera is minimizing its costs to get to production is by delaying the R&D for improved efficiency until after it is shipping vehicles and can afford to invest in improving the vehicle. Aptera Motors publicly announced in May 2025 that it is planning to use the Inmotive Ingear two-speed transmission that improves powertrain efficiency by 7% -12%, but decided to hold off on its implementation. Likewise, Aptera employees have talked publicly about using passive belly cooling and a heat pump, but the company decided to use a conventional HVAC system and resistive heating in its Launch Edition, which is less energy efficient. Engineering custom automotive heat pumps like Tesla does is expensive and best left for when Aptera Motors becomes a high-volume manufacturer. Likewise, Aptera Motors appears to have decided to postpone motor testing for a later date in order to get to production as fast as possible with a proven drivetrain. The company decided to switch the Launch Edition from all-wheel drive using three Elaphe in-wheel hub motors to front-wheel drive using a single Vitesco EMR3 motor on the front axle. Presumably, testing of the Elaphe hub motor on the rear wheel of the future all-wheel drive version and testing of the EMR4, which is 5% more efficient and 25% lighter that the older EMR3 motor, will have to await for a future version of the Aptera.
Another innovative way that Aptera saves on its capital costs is by using a modular design and supporting the right to repair. The modular design makes it easier to assemble the Aptera, but it also makes it easier to replace components to repair the car. Aptera Motors promises to provide instructions for how to repair its vehicle, help owners find service shops in their area, and ship out replacement parts within 24 hours. It remains to be seen what parts of the car Aptera Motors will allow owners to repair themselves, since working around high voltage drivetrains is dangerous, but Aptera is promising to be much less restrictive of third-party repair than other automakers. Aptera’s policy of right to repair will reduce the number of service centers that Aptera needs to open to support its vehicles. It will also allows Aptera to sell its vehicles in areas where a traditional automaker might not, because there aren’t enough customers to justify supporting the market.
Of course, many legacy automakers and their dealers view services and access to replacement parts as profit centers which they want to protect, so right to repair, easy access to parts, and modular design to simplify repair make no sense to the legacy auto industry. However, the Aptera will have very few moving parts and will require little maintenance work compared to a traditional internal combustion vehicle, so the company is unlikely to make a profit on its service centers, so it doesn’t make sense for Aptera Motors to invest as much capital into them.
The outer GF-SMC parts on the Aptera are more tolerant of minor impacts than the metal bodies on conventional cars and it is easy to repair glass fiber. It is also easy to re-wrap the Aptera to cover up cosmetic damage to the vehicle. If the body damage is structural, the service center will need to replace the composite parts, which doesn’t require expensive body repair equipment and extensive training like metal body work.
In line with the environmental goals of the car, the company pledges: “Aptera vehicles are designed for long-term usability and adaptability. To support this, we plan to introduce features like over-the-air updates and an Aptera app integration, allowing owners to access new capabilities and improvements as our technology advances.” If the Aptera body is properly wrapped to protect it from UV radiation, it won’t wear out and oxidize over time like a metal body. The modularized components that will degrade over time, such as batteries, solar panels and PPF wraps, can potentially be replaced and upgraded in the future to keep old Apteras on the road. Aptera Motors promises that, “replacement of a severely damaged solar panel will be quick and hassle-free, just like replacing a windshield.” What this means is that the Aptera could represent a paradigm shift in terms of the sustainability of the auto industry. The conventional wisdom that cars get replaced every 100,000 miles could potentially become every million miles with cars designed like the Aptera. The company registered as a Social Benefit Corporation in 2025, so that “every major decision we make is guided by the long-term well-being of our communities and our planet.” The Aptera will set the standard in the new solar vehicle market that other auto companies will have to compete against, so they will be pressured to make sustainable, longer-lasting vehicles as well.
Aptera Motors’ focus on efficiency and lowering its capital costs has huge implications for the auto industry which has been focused on making bigger and more powerful vehicles for the last 4 decades. The American auto market has switched from 80% sedans/wagons in 1980 to 81% SUVs and pickups in 2024. A 2023 report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) notes that the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about 4 inches wider, 10 inches longer, 8 inches taller and 1000 pounds heavier over the last 30 years. The increasing use of electronics and infotainment systems in vehicles, combined with the transition from internal combustion to hybrids and electric motors has dramatically increased both the manufacturing and capital costs of automobiles.
In contrast, Aptera decided to simplify and minimize its vehicle to improve efficiency and reduce its capital costs by outsourcing to suppliers, modularizing to reduce final assembly work, using composite bodies to simplify manufacturing, wrapping to eliminate painting, and promoting right to repair and 3rd party repair to reduce service costs. These are course corrections that are desperately needed by an auto industry, which is reeling from rising costs, growing debt levels and falling demand because vehicles have grown too expensive for most middle-class consumers.
One of the major problems with the auto industry is the fact that legacy auto companies are reluctant to make the transition from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles, because the companies making EVs don’t tend to make a profit until they get to high volumes. Tesla, BYD and Li Auto make a profit, and Leapmotor, Nio and Xpeng started being profitable in the last year, but it took all of them many painful years of losses to get enough scale to overcome their high capital costs and obtain enough economies of scale to switch their books from red to black. Battery Materials Review posits that an automaker needs to produce about 100,000 EVs per quarter in order to overcome the high fixed costs to become profitable. The Seres Group managed to get quickly to the high volumes needed for profits by partnering with Huawei to use its tech in Seres’ AITO branded EVs. Xiaomi followed a similar path to profitability using its own tech. Western tech companies, however, generally license their tech widely (e.g. Intel Mobileye, Nvidia DRIVE, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay), so most automakers are unlikely to gain a tech advantage that leapfrogs their competition as Seres did with Huawei’s tech.
Aptera Motors, however, doesn’t believe that it needs to sell high volumes in order to become a profitable business. Due to its low capital requirements, Aptera’s VP of Finance Blake Ryan estimates that the company only needs to sell 6000 vehicles per year in order to break even. Given that there are now 55,000 preorders for the Aptera, the company will struggle to produce enough vehicles to meet the demand, but it doesn’t anticipate having the same problems becoming a profitable business that have plagued other EV startups.
Even if Ryan is underestimating the capital costs of production, it is clear that Aptera envisions a far more financially viable path than the one is being pursued by most automakers. The legacy automakers, which are already saddled with tremendous debts, are attempting to make massive new investments in the development of electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles. They know that the market for their existing ICE models is disappearing, but they are reluctant to fully embrace electrification, because they don’t see a clear path to profitability when they are unlikely to ever reach the necessary volumes to make profits like BYD and Tesla. For legacy automakers like Toyota, Volkswagen and GM, which are already carrying $269.33 billion, $230.66 billion and $131.31 billion in debt, respectively, borrowing billions of dollars more to develop new EV and AV models is one more step down a treacherous path fraught with long-term financial risks.
If Aptera can prove to the auto industry that its way of making vehicles works over the next couple years as it begins production, it would become a model for how legacy automakers can enter new EV markets without driving themselves deeper into debt. Following a similar low-capital strategy to produce new models of EVs could help legacy automakers make the transition as their existing ICE markets collapse. However, they may be too set in their ways to be able to adopt Aptera’s radical way of making cars. Far more likely is that other startups will follow Aptera’s example, and it is among the startups where new ideas almost always arise first, not among the incumbent firms.
Of course, Aptera’s method of avoiding capital costs has limits, because it is essentially transferring those costs to its suppliers, who are going to charge a markup for their services. As Aptera’s business grows and it needs greater volumes, the company can decide where it makes sense to invest in its own production capacity and where it doesn’t want to develop that expertise. For example, Aptera may decide to start making its own wiring harnesses or doing composite molding in house in the future, but the important thing is that it can decide when and where that investment makes sense for the company as it grows.
A number of critics have questioned whether there is enough demand for Aptera’s unconventional vehicle, which only appeals to a niche audience. A Jalopnik opinion piece critiques the solar car: “beyond that uniqueness, though, I’m not sure who this car appeals to.” Commenting on the Jalopnik piece, many on the r/ApteraMotor subreddit express similar doubts about the market for the car. Kodos1978 opines: “It is obvious from the MKBHD video that the Aptera is too compromised for the mass market. Few will want to live with this in its current state. Much of the compromise is inherent to the design.” RDW-Development agrees: “The fact of the matter is that this is, and always has been, a niche non-mainstream vehicle. The market is probably a few thousand per year at best – not millions.” Strange_Cockroach328 concurs that there is limited market for the solar car: “Aptera is too late to the party, their time window has expired. In 3-5 years [there] will be many good 20 to $25,000 EV’s for sale. Aptera will never reach economies of scale to compete with GM, Tesla, BYD, etc. They might produce 1,000 cars over the next 2 years, produced on a semi-handmade assembly line, but each car will likely cost $100,000+ a vehicle to produce.”
Nonetheless, if Ryan’s projections are correct, the company can do quite well at low volumes, even in a tiny niche market. Fortunately, Aptera’s market appears to be much larger than these critics imagine. Just like Tesla proved that the market for electric vehicles is much larger than most people could have imagined in July 2006 when Tesla started taking preorders for an electric two-seat sports car, Aptera is likely to prove that the market for solar vehicles is much larger than most people imagine.
Business Strategist Tim McNerney believes Aptera will create a new market, just like Honda created a new market with their efficient, easy-to-use motorcycles for “nice people”. McNerney argues: While the potential sales of an automobile that gets 350 MPGe is hardly niche, it is niche products that launch successful companies that later expand their product line… Launching with a so-called niche product means that you are creating a new market. There is no established company that has a product that can compete with you, and with their embedded, outdated mindset they are currently unable to create one until they are able to copy from someone else’s success.
A survey by San Francisco State University found that 19% of people surveyed said that they were “likely to purchase” the Aptera after being shown a photo of the car, and that percentage jumped to 40% among 18 to 24 year old respondents. The survey found that 49% preferred the Aptera over the Tesla Model 3, 47% preferred the Aptera over the Nissan Leaf, and 49% preferred the Aptera over the Chevy Bolt EV.
It is commonly assumed that people won’t buy two-seater cars, because they represent a miniscule portion of the auto market. However, almost all the two-seater cars on the market today are either sports cars, like the Mazda MX-5 Miata and Porsche 718, or hobbled city cars, like the Smart EQ Fortwo that only has a range of 83 miles. There are almost no two-seaters on the market for drivers who just want a ordinary car. Nonetheless, the average trip by car in the U.S. only carries 1.4 occupants, according to the 2022 National Household Travel Survey.
It is also commonly assumed that people will only buy two-seaters as secondary cars, but 63.7% of American households only consist of 1 or 2 people, meaning that there are many people who only use the back seats of their cars for hauling stuff. The Aptera’s trunk is excellent for hauling stuff, since it measures 70″ (178 cm) long, 47″ (119 cm) wide and 20″ (51 cm) tall, which provides 32.5 cubic feet of cargo space. In comparison, the trunk of a sedan typically has 12 – 16 cubic feet of storage space and the back seats of a car typically have 35 – 40 cubic feet of space. While the back seats of cars provide more vertical storage space, the trunk of the Aptera is long enough to carry surf boards and bicycles, so Aptera’s storage space is generally more useful. In addition, the Aptera seats can be pushed forward when parked, and two people can sleep in the back. In fact, Aptera Motors is planning to sell a tent cover over the opened rear hatch for people who want to go camping.
The idea of a self-charging car which gains range when parked in the sun is very appealing, especially when considering how the current boom in AI and data centers promises to drive up the price of electricity in the future. In the U.S., the average residential price of electricity has risen 37% in six years, from ¢13.16/kWh in 2020 to ¢18.05/kWh in April, 2026. When the weather is sunny, ordinary driving around town with the Aptera should be mostly free, and only when driving long distances with it be necessary to pay for charging. The roughly 10,000 free solar miles that an Aptera provides in a year would require 3000 kWh to drive in a typical EV that consumes 300 Wh/mile and would cost $542 if paying the national residential average of ¢18.05/kWh. However, in California where the residential average is ¢33.75/kWh, it would cost $1013. Those savings are even greater if some of those miles were powered by commercial charging stations, whose electricity typically costs double the residential rate. If the Aptera is owned for 15 years, that means $8130 in savings over the typical EV if paying ¢18.05/kWh, but the savings will be even greater if the price of electricity keeps rising 6% per year in the future.
Even when having to pay for charging, the Aptera will be substantially cheaper than an ordinary EV, because it needs a third of the electricity of a typical EV to go the same distance. At highway speeds, the energy savings of the Aptera will be even greater, because its aerodynamic shape allows it to slip through the air where a conventionally-shaped car has to use brute force to push its way through the air. Drag for automobiles increases as the square of the velocity (v2), and the power required to overcome that drag increases as the cube of velocity (v3). Because Aptera generates so little drag, squaring that drag to go from 35 mph to 70 mph results in little extra power expenditure compared to a conventional EV.
Because the Aptera is so efficient at highway speeds, it will arguably be one of the best EVs for long-distance driving. However, the car is currently limited by its fast charging capability. Aptera Motors promises that the Launch Edition will support NACS fast charging between 40 and 60 kW, but it plans to implement 100 kW charging in the future. With the 44 kWh battery in the Launch Edition, charging 70% of the battery’s capacity for 280 miles of range would take 37 minutes at 50 kW or 18.5 minutes at 100 kW. Considering that it takes about 25 minutes to charge 70% of the Tesla Model Y’s battery at a Supercharger V3, the Aptera needs to support 100 kW charging in order to be competitive with other EVs on the market that can fast charge at 250 kW or 350 kW.
