Shipping times for just about everything have been stretched to new limits thanks to pandemic related supply chain constraints. While nearly every industry has been affected in some way, electric bicycles and other forms of personal mobility have been uniquely impacted.
The pandemic has affected the e-bike industry in a myriad of ways.
Commuters have sought out e-bikes as a cost effective transportation alternative.
Recreational riders have turned to e-bikes as a way to get outdoors and back to exercising on a bike just like during their youth.
And delivery riders have adopted e-bikes en masse as a way to satiate the pandemic-induced skyrocketing demand for home delivery of food and goods.
The only problem is that almost all e-bikes come from Asia, and shipping times to the US have been creeping up for over a year now.
While there is some local e-bike production in the US, the vast majority of electric bikes are imported on container ships.
What used to be a four-week cruise from Asia to the US West Coast has often turned into a more than 10 week journey that involves long lines of container ships waiting off the coast near California’s busiest ports.
One recent electric bicycle company, Ride1Up, recently shared more details than ever on why one of their popular new electric bike models won’t be arriving in time for Christmas.
As the company explained in an email to customers obtained by Electrek:
Thank you for your support and interest in our new Roadster V2 – Gravel Edition. We want to first express our sincerest apologies for the delay. It appears these will not ship by December 31, 2021 and will likely ship by January 2022.
With the global pandemic’s impact on our supply chain, what used to be a 4-week delivery schedule from our manufacturers has turned into 4-8+ weeks (and counting). The Port of Long Beach is extremely backed up with no rhyme or reason for how they are accepting vessels. In fact, the vessel carrying these e-bikes left our manufacturer in mid-October and has been circling around the the Port of Long beach since mid-November.
As of this morning and for almost a month, the vessel is currently outside the port waiting to be unloaded for almost a month. See photo below as of 6:00AM PST on 12/17/21. We are hopeful that the container will be unloaded and will clear customs without any additional, significant delays.
We truly believed that even with an extra 5+ week shipping time as a buffer we would be able to get you all your bikes before the end of the year. We wanted to be proactive and share this information as soon as we determined end-of-year shipping will likely not be possible given the holidays.
We could (and hope to) be wrong and these could unload sooner but we wanted to be realistic with you all.
If you have planned to give this as Christmas or other Holiday present, please reach out to our Support Team and we can provide a digital brochure of the Gravel Roadster to share with a loved one on the holiday.
We appreciate your support of the brand and hope you participate! As soon as we get any updates, we will share them with all of you.
-The Ride1Up Team
The Ride1Up Roaster V2 Gravel Edition e-bike drew a large amount of interest upon its release. Priced at just $1,245 in an industry that normally charges $3,000 or more for electric gravel bikes, the Ride1Up Roadster V2 Gravel Edition is the most affordable way to get into the gravel game on an e-bike.
At the same time, it still manages to pack in a number of nice components, such as the included Gates carbon belt drive and internally-mounted battery.
The bike’s strong response led to high sales, but now customers are waiting for those containers to finally reach port and unload the bikes.
Ride1Up is far from the only e-bike company affected by the shipping crunch. But they are one of the most transparent so far, showing customers exactly where bikes are in the shipping process and why the typically shorter voyage is taking much longer than usual.
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