The Aptera will also be very appealing for renters and people who can’t install Level 2 (240V) charging in their homes. Many renters don’t have access to a plug where they park, and if they do, it is usually a 110V outlet in the U.S. Installing a Level 2 charger typically costs between $700 and $1500, but some homes require installing a new electrical panel and long conduits, which can drive the cost as high as $5000. Fortunately, a standard 110V outlet in the U.S. can charge a substantial number of miles on the Aptera due to its energy efficiency. With a 110V 15A outlet, it will take roughly 34 hours to fully charge the 44 kWh battery in the Launch Edition, but 142 miles of range can be charged in 12 hours, which is enough for most people. For the times when people need faster charging, they can take the Aptera to any NACS charging station.
Another market segment which will be interested in the Aptera are fleet operators. For companies that need to send their employees out on the road, the Aptera can dramatically reduce their costs due to its low operating and maintenance costs. Aptera Motors estimated in June 2024 that the annual operating expenses of the Aptera for fleet operators would only be $386, compared to $1305 for the Chevy Bolt and $4923 for the Toyota Camry. The Aptera’s total cost of ownership over a 10 year period was estimated to be 61% lower than the Camry and 35% lower than the Bolt. Presumably, those TCO numbers were based on the base model, which used to be priced at $25,900, but even if the final price of the base model is closer to $35,000, the Aptera should be substantially cheaper for fleet operators than other vehicles. An important factor for fleet operators is the fact that they won’t have to make major upgrades to their electrical infrastructure if they use the Aptera, because it can self-charge from the sun and use ordinary 110V outlets, whereas charging a large fleet of typical EVs would require 240V 50A chargers and an expensive high voltage connection from the power company.
Co-CEO Chris Anthony predicts: We can see a lot of service industry, a lot of checking meters, a lot of security, a lot of things like that being just the perfect place for Aptera, and we think our three wheel vehicle will evolve into more utilitarian platforms. We will take out the passenger seat,… we’ll have a rear hatch that has more storage, possibly open like a clam shell so you can get packages in and out, deliveries in and out. Think of Uber Eats, FedEx, utility guys and security guys. We think in the long term that we could be selling more fleet vehicles than we are selling consumer vehicles.
Critics worry that demand will dry up for the Aptera after it runs out of early adopters who are passionate about the vehicle. Michael Barnard opines that Aptera, like other three wheelers, “suffers from a fundamental lack of appeal beyond niche early adopters.” When the Aptera was first announced on December 4, 2020, it did receive a rush of preorders. The first 330 “Paradigm” spots were filled in the first day, and the Aptera received 3000 preorders in the first week or 381 preorders per day. For the following 70 days, the Aptera got 57 preorders per day, but for the rest of the first year, preorders dropped to 25 per day. The preorders picked up to over 60 per day in 2022, then dropped to 40 per day in 2023. Since September of 2023, when Aptera reported 45,000 preorders, there has been a noticable decrease to roughly 10 preorders per day. These numbers do indicate a drop in demand from the initial rush. However, what is notable is how steady the demand has been for the last three years at roughly 10 preorders per day, despite the repeated delays as Aptera Motors struggled to raise the capital to start production.
Now that the company has a clear path to low-volume production by either issuing more stock or using New Circle Capital’s equity line of credit, the number of preorders per day are likely to pick up again as more people become convinced that the car will be produced. Once the Aptera starts shipping, the company should have no trouble issuing more stock to raise the extra capital needed for high-volume production.
The question is whether the other auto companies will pay attention when Aptera Motors demonstrates that it is possible to bring a new type of vehicle to market with very little capital. The three-wheeled Aptera is unlikely to convince most of the industry to follow its example. Tesla’s Roadster did inspire GM to develop the Chevy Volt, but most of the auto industry ignored electric vehicles until Tesla released a mainstream car, the Model S in 2012, that demonstrated the market demand for electric vehicles. In the same way, most automakers are likely to treat the three-wheeled Aptera as a niche oddity that they can safely ignore.
Nonetheless, Aptera Motors’ next vehicle is likely to be a four-wheeled solar sedan that will have more mainstream appeal. Aptera Motors should have the scale and brand recognition by that point to sell the model widely. Just like the Tesla Model S sedan shifted the auto industry toward electrification, an Aptera sedan could convince the auto industry that super-efficient solar vehicles with composite bodies are a growing market segment that they need to address. The fact that automakers can enter the new solar vehicle market without huge capital expenditures will make that new market doubly attractive, since they won’t need to invest in expensive metal working equipment and paint shops.
Note: I have no financial interest in Aptera Motors. I have no stock in the company, no relationship with the company’s employees, nor have I ordered the company’s products.
On January 19, 2026, New Jersey’s governor Phil Murphy used his last day in office to sign into law the controversial bill S4834/A6235 that will give New Jersey the most restrictive regulation of e-bikes in the nation. This new law is shocking bad, not only in its regulation, but simply in terms of its drafting […]
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On January 19, 2026, New Jersey’s governor Phil Murphy used his last day in office to sign into law the controversial bill S4834/A6235 that will give New Jersey the most restrictive regulation of e-bikes in the nation. This new law is shocking bad, not only in its regulation, but simply in terms of its drafting and the contradictions in its language. I don’t have any idea how law enforcement and the judiciary system will be able to interpret this law, when it has so many loopholes and contradictions.
This is not my job and nobody is paying me to spend my time researching e-bikes and their regulation. Nonetheless, I was so alarmed by this bad legislation that I felt like I had to do something to try to stop this heavy-handed regulation that would have such pernicious effects on society and the environment.
Then, I looked up the email addresses of every single member of the New Jersey Assembly and Senate, which isn’t an easy task, since the web server for the New Jersey legislator is down, so I had to google each of the 120 members of the New Jersey legislature. Then, I sent the following email to each legislator: ——————————————————————– Date: Sunday, March 8, 2026 6:16 PM Subject: Problems that need to be fixed in the new e-bike law S4834/A6235
Dear Senator, I sat down and read the e-bike bill S4834/A6235 that was signed into law on January 26th, 2026. I was shocked by the number of contradictions and glaring holes in the new law. The new legal categories of e-bikes are so contradictory, that they can be challenged in court, and law enforcement and judges will have a hard time knowing how to interpret the law.
Even worse, the new law is based on the unfounded assumptions that: (1) e-bikes have greater injury and fatality rates than manual bicycles, (2) e-bike riders are causing large amounts of harm to others, so they need to carry liability insurance to protect society, and (3) large numbers of youth are getting injured and killed by riding e-bikes, but there simply isn’t empirical evidence to support any of these beliefs.
This new law imposes heavy costs on e-bike riders. I calculate that the owner of an e-bike will have to spend $162 in NJ DMV fees, plus roughly $1500 in liability insurance over a 10 year period just to comply with the new law, which effectively imposes a 111% tax on the typical e-bike which costs $1500. The end result is that the bill will dissuade most people from using e-bikes in the state, which will lead to higher transportation costs, more social exclusion of non-drivers, more greenhouse gas emissions, more traffic congestion, more obesity and more health problems. Even worse, many people will abandon their e-bike in favor of an automobile, motorcycle or e-moto, since those modes of transportation involve the same amount of regulatory hassle as owning a class 2 or 3 e-bike, but they cause far more fatalities. The upshot is that the new law will lead to more traffic deaths, which undermines the very intent of the law.
At the very least, S4834/A6235 needs to be amended, but in my opinion the new law needs to be abolished, because it will make it even harder to address the real problem, which is getting over-powered e-motos off New Jersey roads. I have nothing to do with the e-bike industry, nor do I own an e-bike, but I got so alarmed by negative effects that I see in S4834/A6235, that I wrote a 35 page report, detailing the problems with the text of the bill and my suggestions for how to fix it. The report explains the empirical data about e-bike injuries and fatalities in the US and covers the socioeconomic, environmental and health benefits of e-bikes.
See: “New Jersey’s strict regulation of e-bikes is poorly conceived and not justified by the data” https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2026/02/20/nj-regulation-e-bikes/ Please read the report, but if you don’t have time, at least read the final section “Conclusion and Policy Recommendations,” which addresses how e-bikes should be regulated in New Jersey.
Best regards, Amos B. Batto Email: amosbatto [at] yahoo.com Telegram: @amosbatto Cel/Whatsapp: +591-76585096 636 E. Seminary St. Greencastle, IN 46135 —————————————————————————-
At first, I emailed each legislator individually between March 5 and 8, but after writing the first 30 emails, I started including 9 legislators in the recipient list for each email to save time. I purposely only included one link in the email to avoid the spam filters.
I got two automated replies from Senator Andrew Zwicker and Assemblyman Mike Venezia, which tells me that they probably don’t respond to hardly any of the emails that they receive.
Senator Zwicker automated response was: ————————- Thank you for contacting my office. I welcome the opportunity to connect with you.
Due to the high volume of correspondence I receive each day, it may take some time to receive a written response. Please know that if you are writing with a position on a piece of legislation or policy issue, it has been recorded. ————————–
Assemblyman Venezia’s automated response was: ——————————— Thank you for reaching out!
Your input is important to us and will help us better serve our constituents. ————————
Then, I didn’t get a response from a single New Jersey legislator for the next week. Finally, seven days later, I got this response from Assemblyman Andrew Macurdy’s office to my email that I sent out on March 5th: ———————- Date: 3/12/2026 1:28 pm Subject: Re: Problems that need to be fixed in the new e-bike law S4834/A6235
Good Afternoon Amos, Thank you for contacting the Office of Assemblyman Andrew Macurdy regarding the recent legislation affecting pedal assisted e-bikes. We appreciate your engagement and the fact that you have taken the time to reach out and make your voice heard.
It is important and helpful for us to know how issues like this affect constituents across District 21 and across New Jersey. Please be assured that I have shared your comments with the Assemblyman and with our policy staff to ensure that your perspective is considered moving forward.
Sincerely, MacKenzie Fitzgerald Constituent Services and Outreach Coordinator Office of Assemblyman Andrew Macurdy | District 21 Email: asmmacurdy@njleg.org Phone: 908-679-8499 ———————————————
Then, there was radio silence for the next two weeks, until I got this belated response from Senator Vin Gopal, 22 days after I sent him an email: ———————————— Date: 3/30/2026 1:57 pm Subject: Re: Problems that need to be fixed in the new e-bike law S4834/A6235
Good Afternoon, Thank you for your email. Senator Gopal values your input and we appreciate you taking the time to contact the office about S4834, which would regulate certain electric e-bikes.
Thank you again for taking the time to share your thoughts about this legislation with Senator Gopal’s Office. Please do not hesitate to reach out in the future, should you have any questions or concerns you would like to discuss.
Sincerely, Olivia K. Legislative Aide Office of Senator Gopal, Assemblywomen Donlon & Peterpaul District 11 Legislative Office ———————————————————–
I assume that I won’t get any more responses. I understand that I am not a resident of New Jersey, but I was disheartened by the fact that only 2 legislators’ aides even bothered to respond. The fact that 118 out of 120 New Jersey legislators didn’t respond is an indictment of the state of democracy in the United States. I doubt that a single New Jersey legislator bothered to read a word of my 35 page report, just like I concluded that most of them didn’t even bother to read the text of S4834/A6235 before they voted to approve the bill.
Here is a sample of what I wrote in the report:
Furthermore, it makes no sense for the bill to ban “motorized bicycles” on high-speed roads, but to not ban “low-speed electric bicycles” and manual bicycles on those same roads. Likewise, it makes no sense that the bill bans “low-speed electric bicycles” on public trails with natural surfaces, unless expressly allowed, but “motorized bicycles” are not banned. In other words in the normal classification system, class 1 e-bikes are fine on high-speed roads, but class 2 and 3 are not, and class 2 and 3 are fine on trails, but class 1 are not. One has to wonder whether the legislators who voted for this bill even bothered to read it.
The facile conclusion to be drawn from this example of bad legislation and the failure to respond to my public critique of that bad legislation is that New Jersey legislators are lazy and/or incompetent. The fact that they overwhelmingly voted to approve S4834/A6235 without seeing the obvious contradictions and loopholes in the bill that I spotted immediately after taking 20 minutes to read the bill is frankly astounding.
However, I don’t think that the New Jersey legislature is unique. The deeper conclusion to be drawn from this example of bad legislation is that American democracy is broken. Legislators don’t seem to feel that they should be spending their time studying the bills that they vote for. When they are informed that there are glaring problems in legislation that they just passed, they don’t express any interest in fixing the problems that they created. One has to question the system of incentives under which American legislators are operating when they aren’t spending their time addressing these issues.
Wired charges $250 extra to ship its 60 volt models to the 48 contiguous states in the U.S., plus $75 in shipping insurance, so buyers end up paying $325 for shipping. Other bike sellers take responsibility for fixing any problems if a bike is damaged in transit, but Wired holds its customers responsible, so they […]
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Wired charges $250 extra to ship its 60 volt models to the 48 contiguous states in the U.S., plus $75 in shipping insurance, so buyers end up paying $325 for shipping. Other bike sellers take responsibility for fixing any problems if a bike is damaged in transit, but Wired holds its customers responsible, so they are out of luck if they don’t pay the $75 insurance fee. Wired’s new 72 volt models have increased the shipping by $25, which adds a total of $350 to the sticker price. Wired used to allow its customers to avoid these high shipping fees by picking up their bikes from its warehouse in Mundelein, Illinois, but Wired stopped offering local pickup after some of its bikes were stolen.
Magician is just as bad, charging $350 extra for shipping, although it does offer local pickup at its warehouses in Ontario, California and Las Vegas, Nevada. For people living in the Southwest, it may be worth their time to spend many hours driving to avoid Magician’s outrageous shipping fees. Another new brand, Rabid E-Bikes, which is sold by Generation E-Bikes, also charges $350 for shipping.
While it is totally fair for online bike sellers to charge for shipping, it certainly doesn’t cost Wired, Magician and Rabid $350 to ship their bikes. Wired says that shipping takes 5 to 10 days and Magician says that shipping takes 3 to 7 days in the contiguous U.S., so these companies aren’t paying for expedited shipping. Essentially the high shipping fees are a sneaky way to attract more customers with a lower sticker price. Most people will click to buy the bike thinking it costs $325-$350 less, and then it is harder psychologically to back out of a purchase when they have already made the decision to buy based on a lower price.
I suspect that Wired started charging these high fees because it wanted to advertise that the Wired Freedom cost less than $2000, so high shipping fees were a way to meet that price point, and then Magician and Rabid copied Wired’s shipping fees. These companies do offer a lot of hardware for the price, so it can be argued that we shouldn’t quibble if they have high shipping fees.
However, I think these high shipping fees are an indication of the deceptiveness of these businesses in general. Wired, Magician and Rabid sell e-motos which are designed to look like ordinary e-bikes, but they have motor wattages and maximum throttle speeds that far exceed the legal limits for riding e-bikes on public roads in the U.S. Wired’s web site lists the peak power of its bikes as 4.3 to 10.6 times more powerful than the legal limit of 750 watts in most states. Wired advertises that its Predator has 8000 watts of peak power, 330Nm of torque and goes 55+ mph, yet it looks like a normal e-bike and the company’s name is “Wired Ebikes” and its web address is wiredebikes.com. Likewise, Magician’s company is named “Magician Bicycles, Inc.” and its web site is magicianebikes.com, which advertises: “At Magician Bikes, we build e-bikes for those who seek adventure and performance.”
Wired Warrior with 5000W peak power, 180Nm of torque, 72V battery and 45+ mph
Nobody would have a problem if these companies marketed their products as “e-motos” or “electric motorcycles”, but they deliberately masquerade their products as e-bikes. Wired CEO Steven Goldman essentially admitted in an interview with Scott Hardesty that Wired mimics the look of an ordinary e-bike to get around regulations for higher powered vehicles:
———————- Goldman: Let me be honest with you. My concern is, you know, people say, “Why don’t you put dual crown forks on all your bikes?”
Hardesty: Mhm. It’s so much more comfortable.
Goldman: Maybe. However, my problem is with all of these stringent ebike laws, and codes and ordinances affecting all of us, never did I want to stand out as a e-moto, as a scooter, as a motorcycle. Never. …I wanted my bike always to look like a bicycle. Always.
Magician hasn’t revealed why it designs its products to appear like normal e-bikes, but it seems to operate on the same principals as Wired. Magician is less transparent than Wired, hiding details about its company. The Electrified Latina has published a number of YouTube videos where she airs her suspicions about the way that Magician Bicycles operates (1,2,3,4,5,6). While I don’t want to endorse her accusations about the company, since they are unproven speculation, they do indicate a lack of transparency on the company’s part.
Magician Alpha with 5000W peak power, 200 Nm of torque and a 72 volt battery
These worries about how Wired, Magician and Rabid operate are spurred by the fact that two other companies selling similar products have burned their customers in the last year. David Cleveland’s company, E-Cells, took deposits for its upcoming 72V models, before the company shut down its operations on April 28, 2025, which resulted in its customers losing their money. E-Cells didn’t even formally declare bankruptcy, so it hasn’t been possible for customers to present their claims against the company in a formal bankruptcy proceeding. In a similar vein, Escape Bikes also took deposits for its promised 5000 watt, 72 volt Ranger, yet failed to deliver the bike.
Wired, Magician and Rabid are sold under the legal fiction that they are just for off-road use or in the states of Mississippi and Florida, which do not place a legal limit on the wattage of e-bike motors. However, almost all buyers of these bikes will set them to go as fast as their hardware allows, since there is no reason to pay for their extra power and weight if just intending to ride them with a 20 mph maximum throttle, as mandated by Mississippi and Florida law.
The Wired online order form makes the buyer check the following box when purchasing one of its bikes: [_] I am at least 18 years of age and understand the following: I am purchasing a Power Performance Bike (PPB). Many states and/or local jurisdictions do not consider PPB’s to be ebikes. It is my responsibility to check my own state and local laws prior to riding on public roads. I have read the TOS page and agree.
Likewise, Magician states on its order form: This product is intended for off-road or private property use only. Users are responsible for complying with local laws and regulations.
Similarly, the Rabid order form states: Check with local authorities to ensure compliance with E-Bike laws and regulations in your area.
Essentially, these companies place the onus on buyers to comply with the law, even though they know that almost all of their buyers will ride them on public roads in violation of the law. Although the pictures on their web sites don’t show them being used on public roads, they send their models to dozens of reviewers who publish videos and pictures of them being ridden on public roads. These companies sell their overpowered e-motos with a wink and a nod to their buyers in order to maintain the legal fiction that they don’t know how their products are being used.
Wired, Magician and Rabid aren’t the only companies engaging in deceptive practices. Ride1Up doesn’t try to mislead buyers about the price, since it offers free shipping. However, its web site doesn’t inform buyers about the wattage of its Revv1 series bikes, which will lead many buyers to assume that they are legal on public roads. The Revv1HT (hard tail), Revv1FS (full suspension), Revv1DRT (off-road) models all use the same 52V Bafang RM G0F4 motor, which is nominally a 1000 watt motor. Ride1Up used to label the Revv1HT as having a “750W” motor and the Revv1FS and Revv1DRT as having “1000W” motors, because the Revv1HT has a 25 amp controller, which should allow up to 1300W peak, whereas the Revv1FS and Revv1DRT have 35 amp controllers, which should allow up to 1820W peak.
Ride1Up’s Revv1FS with a nominal 1000W motor whose throttle can go up to 34 – 38 mph in Off-Road mode
In November 2025, however, Ride1Up changed its website (according to site captures by archive.org). It stopped listing any of the Revv1 models under its “Ebikes” section and moved them to a separate “Revv1” section, which is better, but it also stopped listing the wattage of the Revv1 models and removed this helpful explanation, which used to clarify its legal status: The Revv1 ships pre-programmed as a class 2 (pedelec) ebike which enables speeds of up to 20 MPH on pedal assist and throttle. The multi-class speed system gives riders the ability to configure the settings and switch between Class 2, Class 3, and ‘Off-Road’ mode which unlocks speeds of 28+ MPH for private road use only. Increase the controller’s amps temporarily with the ‘boost’ feature (DRT & FS frame only) for short bursts of speed off the line.
Now, Ride1Up doesn’t list any class information for the Revv1 models on its website, and doesn’t provide any wattage information, so buyers will be clueless about the Revv1’s legal status. The Revv1’s FAQ section, however, leads buyers to assume that they can ride the Revv1 on public roads, because it says that the Revv1 is a “moped-style e-bike”, which has different regulations than an electric moped: What Is the Difference Between a Moped eBike and Electric Moped? A regular electric moped works on a twist-and-go basis. Akin to a motorcycle, they do not have pedals, require insurance and registration and are heavier than an electric bike because of a larger battery and frame build. An electric moped ebike incorporates a motor, does not require insurance or registration and has pedals so in theory, the rider is intended to power the bike by pedaling. This design bypasses the regulatory needs of a moped, has a smaller, lighter battery and incorporates an element of exercise that you do not get with an electric moped or electric motorcycle.
Ride1Up’s electric moped bike takes all the best bits from both types of vehicles and blends them to create something different. The Revv1 is a moped-style e-bike engineered with a café racer, moto-inspired design, giving our riders the best of both worlds.
The truth is that most states are going to treat the Revv1 as an electric moped or motorcycle, because its 1000 watt motor exceeds the legal limit for e-bikes in those states. Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Virginia allow e-bikes up to 1000 watts, and Florida and Mississippi don’t have a wattage limit on e-bikes, so the Revv1 can be legally ridden on public roads in 8 states, if it is set as a class 2 or class 3 bike in its configuration. Perhaps Ride1Up sets the amperage in class 2 or class 3 modes so that it functions as a 750 motor, but Ride1Up doesn’t explain how its class settings work in the configuration options. By not listing the nominal motor wattage, Ride1Up makes it very hard for buyers to even investigate whether the Revv1 models are legal in their states.
Another California-based company, Super73, also sells moped-style e-bikes, that used to allow the user to change the bike between Class 1, Class 2, Class 3 and Off-Road modes in the company’s mobile app. In Off-Road mode, Super73 bikes with 1200W motors (2000W peak) were able to go 35 – 38 mph. In December 2024, the company was hit with a class-action lawsuit that alleged: “False Advertising: Super73 advertises its bikes as legal and compliant with state laws governing e-bikes while failing to disclose that many of their products are not actually e-bikes but rather motor vehicles requiring licensing and registration.“
In response, Super73 locked their bikes in January 2025 to only allow them to be used in class 2 mode and their motors were limited to use a maximum of 750 nominal watts. These changes dramatically limited the performance of Super73 bikes, as noted by reviews. So far Super73 hasn’t been driven out of business, but the ongoing lawsuit does raise questions about whether the company will be able to keep supporting its current bike models when there is little demand for them as overweight, class 2 e-bikes.
Goat Power Bikes, another company selling over-powered, moped-style e-bikes, has a different response to the threat of a regulatory crackdown. It continues to list 5 models under the “E-BIKES” section of its website, which have too much power to be legally called e-bikes in most states, since they have between 2000 and 5000 watt motors (3000 – 8000 peak watts). These bikes have the option to be shipped with or without pedals, which makes a mockery of them being labeled as “e-bikes”. When ordering them online, the Goat Power Bikes website provides no warnings that these 5 models may not be street legal.
This lack of warning about the legality of its bikes appears to be deliberate on Goat Power’s part. In March 2025, the company posted an article on its blog entitled, “Electric Bike Laws in the U.S. Explained by State,” which explains the American three class system for e-bikes. The article, however, fails to mention the power limits for e-bikes in each state, nor does it mention the fact that every single one of Goat Power’s bikes are too powerful to be legally ridden on public roads in 48 out of the 50 states, even if set to class 1, class 2 or class 3. The article concludes with a FAQ that asks this question: Q: Are GOAT Power Bikes legal for road use? A: Most GOAT Power Bikes meet Class 2 and 3 standards but always check with local laws to confirm road legality.
The dishonesty of Goat Power’s answer is stunning, considering the fact that its lowest power model at that time was 2.7 times the legal limit in most states. It would have been different if Goat Power had explained the power limits in the different states and then stated that the Goat Power controllers had been engineered to limit the power to 750W or less, when using the Class 2 or Class 3 settings. However, Goat Power is simply deceiving its customers by not informing them that its bikes violate the power limits set by 48 different states. It continues this deception in subsequent blog posts. An article in November 2025, entitled “Are E-Bikes Allowed on the Road? Understanding Bike Lane & Street Laws in 2025,” made no mention of the legal power limits for e-bikes. Another post in December 2025 about “Best E-Bike Insurance Options (And Why You Might Need One)” also failed to explain the fact that most owners of Goat Power’s bikes would need to buy insurance in order to legally ride their over-powered e-bikes on public roads in their state.
Nonetheless, Goat Power appears to have finally decided to add a fig leaf of legality to its operations. It recently added three upcoming “Street Legal” models to its website, which are limited to 750 watts and can only be used as class 2 and class 3 e-bikes. These new SL models can be preordered today and they will begin shipping in May 2026. Unlike Super73 whose high prices don’t reflect the reduced 750W power of their motors, Goat Power is charging $1999 for these three models, which is an indication that they really are using 750W motors and not just motors that have been software limited by the controller. It is unlikely that Goat Power Bikes will sell many these new SL models, but it will allow the Canadian company that ships from San Diego, California to claim that its buyers now have a choice between street legal and off-road models.
Much of the recent moral panic and public outcry over e-bikes is due to youth irresponsibly riding electric dirt bikes and e-motos, which get described as “e-bikes” in the press. Youth post videos of them doing wheelies and other dangerous maneuvers in traffic, often in large group rides, and then post them on social media, which encourages other youth to copy their bad behavior. The manufacturers of these electric dirt bikes and e-motos often sow confusion by calling their products “e-bikes” as well in order to avoid regulations for more powerful vehicles.
Sur-Ron Light Bee X with a 60none of them could beV motor that peaks at 8000 watts, has 266 Nm of torque and goes 46.6 mph
The best known brand of electric dirt bike is arguably Sur-Ron. The company’s official website carefully avoids calling its products by any name, such as bicycle, e-bike, e-moto, dirt bike, moped, motorbike or motorcycle, probably because it wants to maintain the ambiguity about how its products should be regulated. However, many of Sur-Ron’s subsidiaries, distributors and dealers call them “electric bikes” or “e-bikes“, but also use other terms such as “electric motorbikes” and “electric motorcycles” as well. Sur-Ron allows its distributors and dealers to use its brand name as well, so it isn’t clear who is speaking for the company. For example, the website for Sur-Ron’s subsidiary in the UK describes its vehicles as “electric bikes that hit hard on performance while staying light on their feet”, but also says: “We independently developed the first mass-produced high-performance electric motorbike in China.”
Sur-Ron USA (sur-ronusa.us.com), which is the official distributor of Sur-Ron in the U.S., calls its products “electric dirt bikes”, but its menu lists all its models under “E-Bikes” on its web site. Another company that also calls itself “Sur-Ron USA” (sur-ronusa.com), which is a dealer, describes the Sur-Ron Light Bee X model as a “mid drive electric bike that you can ride anywhere.” Of course, “anywhere” doesn’t include public roads, because the Light Bee X peaks at 8000 watts, which makes it illegal to use as an e-bike in 48 states. Its maximum speed of 46.6 mph exceeds the legal limit for e-bikes and mopeds in every state, so it has to be registered and insured as a motorcycle. Very few of the online Sur-Ron dealers in the U.S. warn buyers about the legal obligations they will face in order to ride Sur-Rons on public roads in their state.
Sur-Ron also creates confusion about the classification of its vehicles by shipping them with the speed limit capped at 20 mph in North America and at 25 km/h (15.5 mph) in Europe, as if they were street-legal e-bikes. Buyers can unlock the full speed of Sur-Ron bikes by cutting a looped green wire going to the controller (or by pulling the brake handle 6 times for 2022-3 models or 8 times for 2024-5 models each time it is turned on). Sur-Ron bikes don’t come with pedals, but many Sur-Ron dealers sell pedal conversion kits, which creates further confusion about their classification.
Talaria, another well-known manufacturer of electric dirt bikes, maintains the same classification confusion as Sur-Ron, by using various names to describe its products. Its official website describes the Komodo and Sting Pro models as “electric dirt bikes”. However, the website of Talaria’s U.S. subsidiary (talaria.us.com) describes the company as an “electric motorcycle manufacturer” on its “About us” page. Conversely, the footer of the same website says: “Talaria, an electric bike manufacturer based in Chongqing, China, is known for producing environmentally friendly, high-performance vehicles developed exclusively for off-road enthusiasts.” The website lists all the company’s models in the menu under Shop > Talaria E-bikes. The company can’t seem to decide whether it is producing “electric dirt bikes”, “electric motorcycles”, “e-bikes” or “electric bikes”.
Similar to its competitor Sur-Ron, Talaria ships its bikes in North America with a 20 mph speed limit in Eco mode and 28 mph speed limit in Sport mode, which are the same maximum speeds for e-bikes’ class 2 throttles and class 3 pedal assistance, respectively. However, cutting a looped brown wire going to the controller removes those speed restrictions on Talaria bikes. The talaria.us.com website fails to provide any warning to American customers about the legal requirements for riding its vehicles on public roads in the U.S.
Both Sur-Ron and Talaria sell “LE1” models that are called “road legal” since they have the necessary components (mirrors, turn signals, lights, speedometer and rear license plate holder) to comply with vehicle regulations, and their speeds are limited by default to e-bike maximum speeds, so buyers may mistakenly assume that they can ride them on public roads as e-bikes. Sur-Ron’s official U.S. distributor and Talaria’s U.S. subsidiary do not inform American buyers that their products fail to qualify as e-bikes in any state in the union, even if they haven’t cut the cable to the controller that limits them to 20 mph. They legally aren’t e-bikes in 48 states, because their motors are too powerful, and in the remaining two states (Mississippi and Florida) that don’t have power restrictions, they are required to have fully operable pedals in order to qualify as e-bikes.
The question is what are better alternatives for people who don’t want to support these deceptive business practices. Ideally, people would seek to only buy e-bikes which adhere to the legal power limits in their state. For example, the Himiway D5 2.0 and Puckipuppy Bulldog Pro are street-legal alternatives with 750W motors to the Wired Freedom/Cruiser. Another option is to buy a second battery to swap out when riding bikes like the Velotric Nomad 2X or Mokwheel Obsidian 2.0. For street-legal, moped-style alternatives, check out the ENGWE M20 2.0, Euybike S4, Valen Rev+, JANSNO X70 PRO, OUXI V8 Max and all the Super73 models.
Many people, however, turn to brands like Wired, Magician, Rabid, Goat Power, Sur-Ron and Talaria, because they want more power than a 750W motor can provide. One good alternative to these brands is Ariel Rider, because it provides more power than the legal limit for people who want it, but also offers a legal option for those who don’t want to skirt the law, and it acts transparently for both types of customers. Ariel Rider is a Hong Kong-based company founded in 2009 that operates in the Seattle area. It was one of the first e-bike manufacturers to offer higher voltage batteries and to exceed the 750 watt limit, starting with its moped-style X-Class in 2020 with a 52 volt battery and a 1000 watt motor (2000W peak).
Despite being one of the first companies to sell e-bikes with throttles above 30 mph, it is striking how differently Ariel Rider now operates compared to Wired, Magician and Rabid. First of all, Ariel Rider offers free shipping and doesn’t try to obscure the true price with high shipping fees. Secondly, Ariel Rider clearly labels which of its models can legally be ridden on public roads and which cannot.
Ariel Rider sells its products as either class 2 e-bikes or “PPB” (Power Performance Bike) models for off-road usage and it does not mislabel the PPB models as “e-bikes” or “electric bicycles”. For example, the X-Class 60V PPB model with a 1500 watt motor (2700 watt peak) that goes 40+ mph has a red title bar at the top of the page stating: “HIGH PERFORMANCE MODEL – PRIVATE PROPERTY USE ONLY.” It is not possible to order a PPB model without first checking a box that affirms: “[_]I understand this is a HIGH-PERFORMANCE PPB MODEL. For private property use only.“
In contrast, Ariel Rider’s X-Class 60V model, which is shipped as a class 2 e-bike by default and is listed as having 750 watt motor, appears very differently on the web site. There is no checkbox stating that it is “for private property use only”, but it includes a “Check Your State E-bike Law” section, where buyers can enter their state and see the requirements to ride e-bikes in their state. Unfortunately, the web site fails to explain that the X-Class 60V is not street legal in Maryland, where the legal limit for e-bikes is 500 watts, but it is generally a helpful resource for buyers.
The reality is that the Performance version of the X-Class 60V has the same hardware as the X-Class 60V PPB model, but it is software locked to only operate as a 750 watt motor. In order to exceed the three class system that is currently used by 45 U.S. states, buyers of the X-Class 60V have to write an email to Ariel Rider requesting that their bikes be unlocked and digitally sign a waiver form in order to get a code to unlock their bikes.
Unlike Wired and Magician whose models are designed to hide the fact that they are e-motos, Ariel Rider’s Kepler – Dual Battery and Kepler – Dual Battery – PPB models use a blend of the conventional e-bike and motorcycle styles to visually signal that it is a fusion. It has a conventional e-bike frame with wider frame tubes for the batteries, but it also has a dual crown front fork and a large motorcycle-style front headlight. The Kepler – Dual Battery model is sold as a 750 watt class 2 e-bike, but the buyer can write to Ariel Rider to sign the waiver form to get the software code to unlock its 1000 watt (1600 watt peak) capability. Unlike most manufacturers, Ariel Rider designs all its models to have turn signal lights in both the front and the back, so that if the buyer chooses to unlock an Ariel Rider bike, it will have the necessary hardware to be street legal, if the buyer registers and insures the bike as a moped or motorcycle in her state.
Judging from the reviews, the Kepler – Dual Battery was designed to be used as an e-bike, and not as a means to get around e-bike regulations like the bike models offered by Wired, Magician and Rabid. The Bike Cave says in his review of the Kepler – Dual Battery: “I love torque sensors, especially for bikes that are meant to be pedaled like this one. Yes, you’ve got a throttle, but the experience you get when you have a good torque sensor like this bike has. It just feels like the bike is an extension of you. It’s so nice, so easy to control. It just feels natural.”
The Kepler is also better balanced, since the weight of the two batteries is centered in the top tube and down tube. In constrast, the bikes sold by Wired, Magician and Rabid have their second batteries over the rear rack, which make the bikes more prone to wobbling. CitizenCycle found that adding the second 10 lb battery on the rear rack caused the “death wobble” on the Wired Freedom.
In an ideal world Ariel Rider would be rewarded for selling bikes without deception. They don’t try to hide the price with high shipping fees, and they honestly inform the customer about whether they can legally use the bike on public roads in their state. Sadly, many people are going to look at the more powerful Wired Freedom with its list price of $1999 and decide that it is a better deal than the Kepler – Dual Battery at $1999 with free shipping, but the Wired Freedom really costs $2324 with shipping. Likewise, they are going to perceive the waver form and software unlock codes as needless hassles for the X-Class V60 and Kepler – Dual Battery, which they can avoid by buying from other brands like Wired, Magician, Rabid, Ride1Up and Goat Power, which make it easier to switch off the class restrictions on the bike’s hardware.
The reality is that it simply isn’t safe to ride an e-bike at the kind of speeds that 60V and 72V e-motos can achieve, so this isn’t just a question of getting around some bothersome e-bike regulations. Manufacturers are not being responsible when they stick a 3000W nominal (5000W peak) motor on a bicycle frame, so it can be ridden at over 45 mph. It is best to stick to the legal limits for e-bikes, but if choosing to exceed those limits, it is recommended to select a brand like Ariel Rider that still designs bikes that can safely handle the power of the motor, with adequate frame strength, brakes and lights. Hopefully e-bike buyers will be smart enough to recognize the responsible companies that value their safety versus the sketchy companies that engage in deception.
After publishing my 35 page report that critiques New Jersey’s 2026 law that regulates e-bikes, I received the following comment by Mysana on Reddit: I do think some of the comparisons to cars weakened your argument, especially in the conclusion. Specifically the line, “However, there have been no cases of e-bikes killing the passengers of […]
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After publishing my 35 page report that critiques New Jersey’s 2026 law that regulates e-bikes, I received the following comment by Mysana on Reddit:
I do think some of the comparisons to cars weakened your argument, especially in the conclusion. Specifically the line, “However, there have been no cases of e-bikes killing the passengers of motor vehicles, and motor vehicles killed 6000 times more pedestrians than e-bikes between 2017 and 2023 in the U.S., so there is little justification for requiring e-bike riders to have liability insurance when there is such a low probability that they will harm others.” That felt weak to me since cars do require insurance. If they didn’t, I’d consider it a fair point. The car commentary felt like it came from an anti-car angle, rather than actually being particularly relevant to the specific ebike law.
I would’ve liked to see more comparisons on the danger of ebikes vs motorcycles, since the question seems to be whether ebikes are closer to manual bikes or motorcycles.
Automobiles are the principal reason why pedestrian, cyclist and motorcyclist fatalities are rising in the U.S., so my report recommends that governments need to better regulate the design of automobiles to make them less lethal and dedicate a greater portion of their transportation budgets to walking and cycling to make roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists. I do have an “anti-car bias,” because I believe that American society has prioritized the needs of automobile drivers over the needs of other people. Standard American urban design is based around the automobile, which makes it very difficult for non-drivers to work and participate in society.
It may not be politically expedient in the U.S. to criticize the prioritization of the personal automobile over other types of transport, but it is important to understand that much of the infrastructure that would improve walking and cycling gets blocked, because it would inconvenience automobile drivers or reduce the budget for auto roadways. In reality, building better infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists reduces congestion and improves air quality, which benefits automobile drivers, even if that infrastructure reduces the places and speed limit where they can drive. Urban design advocate Not Just Bikes argues that the Netherlands is the “best country in the world for drivers“. Its policy of autoluw (car-reduction) reduces through-traffic and congestion and separates automobiles from slower types of vehicles, which makes it much more pleasant to drive, although drivers may not always be able to take the most direct route.
Nonetheless, Mysana’s question whether the dangers of e-bikes are closer to bicycles or motorcycles does point to the critical issue of how e-bikes should be regulated, so I decided to investigate it. Unfortunately, the NHTSA database doesn’t separate e-bikes from other types of bicycles, but its data shows that motorcycles and automobiles pose a much greater threat to society than bicycles, and thus motor vehicles warrant stricter regulation than e-bikes. The two years of data that NHTSA provides for “motorized bicycles” (e-bikes and ICE motor bicycles) in 2020-21 suggests that they do not cause fatalities at a higher rate than bicycles in general.
I added a new section entitled “Should e-bikes be regulated like motor vehicles?” to explain the data. I also updated the fatality rates for manual bicycles and e-bikes, based on data from Fernandez et al (2024). The update adds the following tables to the report:
On January 19, 2026, New Jersey’s governor Phil Murphy used his last day in office to sign into law the controversial bill S4834/A6235 that will give New Jersey the most restrictive regulation of e-bikes in the nation. The new law is based on a number of faulty assumptions about e-bikes, which the empirical evidence does […]
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On January 19, 2026, New Jersey’s governor Phil Murphy used his last day in office to sign into law the controversial bill S4834/A6235 that will give New Jersey the most restrictive regulation of e-bikes in the nation. The new law is based on a number of faulty assumptions about e-bikes, which the empirical evidence does not support. The studies of injuries and fatalities associated with e-bikes in the U.S. do not demonstrate that e-bikes are more dangerous than manual bicycles. E-bikes represent very little threat to pedestrians and almost none to passengers of automobiles, so treating them like motorcycles that require licensing, registration and liability insurance is unjustified.
This 35 page critique of the new law details the problems with the text of the law and summarizes the empirical studies about e-bikes. The report uses the annual sales numbers to estimate injury and fatality rates for e-bikes and manual bicycles. It explains the economic, social, health and environmental reasons why governments should encourage the use of e-bikes, rather than burden them with onerous regulation that will suppress their usage. Finally, the report makes recommendations about how to better regulate e-bikes.
This report and its spreadsheet data are published with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, so feel free to repost and edit this report, or reuse parts of it. Here are the LibreOffice ODT file for editing the report:
PDF / ODT for printing, License: CC BY 4.0 The Rust programming language has been consistently gaining developer mind share and acquiring corporate support over time, which has given the language the kind of momentum that will likely take it into the top tier of programming languages in the future. It is worth examining how […]
The Rust programming language has been consistently gaining developer mind share and acquiring corporate support over time, which has given the language the kind of momentum that will likely take it into the top tier of programming languages in the future. It is worth examining how Rust has grown over time and ask why the tech industry is adopting the language at a pace that promises to overtake C and C++ in the future. With the caveat that all future predictions about technology are uncertain and often proven wrong, let me make some predictions about the future of Rust based on current trends.
The slow evolution of Rust Like a snowball just starting to roll at the top the hill, Rust didn’t appear to have bright prospects when the Mozilla Foundation first publicly released the language on January 20, 2012. At that point, the language had spent three years as the personal pet project of Graydon Hoare, plus another three years as an internal project at Mozilla, but it still wasn’t fully defined after six years of development.
Many of the features that have defined Rust as a distinctive programming language took years of experimentation to be added to the language. The language switched to the LLVM compiler in 2009-10, when Mozilla started working on the language. The ownership model which is what Rust is most known for today was added in 2010, because Mozilla was having so many problems dealing with shared memory in Firefox’s C++ code. The language’s compiler was written in Ocaml between 2006 and 2011, before it switched to Rust. One of the distinguishing features of the language is the fact that it doesn’t support normal classes with inheritance, because inherited objects are difficult to implement with Rust’s ownership model. Instead, the language relies on object composition, which separates data from behavior by putting the data in structs and methods are defined in impl blocks and shared behavior with polymorphism is defined as traits. However, the language had object inheritance until 2011-12. Another distinguishing feature of the language, which sets it apart from Java, Go, C#, Python, etc., is the fact that Rust doesn’t have a garbage collector, which gives it performance similar to C and C++, but Rust had an optional garbage collector until 2014. Rust is known today for its support of asynchronous programming, but async and await were not added to stable Rust until version 1.39.0 in November 2019. There was many years of experimentation and arguments about how to implement asynchronous programming in Rust, as Steve Klabnik notes.
It took Rust a long time to be defined and its distinctive features to emerge which have carved out its niche in the panoply of programming languages. Almost all the new languages that have become leading languages with significant market share got developed and promoted by one of the leading tech giants. It is unlikely that Visual Basic, C# and TypeScript would have become major languages if they hadn’t been developed by Microsoft, and the same is true of SUN’s Java, Apple’s Objective-C and Swift, and Google’s Go and Dart.
Rust’s independence has helped gain wide-spread support Netscape/Mozilla has a history of creating new languages with JavaScript and asm.js→WebAssembly, but Mozilla’s Firefox was losing web browser market share and the organization struggled to fund the development of Rust. Just like Mozilla cut its staff working on Thunderbird in July 2012 and abandoned the development of Firefox OS in December 2015, Mozilla easily could have abandoned Rust’s development. Brandon Eich as the technical lead at the Mozilla advocated for the language as necessary for the future development of its CCS engine and the experimental Servo web engine. Eich was forced out of Mozilla in April 2014, but Mozilla under the leadership of Mitchell Baker continued to sponsor the language’s development, launching its 1.0 release in May 2015.
Rust was created to solve Mozilla’s problems with C++, but a lot of other tech companies also needed a language that was memory safe, type safe and designed for concurrency like Rust, and the language started gaining developers employed at other companies. Rust could have died when Mozilla’s finances became so shaky in August 2020, that it had to axe 250 of its staff, including the team working on Rust. By that point, however, Rust had gained enough support outside of Mozilla, that many of the leading tech companies stepped up to support the development of the language. Amazon Web Services, Google, Huawei and Microsoft all supported Mozilla in creating the Rust Foundation in February 2021, and Meta joined as a Platinum member two months later.
In some ways, the fact that the Mozilla Foundation was so weak financially, and not really a threat to any of the leading tech giants helped Rust grow, because the language became neutral ground where all the tech companies felt free to collaborate and contribute. When a programming language is developed and promoted by a single tech giant, it can be rapidly catapulted into the list of the top 20 languages, but then the growth of the language often gets limited to the sphere of influence of that one company. Even though C#, Go and Swift have been widely praised for their good design choices and good balance of safety with performance, their further adoption has been stifled by the fact that they are tied to Microsoft, Google and Apple, respectively.
In order to become the leading language in its area, a language has to become independent, so that all the competing companies feel free to adopt it, as is the case with HTML/CSS for web layout, JavaScript for web scripting, SQL for database queries, Python for scripting and C/C++ for systems programming. Developers don’t want to become dependent on the decisions of any one company and tech companies don’t want to use tools that are controlled by their rival. In the same way that IBM lost control over SQL in the 1970s, AT&T lost control over C in the 1970s and C++ in the 1980s and Netscape lost control over JavaScript in 1996 when Microsoft launched JScript with Internet Explorer 3.0, Mozilla has lost control over Rust, which aided its adoption throughout the tech industry. At this point, the Rust Foundation is perceived as neutral and independent, just like the Python Foundation and the committees where the standards for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C and C++ are defined. Rust will never be hobbled by a corporate sponsor, as happened to Java when Oracle sued Google over the use of its language.
The growth of Rust over time Most groups that measure the usage of programming languages report that Rust usage has been growing rapidly over time compared to other languages. According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, Rust rose from the 211th ranked language in Dec. 2012 to the 13th in Feb. 2025, and currently has a rating of 1.51% (compared to top-ranking Python with 22.61%).
Based on the interests of its members, the IEEE Spectrum reports that Rust rose from the 20th ranked language in 2022 with a score of 5.01 (on a 100 point scale) to the 14th ranked language in 2025 with a score of 13.01, which places it below PHP and Kotlin and above Dart, Swift and Ruby. SlashData’s biannual Developer Nation surveys estimate that the number of Rust users has increased from 0.4 million in Q2 2019 to 5.1 million in Q1 2025, which represents an increase from 2.9% to 10.8% of all software developers.
JetBrains’ annual Developer Ecosystem surveys find a similar growth in the usage of Rust. The percentage of developers using Rust grew from 5% in 2019 to 12% in 2025. 10% of surveyed developers say that they intend to adopt Rust, which is the second highest percentage for any language. In comparison, the percentage planning to adopt Go, Python, Kotlin and TypeScript is 11%, 7%, 6% and 5%, respectively. JetBrains’ Language Promise Index, which is based on growth rate, adoption momentum and user loyalty, ranks Rust as the second mostly likely language to expand in 2026, behind TypeScript. JetBrains estimates that 2.27 million developers used Rust in mid-2024, with 709,000 using it as their primary language. SlashData estimates twice as many Rust users, but SlashData’s numbers should be taken with a grain of salt as explained below.
The one outlier is RedMonk, which reports that Rust has maintained the same ranking as the 19th programming language in the first quarter of 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. RedMonk bases its ranking on the amount of activity on Stack Overflow and the number of projects on GitHub. RedMonk’s methodology is a poor measure of Rust usage, because most developers who have questions about Rust ask them on Rust’s user forum, where they are more likely to get better answers than on Stack Overflow. Furthermore, Rust provides its own crates.io platform to host Rust code, so GitHub isn’t needed. However, if just counting the number of projects on GitHub, Rust ranked as the 11th most popular language in Q1 2025, sitting below C++ and Shell, but above C and Kotlin.
Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer Surveys find that the percentage of developers who have used Rust in the previous year has risen from 3.2% in 2019 to 14.8% in 2025, which caused the language to jump from the 22nd to the 14th most popular programming language.1
Rust’s growth is often compared to the rise of Google’s Go, but they have grown very differently. Go grew very fast when it was first released, and then its growth leveled off, whereas Rust initially grew more slowly than Go, but it has kept growing steadily. This slower growth was partially because it took longer for the language to stabilize and the Rust ecosystem to mature, so that it had a full complement of libraries for the standard tasks. However, the slower initial growth of Rust was also due to the fact that the language was harder to learn, whereas Go was designed to be easy for C/C++/C# users to adopt, so it enjoyed a more rapid adoption than Rust. Since 2019, however, Rust has grown more than Go. According to the Stack Overflow surveys, the Rust has gained 1.9% of developers per year since 2019, whereas Go has gained 1.3% of developers per year over the same time period. Despite Go being released three years earlier, Rust’s steadier growth has allowed it to catch up to Go’s usage in the Stack Overflow and SlashData surveys, although the JetBrains surveys find that Go still enjoys a substantial lead over Rust. Both TypeScript and Python have gained more developers than Rust since 2019, but they were already major languages with widespread usage. TypeScript is based on JavaScript, which was already the most popular programming language. Python gained new developers due to its growing use in data science and AI, but it has also been pulling developers from Java, C#, PHP, Ruby and Perl, which have all declined in recent years.
Rust’s growth compared to C/C++ In contrast to the growth of Rust, the Stack Overflow surveys find that the percentage of developers using C and C++ has basically remained the same over the last six years. The percent of surveyed developers that reported using C was 20.6% in 2019 and 22.0% in 2025, and the percent using C++ was 23.5% in both 2019 and 2025. In contrast, the JetBrains surveys find that percent of developers using C and C++ usage peaked in 2020, and has since declined slightly. The percent of developers using C grew from 15% in 2017 to 23% in 2020, and then decreased to 18% in 2025. Similarly, the percent using C++ grew from 17% in 2017 to 27% in 2020, and then declined slightly to 25% where it has stayed for the last 4 years.
On the other hand, SlashData’s Developer Nation surveys find that the number of developers using C and C++ have been rising rapidly in recent years. According to SlashData, the percent of global developers using C rose from 15.2% in Q3 2023 to 19.3% in Q1 2025, while the percent using C++ rose from 26.5% to 34.5% over the same time period. There is no way that there has been such a dramatic change in just a year and half and I wonder if SlashData’s estimates are being distorted by AI generated code. I wouldn’t put much stock in SlashData’s numbers, considering that the company reports that the global number of software developers nearly tripled in six years from 18 million in Q2 2019 to 47.2 million in Q1 2025. Reporting such rapid growth may help generate clicks for the company, but their numbers aren’t credible in my opinion.
The resilience of C, which was originally designed by Denis Ritchie at Bell Labs in 1972-3, is astounding, considering how other languages that were designed during that time period have fared, such as BCPL (1967), Logo (1967), Simula 67, ALGOL 68, Forth (1969), Pascal (1970), Prolog (1972) and ML (1973). The fact that 1 out every 5 developers today uses a language which is over 50 years old is a testament to the longevity of the language. C++, which was designed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs in 1979-85 as “C with Classes”, has proven to be even more popular than its parent language. C++ was originally a superset of C with OOP added, but it has arguably evolved into a separate language from C over time.
Current trends for Rust to overtake C and C++ If the user base of both C and C++ continues at the same level, while Rust continues to acquire 1.9% of developers per year, we can project based on the StackOverflow data that the number of Rust developers will overtake the number of C developers in the next 3.6 years and the number of C++ developers in the next 4.5 years. If using the JetBrains data, where Rust is acquiring 1.2% of developers per year, we can project that it will take 5.1 years for Rust to overtake C and 11.1 years to overtake C++. However, there are good reasons to question whether C and C++ will maintain the same share of developers in the future.
Why C/C++ dominated as systems languages for so long While Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs did design a good imperative language for systems programming in the early 70s, I think that the longevity of C and its superset C++ is largely due to the fact that both academia and the tech industry coalesced around these two languages and didn’t develop competing compiled languages to challenge them. The only significant competitor to C/C++ was Pascal and its object-oriented successors (Clascal, Object Pascal, Turbo Pascal and Delphi), but Pascal’s verbose style and its initial focus on being a simple educational tool to teach programming limited its appeal.
Because C was designed as practical tool for building an operating system, it used terse and efficient syntax, and focused on giving the programmer full control over the hardware. C and C++ became the leading imperative language and object oriented language, respectively, because AT&T’s phone business was facing anti-trust charges from the U.S. government, so AT&T gave away the code for UNIX and its Portable C compiler (PCC) for a pittance to universities in the 1970s and early 80s. Both the operating system and its languages were used to teach the next generation of computer science students, and those students went on to found businesses based on UNIX and C/C++, so they became the standards for the tech industry. Earlier imperative languages like ALGOL, PL/I, CPL and BCPL never gained the widespread adoption of C.
If AT&T’s Bell Labs hadn’t handed out the code for its PCC on liberal terms to schools, we would have likely seen the development of many compiled languages to rival C and C++. Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie’s 1978 book, The C Programming Language, became the language’s de facto K&R standard, which anyone was free to implement. Instead of designing new competing languages, ambitious tech companies focused on developing their own C compilers based on the K&R standard, starting with the Lattice compiler in 1982, which Microsoft repackaged and sold. Lattice, Whitesmiths, Brain Damaged Software and Zortech all developed competing C compilers in the 1980s, but the compiler which arguably had the biggest impact was Richard Stallman’s GNU C Compiler (GCC), which was released in 1987, right when AT&T started jacking up the price for UNIX and selling PCC as an expensive separate component. All these competing C compilers created the need for a formal standard for the C language, and work started on creating an ANSI C standard in 1983, which included many of the innovations, such as void * pointers, being added to the language. By the time the first ANSI C standard was published in 1989 and the first ISO C++ standard was published in 1998, these languages were being defined by their open standards committees rather than being controlled by Bell Labs.
There was little reason for academia and industry to develop rival languages to C and C++, when they could easily get their hands on Bell Lab’s PCC compiler or develop their own compilers based on open standards. In contrast to how compiled imperative and object oriented programming coalesced around C and C++, functional programming fractured into many different languages with innumerable variants, such as Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Visual Lisp, Scheme, NIL, ZIL, Guile, Clojure, Racket, ML, SML, Caml, OCaml, Erlang, F#, Haskell, Scala, etc. This same diversity appeared for interpreted languages. After Dartmouth introduced the interpreted BASIC language in 1964, a myriad of incompatible variants arose without a single standard to unify them. Scripting started with the interactive shells on time sharing systems in the 1960s, and the use of command substitution, which was introduced by the Text Reckoning And Compiling Language (TRAC), designed by Calvin Mooers between 1959 and 1964. UNIX’s Bourne Shell and Bill Joy’s C Shell in BSD made scripting a widespread practice in operating systems. Seeking to improve on the scripting found in UNIX, many new interpreted languages were created, such as Larry Wall’s Perl in 1987, John Ousterhout’s Tcl in 1988 and Guido van Rossum’s Python in 1989.
Another factor that prevented rivals to C and C++ from arising is the fact that the standards committees for these languages were open and could incorporate new elements that were being promoted by diverse interests, so it wasn’t necessary to create new languages to get new features. The downside of design by committee is that C++ has become a mishmash of different elements that were tacked onto the language, making it awkward and verbose to use many of the new features. Because C++ didn’t have a “benevolent dictator for life” like Guido van Rossum with an overriding vision for the language, C++ has become a haphazard amalgam over time. New features get added with awkward syntax in order to accommodate all the stakeholders in the committees, while trying to maintain backward compatibility.
C/C++ will lose market share to Rust The end result is that C has ossified in a outdated design that is 5 decades old, and C++, which has made a greater effort to modernize, has become very difficult and complicated to use. Both languages are replete with a myriad of ways for programmers to shoot themselves in the foot and require programmers to spend years learning how to avoid all the potential pitfalls in these languages.
Despite the fact that it is widely assumed that C and C++ will continue to dominate in their respective niches, both of them are ripe for disruption. They won’t be replaced quickly, since so much code has been written in these languages, but there are a number of reasons to believe that they will start to be displaced and gradually lose market share as new projects opt to use different languages and existing projects incorporate new languages into their code bases.
In the past, the alternatives to C++, such as Eiffel and D, never gained much traction, but Rust has garnered a critical mass since its initial 1.0 release in 2015, in terms of developer mind share and widespread industry support. Most of the software industry had already adopted RAII and smart pointers found in C++11 to deal with memory safety, but many in the tech industry concluded that these measures were not enough to deal with the memory bugs and security holes that they were encountering. Rust appeared at a time when the industry was searching for better solutions, and the paucity of memory-safe languages that could match the performance of C/C++ made Rust the only viable alternative for many developers.
Rust has become the new language for operating systems In August 2016, Google started using Rust in their experimental Fuschia operating system, and in 2019, the company began integrating Rust into Android. It took Google 18 months to add support for Rust in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), and in April 2021, Google announced that AOSP now supported using Rust to develop the OS itself. By 2025, Google was adding more Rust code than C/C++ code to Android. Google announced in November 2025 that it had only found one memory vulnerability in the roughly 5 million lines of Rust code that it had added to Android, compared to its historical average of 1000 memory vulnerabilities per million lines of C/C++ code. As a result of these efforts, the percentage of Android vulnerabilities that are memory safety issues has dropped from 76% in 2019 to under 20% in 2025.
In June 2018, Microsoft announced that it was using Rust to write some of the components in its Azure Internet of Things platform. By July 2019, Microsoft’s Principal Security Engineering Manager was posting articles on the company’s official blog about how Rust is one of the company’s solutions to deal with the fact that 70% of Window’s critical security bugs since 2006 were caused by memory safety issues. Microsoft announced in April 2023 that it would use critical components written in Rust to improve the security of Windows 11, starting with the win32kbase.sys driver, which handles the graphics device interface (GDI) and window management. Microsoft developed the windows and windows-sys crates, so that Rust code can access any of the Windows APIs, including Win32, COM and WinRT, plus the windows-bindgen crate to generate custom bindings from Windows metadata, so that Rust modules can be integrated into existing C# or C++ codebases managed by MSBuild. Microsoft reports that the company is now rewriting critical components in Rust, including parts of its Hyper-V virtual machine, its SymCrypt cryptographic library and the Azure Data Explorer.
Apple appears to have quietly started using Rust as well. In March 2020, a job ad for the Apple Cloud Traffic Team stated: “Following a very successful first foray into Rust we are migrating an established codebase from C to Rust, and building new functionality primarily in Rust.” Job postings and rumors suggest that Apple is now rewriting critical parts of iOS in Rust, especially low-level kernel interfaces and some drivers, such as the GPU driver for Apple chips. Apple has been tight-lipped about the company’s use of Rust, leaving external app developers wondering how much C and Objective-C code in iOS will get replaced. Nonetheless, there are also rumors that Apple is cooking up a new LLVM language, which has Swift-like syntax and a Rust-like ownership model. These rumors are fueled by the fact that Apple has not joined the Rust Foundation like other companies using the language and Xcode still doesn’t have native support for Rust projects and requires a third-party plugin for debugging and syntax highlighting Rust code. It is possible that Apple is using Rust in the near term, but its long-term strategy is to switch to a more familiar language developed in house, but it is hard to know due to Apple’s legendary culture of secrecy.
Unlike Apple, the use of Rust in Linux has been very public. Linux developers started discussing the idea of using Rust code in the kernel in July 2020. Initial support for Rust was added in October 2022 as “an experiment” starting with version 6.1. Some of the leaders of Linux subsystems blocked patches that would have enabled the use of Rust, which stirred up rancorous public debate. Linus Torvalds observed that “the whole Rust versus C discussion has taken almost religious overtones.” The project’s second-in-command, Greg Kroah-Hartman, argued:
The majority of bugs (quantity, not quality/severity) we have are due to the stupid little corner cases in C that are totally gone in Rust. Things like simple overwrites of memory (not that rust can catch all of these by far), error path cleanups, forgetting to check error values, and use-after-free mistakes. That’s why I’m wanting to see Rust get into the kernel, these types of issues just go away, allowing developers and maintainers more time to focus on the REAL bugs that happen (i.e. logic issues, race conditions, etc.) … But for new code / drivers, writing them in rust where these types of bugs just can’t happen (or happen much much less) is a win for all of us, why wouldn’t we do this?
The debate was finally resolved when Linus Torvalds put down his foot and declared that the maintainers of Linux subsystems don’t have to deal with Rust code, but they also cannot block Rust from using their interfaces.
Why the tech giants chose Rust When Rust was first publicly released in 2012, few would have guessed at the time that it would be adopted by all the tech giants and become a fundamental building block of all the major operating systems. What is even more surprising is that so many companies would embrace a language with such a steep learning curve, novel concepts of ownership, borrowing and lifetimes and an unfamiliar syntax that borrows elements from functional languages, such as closures and pattern matching with enumerators. Few would have guessed that the tech industry would embrace a language that does not have classes and object inheritance, function overloading, variadic functions, nullable values and exceptions to handle errors. Most would have expected the industry to deal with its security and memory safety problems by transitioning to a language that is a gentle evolution from C/C++.
While it isn’t surprising that companies like Meta, Amazon, Huawei, Beidu, ByteDance, Cloudflare, Dropbox, 1Password, Discord, Shopify, Samsung, Intel, ARM, AMD and Nvidia have adopted Rust, it is more surprising for companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple, which have a history of creating their own languages. Any of the big tech companies have the resources to roll their own compiled language with memory safety to replace C/C++. I suspect that the management at Microsoft, Google and Apple didn’t want to step on the toes of their existing teams working on C#, Go and Swift. They couldn’t just attach an extension to one of their existing languages, because achieving the performance of C with a Rust-style ownership model and memory safety would have required a complete overhaul of the design of the language.
Another factor is the time to develop a new language and its ecosystem of libraries. Apple spent 4 years getting Swift to version 1.0, and Google took 5 years with Go. It only took Microsoft 3 years to get C# to version 1.0, but the company spent an additional two years working on the .NET framework before C# was conceived, so it was really a 5 year project. Managers at tech companies need to solve the memory and security problems in their code as quickly as possible, so it makes sense for them to opt for Rust, that was ready to be deployed immediately and had already ironed out its kinks.
Microsoft’s former CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, were aggressively territorial and competitive and probably wouldn’t have accepted this kind of dependence on an outside entity. They likely would have seen this as a commercial opportunity to sell a new language to customers, but current CEO Satya Nadella is less interested in selling software licenses for software. The leadership at Microsoft likely didn’t see much advantage to spending their own resources developing a new language, when there was already one available whose future they could control by simply joining the Rust Foundation and paying a few engineers on their staff to contribute to the development of the language.
In contrast, Google appears to be pursuing a dual strategy. It was the first company to adopt Rust for the development of its operating systems. However, Chandler Carruth, who leads Google’s C++, C Lang and LLVM teams, started designing the experimental Carbon language in 2022, with the goal of creating a memory-safe language with bi-directional interoperability with both C++ and Rust, so that Google can write new code in Carbon that seamlessly interacts with its existing C++ codebase while accessing memory safe Rust libraries. Carbon will use its own high-level semantic intermediate representation (SemIR) which allows full communication with parameterized types between Carbon, C++ and Rust, before compiling with LLVM.
Carruth says that Carbon arose from his frustration trying to work with the C++ standards committee: “We kept seeing really fundamental risks facing C++, really fundamental problems that needed pretty radical changes to the programming language as a whole and how the programming language worked in order to credibly address them.” The goal of Carbon is to create an independent, community-driven language, but so far almost all the project’s code comes from 8 Google employees. For the past three years the project has mostly worked on creating the SemIR for interoperability and only recently started specifying how the language will handle safety.
The goal of Carbon does not appear to be replacing Rust, since Google continues to charge ahead adding Rust code to Android and much of Android will be written in Rust by the time Carbon is planned to be production ready in 2028. Instead, Carbon appears to be a means for Google to be able to add new safer code to its existing C++ codebase, rather than having to retire it. However, Google hasn’t thrown much manpower into Carbon so far, so it appears to be an experiment that will have to prove that it can done technically, before Google fully commits to it.
Apple’s strategy is still unknown at this point, but it also may be planning on a dual strategy similar to Google. It is possible that Apple is currently using Rust, while also secretly concocting its own memory-safe systems language, and it certainly would fit the company’s ethos of controlling its own software destiny. Nonetheless, it is hard to see the business case for the company to spend many years developing a new language that will only be used for building the low-level infrastructure in its operating systems. Apple already has the Swift language, which is ergonomic, performant and plenty fast using reference counting, to distinguish its app ecosystem from its competitors. However, Apple could afford to waste $10 billion over a decade on its secretive “Project Titan” to make a electric car, so it certainly has the cash on hand to create its own language to compete with Rust.
The drawbacks of the new systems languages challenging Rust Even if Google’s Carbon and Apple’s rumored language never come to fruition, there has been an explosion of new systems languages in recent years that could potentially vie with Rust in the future. C2, Hare and Zig are new imperative languages that seek to fix the shortcomings in C. Like Rust, C3, Odin and Hylo (formerly Val) seek to avoid the problems with object oriented programming in C++ by using object composition, instead of object inheritance. Carbon is the only one of the new languages that will support object inheritance, since it seeks compatibility with C++, but it will limit its objects to single inheritance.
Among these new languages, Zig currently is the one with the most active community and the largest number of users. Stack Overflow’s surveys find that the percent of developers using Zig has grown from 0.8% in 2023 to 2.1% in 2025. Rust has 7 times more users than Zig according to the 2025 survey, but Zig is still far from its production-ready 1.0 release and its current 0.15 release doesn’t include async/await for concurrency. Zig after 10 years in development is behind Rust, which took 9 years to get to its 1.0 release, but Zig currently has more users than Rust after its first decade.
The question for these new languages is whether they will ever gain the kind of industry support that C/C++ currently enjoy. I am skeptical that any of them have good prospects of being widely adopted by tech companies, because most of them are not attempting to offer the same safety guarantees as Rust. Carbon is promising to offer the same kind of memory safety as Rust, although it will take a performance hit, since it plans to use more runtime checks, rather than Rust’s compile-time checks.
The advantages of Rust over other systems languages Leaving aside Carbon whose implementation details are still being defined, Hylo is the only one of the new systems languages that promises to fully support RAII, so allocated memory is automatically freed when its variables go out of scope. For all the rest, allocated memory is manually freed. Zig, Odin and C3 make it more convenient for the programmer with the defer keyword to execute the command to free memory when leaving the current scope. C3 also offers a more ergonomic way to free memory with its @pool command when exiting the current scope. However, the overriding reason why the corporate world is moving away from C/C++ is because they need memory safety, and they aren’t going to make the painful switch to another language if it doesn’t guarantee to solve their memory problems.
The other compelling reason why tech companies are switching away from C/C++ is because they need concurrent programming that can take advantage of the power of today’s multi-core processors. It is extremely difficult to write safe concurrent code in C/C++, and Rust’s promise of “fearless concurrency” is a very compelling argument for companies struggling with data races and other concurrency bugs. Rust’s ownership model and immutable variables by default, along with the atomic reference counters, mutexes and send/sync traits found in its standard library, make it easier to avoid the common pitfalls when writing concurrent code. Companies which need the extra power of multi-threaded processing are more likely to select Rust. None of the other new languages are promising to use an ownership model like Rust which simplifies concurrent programming, except for Hylo, which will use mutable value semantics and borrow checking without annotation. Zig, which is arguably the fastest single-threaded language, currently doesn’t support concurrency (although it is coming back in future version 0.16.)
The third compelling reason to switch to Rust is the fact that it now offers a huge ecosystem of available code through its crates.io platform and Rust’s build system can automatically download and compile external code modules (called “crates”) into a project. There are currently 216,855 Rust crates available at crates.io. Roughly 437 million crates are downloaded per week from crates.io and the number of downloads is increasing 2.2 times per year. Not all of this code is well maintained or well documented, but the Rust ecosystem of available libraries is rapidly expanding and is starting to rival the open source libraries that are available for C/C++. Of course, there are a number of areas where C/ C++ has a large lead over Rust, such as gaming engines, but Rust’s ecosystem is rapidly improving, and only 19.1% of Rust crates contain unsafe code blocks, which gives Rust libraries a significant advantage over C/C++ libraries for companies seeking memory safety.
The problem for many of the new systems languages that are now appearing is that Rust is 20 years old and has built up so much momentum in terms of its ecosystem of libraries, industry support and the growing number of users, that it is hard to see another new systems language catching up to Rust. Even though many of the new systems languages are closer to C/C++ in syntax and design, and offer an easier transition than Rust, they simply aren’t ready for production, and by the time they are ready, it will be too late, because most of the industry will have already made the transition to a memory safe language, so they will have lost the opportunity to become major languages with significant followings. Among the new languages, only Hylo and Carbon are attempting to offer safety guarantees like Rust, and both Hylo and Carbon are many years away from being close to production ready.
The demands of governments for memory safe languages The White House, National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Security Research Group, Australian Signals Directorate, Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, New Zealand’s National Cyber Security Centre and CERT NZ, and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre are now all calling for the use of memory safe languages. The CISA issued its Product Security Bad Practices report in January 2025 which recommended:
Software manufacturers should develop new product lines in memory safe languages. For existing products, software manufacturers should publish a memory safety roadmap by the end of 2025, outlining their prioritized approach to eliminating memory safety vulnerabilities in priority code components written in memory unsafe languages.
The CISA also created a Secure by Design Pledge for organizations to commit to following its recommended security practices, including using memory safe programming languages. So far 346 organizations have signed the pledge, including Google, Microsoft, HP Enterprise, IBM, Lenovo, Cloudflare, Salesforce, T-Mobile and TP-Link.
The success of new programming languages often depends on being able to fill the right niche at the right time. The tech industry urgently needs a systems language which memory safe, and Rust is the best option which is currently production ready. Software companies are now under the gun to plan their transition to memory safe code. Their contracts with governments are at risk, and clients in the private sector are going to increasingly demand memory safety as well. When these companies sit down to evaluate what language to use in place of C/C++, they are going to ask whether they can live with the reduced performance and unexpected pauses for the garbage collectors in C#, Go, Java and Python. Swift’s reference counters don’t have the random pauses for garbage collection, but they still reduce the execution speed compared to C/C++ and many companies fear becoming dependent upon Apple and its ecosystem. At this point, Rust offers nearly as good of a library ecosystem as C#, Go, Java and Swift, and it has none of the performance penalties and corporate baggage of these languages. Ada also offers performance comparable to C/C++, but its programmers charge higher prices for their services, and its libraries are expensive and limited, since many of them were written for the defense and aerospace industries.
Memory safe variants of C/C++ Many companies are going to look for ways to keep programming in C/C++. Sean Baxter’s “Safe C++” proposal to add strict lifetime checking and memory safety looks promising, and Baxter has implemented the functionality with his proprietary Circle C++ with Memory Safety compiler. Unfortunately, Safe C++ has been sidelined in favor of the C++ profiles, which will be included in the upcoming C++26 standard. These safety profiles (Pro.lifetime, Pro.bounds and Pro.type) will make the language safer by adding static analyzers that check for memory safety, but they fall short of Rust’s safety measures. Filip Pizlo, the senior director of language engineering at Epic Games, forked Clang in 2023 in order to compile a memory-safe version of C/C++, which is called FIL-C. It requires minimal changes to existing C/C++ code, but it has a garbage collector and FIL-C’s performance is currently 1.5 to 5 times slower than standard C/C++. Pizlo, however, believes that he can improve FIL-C to achieve speeds that are 1.2 to 1.5 times slower than C/C++. Finally, Robin Rowe has proposed TrapC as a variant of C, where all pointers are managed by the compiler and memory safe with lifetimes. It eliminates C’s undefined behavior and the goto and union keywords.
All of these proposals for making C/C++ memory safe still have drawbacks at this point. Many companies will be leery of relying on Baxter’s proprietary compiler, when there is little guarantee that it will be maintained and his proposed changes aren’t likely to ever be adopted as part of the C++ standard. Many projects are going to wait until the new safety profiles are supported by the major C++ compilers to evaluate them, but those profiles aren’t enough to make C++ a fully memory safe language. Likewise, many projects are going to wait and see how much Filip Pizlo can improve FIL-C’s performance, before they seriously evaluate it as an option. The same is true for projects currently using C, which will wait for the implementation of TrapC, before evaluating whether to use it.
Conclusion The crucial issue is that the software industry needs complete solutions for memory safety that are currently production ready. Maybe in a couple years, there will be memory-safe variants of C and C++ that are ready for deployment, but many projects are already making decisions, and the longer they have to wait, the more projects are going to decide to move on to Rust. Once they have gone through the pain of adding Rust tooling and adapting their codebase to support new code written in Rust, they are unlikely to bother making another painful transition to a memory-safe variant of C or C++ in a couple years time.
The question is how large will Rust usage become in the future. Rust has the potential to be adopted in spheres where C/C++ has struggled to gain traction, such as server-side for web development, network programming, crypto/blockchain and the defense and aerospace industries that currently use Ada. For example, C/C++ can’t match the 16,126 crates that Rust offers for web development (http servers, http clients, WebAssembly, WebSocket, etc.)
On the other hand, the current usage of C/C++ is likely to splinter into many different languages and different memory-safe variants of C/C++ in the future. Rust will probably capture the largest proportion of former C/C++ developers, but systems programming won’t be nearly as unified in the future as it is today under C/C++. None of the new systems languages are likely to gain much industry support, because most of them (Zig, Hare, C2, C3 and Odin) don’t offer sufficient safety guarantees and the ones that do (Hylo and Carbon) are going to arrive too late to gain much traction in the market. However, they will siphon off some proportion of developers, as is already happening with Zig. In addition, there are likely to be new languages in the offing, such as Mojo that promises to provide C-like performance with the ergonomics of Python, that are going to be much easier to use than C, C++ or Rust. The complexity of Rust and its steep learning curve limits the number of developers who are willing to adopt the language, so it is unlikely that more than a quarter of developers will ever use Rust, which is the proportion of developers currently using C++, according to JetBrains and Stack Overflow.
Given the current pressure on the software industry to switch from C/C++ to memory safe languages, it is likely that Rust will overtake both C and C++ by 2030 in terms of the percentage of developers using the language. Memory safe variants of C and C++ are likely to become production ready in the next couple years, which will curb the decline of these languages to some degree, but that won’t stop Rust’s growth from overtaking them.
Note: Thanks to LEpigeon888 for catching two errors in my text and pzometa for the feedback to make the text clearer.
1Actually it was ranked as the 21st language in 2019, but Stack Overflow subsequently decided to separate “Bash/Shell/PowerShell” into two languages labeled as “Bash/Shell” and “PowerShell” in its annual surveys.
Microsoft is no longer considered the “Great Satan” by the free/open source (FOSS) community, since Satya Nadella took over the helm of the corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Unlike Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer, who called Linux a “cancer,” Nadella famously declared in October 2014 that “Microsoft loves Linux.” This embrace of Linux made strategic […]
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Microsoft is no longer considered the “Great Satan” by the free/open source (FOSS) community, since Satya Nadella took over the helm of the corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Unlike Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer, who called Linux a “cancer,” Nadella famously declared in October 2014 that “Microsoft loves Linux.” This embrace of Linux made strategic sense for Microsoft since its historical antagonism toward Linux had alienated many of its business clients who used Linux servers and needed Microsoft’s software to be compatible with their server infrastructure.
However, it was also part of Microsoft’s strategy to copy Google in monetizing its users’ personal data with targeted advertising, which Shoshana Zuboff aptly dubbed as “Surveillance Capitalism“. Microsoft’s new goal was collaboration with other platforms, so that it could get its software installed everywhere to collect users’ data and extend the market share of its services and software. Microsoft switched from charging mobile phone makers fees for violating their patents to pressuring them to install Microsoft’s apps on their phones. Microsoft was still a parasite on the mobile industry, but it now costs the industry less, so its strong arm tactics draw less public criticism.
When Microsoft bought Github in 2018 for $7.5 billion in stock, Nadella stated: “Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation.” Microsoft appointed Nat Friedman as the new head of Github, who had quite a bit of credibility in the free/open source community. With Miguel de Icaza, who was a GNOME cofounder, Friedman cofounded the company Ximian in 1999 to develop applications and infrastructure for GNOME. Later in 2011 Friedman cofounded the company Xamarin to offer commercial support for Mono, a FOSS implementation of Microsoft’s .NET software stack.
Since I’ve had a Github account since 2013, I kept using the platform after Microsoft bought it in 2018, but I recall thinking at the time, “let’s see whether Microsoft really has turned over a new leaf or not.” I found it annoying that Github kept restricting the size of files that I could upload through the web interface, but I was using Github to distribute large LibreOffice Calc files, which isn’t really the purpose of a coding platform. However, Microsoft seemed to respect my preference for free/open source software and didn’t force people to endure advertising to see my code, so I was happy with the platform.
I knew that I could have installed Gitlab on my server and hosted the code myself, or looked for another code repository that better reflects my values, but all of the code that I have published is for my personal projects that few people care about, so there was no reason for me to invest much time in finding another place to host my files. It was easy to ignore my Github account, because Microsoft rarely bothered me and didn’t spam my email box with advertising and useless announcements. Microsoft loses money providing Github to developers, because it is a gateway to get developers to use other services and platforms like Azure where Microsoft does make money.
Given how little attention Github has demanded from me over the years, I was surprised to get an email on November 4 from Microsoft entitled, “[ACTION REQUIRED] Your GitHub account, amosbatto, will soon require 2FA”. The email explained:
On December 6th, 2025 at 00:00 (UTC) your account will be required to have 2FA for authentication. If you have not yet enrolled by that date, your ability to access GitHub.com will be limited until you finish the enrollment process.
How do I enroll in 2FA?
Click here to get started! Prior to December 6th, 2025 at 00:00 (UTC) you can follow the instructions in our documentation to set up 2FA for your account. If you have not yet enrolled in 2FA by December 6th, 2025 at 00:00 (UTC), you will automatically be taken to the 2FA enrollment form the next time you access GitHub.com.
When I clicked on the first link, it displayed a web page with a QR code to enable two factor authentication with an authentication app. I installed the zbar-tools tools package on my Linux phone, a Purism Librem 5 USA, and downloaded the QR image, so I could use the following command to get the text associated with the QR code: $ zbarimg github-qr-code.png The text, however, is only useful if passed to an authentication app, and there were only three authentication apps mentioned on Github’s page, which were 1Password, Authy and Microsoft Authenticator, and all of these apps are proprietary. 1Password is the only one of these three apps which functions on a Linux system, but it isn’t designed to function on a 5.7″ screen, so I couldn’t use it on my Linux phone. Of course, I could have installed 1Password on my Linux laptop, but I have an ideological preference for free/open source software, so I didn’t want to install any proprietary garbage if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.
I then did a search for “2FA Linux” and found a couple different apps that are free/open source. I installed both KeePassXC and OTPClient, but both of them had the same problem that they didn’t resize properly for a small screen. In addition to my Librem 5, I also have a PinePhone running Mobian, but it has the same problem of limited screen size.
However, I also own a Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 phone that runs LineageOS 22.2, which is a derivative of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). I like this phone because AOSP derivatives like LineageOS strip out most of the proprietary stuff, including the spyware, which is found on normal Android phones, so my phone runs a reasonably free system aside from the proprietary drivers and firmware needed to operate the hardware.
On my Redmi Note 7, most of my apps come from the F-Droid repository, which only contains free/open source software. I know that the F-Droid team does a good job vetting the software, because I helped develop a dictionary app a couple years ago, that we submitted to F-Droid, and they pointed out that the app called a proprietary library from Google for doing downloads. In F-Droid, I found the Aegis Authenticator app, whose code has a GPL 3.0 license. I installed it, and it worked great to set up two factor authentication with Github. I also gave me 16 recovery codes that can be used in the future to reestablish the two factor authentication.
What would have taken me a couple minutes if I had just installed 1Password or one of the other proprietary apps recommended by Github ended up taking me about forty-five minutes, because I wasted time fiddling with different devices and searching for a FOSS solution. It’s not a big deal in the general scheme of things, and frankly I should have figured it out quicker, but I got hung up installing 2FA apps that don’t resize properly for the small screen on a Linux phone.
This story hardly seems worth recounting, because it is the common experience of anyone who tries to only use free/open source software whenever possible. We have to waste time looking for FOSS workarounds, because tech companies assume that we shouldn’t mind using proprietary software, so they often don’t bother listing FOSS alternatives. However, Microsoft claims to “love Linux,” so it should have listed at least one FOSS authenticator application on its web page that can be found in the standard repositories of all Linux distros. It is telling that nobody at Github seems to have noticed that all three of the 2FA apps it mentions on it web page are proprietary, and none of the three are found in the standard repositories for the major Linux distros. It seems like a major oversight for a firm that claims to “love Linux” and makes me wonder what percentage of Github employees use Linux desktop computers.
To be fair to Microsoft, one of its employees did post the “GitHub 2FA Troubleshooting & Prevention Guide” on the Github forum, which lists six authentication apps for 2FA with Github, and one of those six apps is KeePassXC, which is FOSS and runs in Linux. However, KeePassXC isn’t designed for a Linux phone’s screen. Microsoft could have recommended GNOME’s Authenticator app, which is designed to work with smaller screens.
The Guide provides no solution for people who want to use a non-proprietary 2FA app on their mobile devices, which is quite an oversight for a corporation that proudly proclaims: “Open Source enables Microsoft products and services to bring choice, technology and community to our customers.” The vast majority of Github users are probably going to do two factor authentication on their smartphones, and Microsoft could have recommended a multi-platform FOSS app, such as Ente Auth or Proton Authenticator, which works on all the major operating systems, including Linux, Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows. Another good choice would have been 2FAS Auth, which runs in Android and iOS and as a web browser extension in all operating systems. The fact that Microsoft didn’t recommend any of these FOSS options reveals Microsoft’s priorities. Microsoft, like many of the other big tech companies, often brags about how it has embraced “open source,” but the reality behind the rhetoric is often quite different.
Edit: Added recommendations for Ente Auth, Proton Auth and 2FAS Auth.
I have finally finished my lineageos_stats.php script, so it is ready for anybody to use it who wants to analyze the LineageOS installation statistics. It took a long time, because I had to look up the device maker and model, processor and model release date for each build. LineageOS only collects the build codename, the […]
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I have finally finished my lineageos_stats.php script, so it is ready for anybody to use it who wants to analyze the LineageOS installation statistics. It took a long time, because I had to look up the device maker and model, processor and model release date for each build. LineageOS only collects the build codename, the country code and the cellular provider for each active install, and then reports those results in aggregate by country’s two-letter ISO code or by the build codename at https://stats.lineageos.org.
Often the LineageOS build codenames use the OEM’s codename for the model or the model name, but sometimes they are just random names chosen by the person who created the build. Using web searches, I was unable to find any information online about these 12 builds: “wseries”, “enzo”, “androidbox”, “treble”, “K2”, “tenet”, “hulkbuster”, “p10bio”, “paros”, “scale”, “X3” and “Nightmare”. For many of the build codenames, I was unable to find the LineageOS ROM image, but I was able to find either the kernel source code or ROM images for other AOSP derivatives using the same build codename. In some cases, I found nothing except the OEM codename for the model, and I assume that they must have used a GSI kernel to install LineageOS.
My script provides the manufacturer/brand, device model name, processor and model release date for 1319 builds, plus it provides links for some of the unofficial builds, which I thought people might have trouble finding. In some cases, like the codename “Z1“, however, I was unsure because a codename could refer to multiple devices. I found a dozen different devices named “Z1”, including the Acer Z110 (codename: Z1), Coolpad Z1, Cristor Glory_Z1, Jumper Z1, Lava Z1, MobiiStar LAI Z1 4G, Mara Z1, Mafe Z1, Premio Z1, Panasonic ELUGA Z1, Vankyo Z1 and Vestel V TAB Z1. I assume that it is probably a build for the Sony Xperia Z1, because nobody has ported LineageOS to devices made by those other manufacturers, whereas most Sony devices get LineageOS ports, because Sony releases the AOSP source code for its devices.
In a few cases, multiple devices are probably using the same build codename. Unofficial LineageOS builds have been made for Xiaomi Mi 4i and Realme GT 2 Pro, which are both named “ferrari“. Since stats.lineageos.org doesn’t distinguish the two builds, I tallied all the installs as the Xiaomi Mi 4i, since I thought that the majority of the installs were for the Mi 4i. Likewise, the “b5q” codename is probably being used by two different devices. There are 2 installs of LineageOS 22 for the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 and 106 installs of LineageOS 16 for an unknown older device that also used the “b5q” codename.
The “X3” codename aptly illustrates the problems with the LineageOS statistics. There are 24 different devices that use “X3” in their model name or OEM codename. Most of those devices are from minor brands that are unlikely to ever get a LineageOS build, but builds might have been made for the AGM X3, LG Optimus 4X HD (codename: x3), OPPO Find X3 中国版, Realme X3 and Xiaomi POCO X3. I can find LineageOS builds under other codenames for the Optimux 4X HD and POCO X3, and I can find builds for the Realme X3 for other ROMs under the codename “x3” (in lowercase), however, I can’t find a build for “X3” (in uppercase) on the internet. “X3” has installs of versions 14.1, 22.2 and 23.0, and that gap between versions indicates that there are probably two different devices using the same build codename.
LineageOS could resolve these problems by collecting the device model name or processor with its statistics tracker. Unfortunately, my efforts so far to improve how LineageOS reports its statistics have been rebuffed or generally ignored by the developers. I was told that the LineageOS statistics code is “on life support” by one developer and another told me that I should write the code myself and submit it to fix any problems (1, 2, 3) that I find in the statistics. These are a totally understandable responses in a volunteer organization where nobody wants to be in charge of maintaining some old code, but it is also a depressing indication why custom ROMs often have trouble gaining traction beyond a small community of tech enthusiasts. I spent 20 minutes looking through the Go code used to collect the LineageOS stats, but I couldn’t find what needs to be changed, and I’m leery to start randomly hacking on code that could potentially screw up the LineageOS server.
Another problem that one of the LineageOS devs mentioned to me is that people in the past were creating fake accounts to increase the number of installs for particular builds. These fake accounts need to be purged, but there is no easy way to distinguish the number of real installs from fake installs. I found some build names like “1904”, “1905”, “1907”, etc. for installs of version 16.0 in Vietnam that are likely fake and need to be removed from the statistics.
Nonetheless, these problems only appear to affect a very small number of the reported 4.3 million installs, so I think there is value in analyzing the LineageOS statistics. With the caveat that some of the data is questionable, below are some of the results that I gleaned from running the lineage_stats.php script with information on almost all the builds.
The biggest thing that stood out to me is how many builds there are for Samsung devices. Despite all the obstacles that Samsung has created for custom ROMs over the last decade, there are 411 LineageOS builds for Samsung devices, which is twice as many as any other manufacturer. However, it is important to keep in mind that a substantial number of those builds are for different variants of the same model. Because Samsung commonly creates several variants for the same model with different processors and different connectivity options, many different builds are required. Samsung has 1,219,799 million installs, which represent 28.6% of all active installs of LineageOS. Samsung’s recent decision to lock the bootloader on all its devices receiving the upgrade to the UI 8.0 interface will be a huge blow to the LineageOS community in the long term.
Xiaomi with 204 builds and 724,221 installs is the manufacturer with the second largest number of builds and third largest number of installs. Xiaomi’s decision to restrict the number of devices whose bootloader can be unlocked is another giant blow to the community. In some ways, Xiaomi’s decision to no longer be a mod-friendly company is even worse than Samsung’s decision to lock the bootloader, because so many of the Samsung installs are on older devices, whereas many of the Xiaomi installs are for newer devices, so this will have a greater impact on the future of LineageOS. It was also a greater shock to the community, because Xiaomi relied on enthusiasts to help it enter new markets in the West and it built is reputation as a brand for modders.
As I explained in my previous article about the LineageOS statistics, the recent changes in the bootloader unlock policies by Samsung, Xiaomi, ASUS and Realme will make the modding community more dependent on Lenovo/Motorola, as the last major brand that sells to all market segments and regions of the world and still allows the bootloader to be unlocked on its devices. With 137 builds and 1,154,765 installs, Lenovo/Motorola has the third largest number of builds, but it rivals Samsung for the largest number of installs. Lenovo/Motorola has more installs per device than other manufacturers, because it sells more budget models which get more installs than the premium models, especially in the developing world.
In the future, LineageOS will become more dependent upon the specialty brands that serve tech enthusiasts and modders, such as OnePlus, Google Pixel, Sony, Nothing, Fairphone, SHIFT and Volla Phone, that still allow the bootloader to be unlocked. Sony now sells so few phones that it has become a specialty brand that only caters to the premium market in Japan, Europe and North America. The total number of installs of LineageOS will likely decrease as the custom ROM is installed on fewer phone models in the future.
Before the recent changes in the bootloader unlock policies, custom ROMs could be installed in brands that controlled 42.5% of the global smartphone market in 2024, but now custom ROMs will be restricted to brands that control roughly 7% of the smartphone market. Only 30.0% of today’s active LineageOS installs are on those brands that don’t block or put major restrictions on the unlocking of the bootloader.
Ideally the custom ROM communities should respond to this threat to their existence by publishing a list of recommended brands/models that meet a “right to unlock” standard, and encourage the phone makers to change their policies to meet that standard. Since there will be far fewer modable phones available on the market in the future, people will have to actively look for the models that allow the bootloader to be unlocked and support those brands with their business to encourage them to maintain these policies. There will be pressure on these brands to not allow people to install the operating system of their choice, because the phone manufacturers will increasingly rely on revenue from the collection of personal data that is used for targeted advertising and AI training.
The custom ROM communities should also collaborate to create a public petition addressed to the government regulation agencies demanding that users should have the right to unlock the bootloader of mobile devices after a manufacturer stops providing updates for a device. We could try to get lots of groups to cosign the petition, such as the EFF, FSF, OSI, Consumer Union, right to repair organizations, environmental groups, etc. The phone makers do fear the regulation of the European Commission, especially since the Commission mandated that phones must have USB-C ports and removable batteries. The threat of government regulation might convince the manufacturers to allow unlocking the bootloader on more of their devices.
One of the modifications that I made to the lineageos_stats.php script is to only count installs as “O” (active official) or “D” (discontinued official) status if they are a version of LineageOS with official status. 58.2% of LineageOS builds and 50.40% of installs have “unofficial” status, which suggests that the LineageOS project should do more to help users find the unofficial builds, since they represent over half of the builds and installs. Another thing that is surprising is how few of the installs are for discontinued official builds. While these builds represent 22.7% of all builds, they only represent 2.62% of all active installs.
I also added code to the script to calculate what percentage of LineageOS installs are a recent enough version that they can still get security updates from Google. 62.23% of installs are older than LineageOS 20 (Android/AOSP 13), which is still getting Google security updates. This doesn’t mean that the other 37.77% are installing security updates, but at least they are available from Google. The fact that the majority of people are using an unsupported version of LineageOS shows that most people use LineageOS to extend the lifespan of their devices, rather than for the greater security that custom ROMs can provide.
In my previous article, I graphed the number of installs for the top 250 builds. I was surprised how sharply the number of builds and installs peaked in 2019. I wondered if this peak in installs for devices that are 5 to 6 years old is a new phenomenon or it is a long-standing trend. Since we don’t have past data, it is hard to answer that question.
However, when all 1319 builds are included in the graph, it becomes clear that the number of builds didn’t peak for devices released in 2019. There were more builds created for devices first released in 2014, 2015 and 2016. The high number of builds for devices released in previous years suggests that they also had high numbers of installs in the past, similar to what is currently observed for 2019. In other words, the peak in installs for devices that are 5-6 years old is probably a long-standing phenomenon.
The gradual decrease from 142 builds for 2014 devices to 116 builds for 2020 devices suggests that the usage of LineageOS has decreased to some degree over time. However, this decrease may also be a result of device manufacturers making it harder to install and use custom ROM over time, so fewer models are getting builds. Since it often takes a number of years for LineageOS to get ported to new models, it is hard to know how well the LineageOS community is doing with recent models. We need past data to compare with the present.
I am thinking about storing data from my script in a database so it is possible to track changes over time. However, it is discouraging how little interest the LineageOS developers have shown in the installation statistics. Almost nobody bothered to read my previous article on the LineageOS statistics. The one LineageOS dev who bothered to provide feedback on the article was openly hostile to me analyzing the installation statistics.
It is also disheartening that nobody in the custom ROM community is organizing a response to the manufacturers eliminating the right to unlock the bootloader for the vast majority of phones and tablets on the market. The changes in the unlock policies at Samsung, Xiaomi, ASUS and Realme is an existential threat to the custom ROM community in the long term, yet there is very little push-back or public outcry about these changes that will vastly restrict the number of devices where people can install the operating system of their choice.
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Go Aptera Motors, we believe in you! The production line and the Aptera vehicle are really coming together.
