They would be better off trying to OEM the motor vs. doing bikes themselves…
I won’t bother him here, but I’d be curious to get DCR’s take.
I’m wondering how much this coincides, if at all, with U.S. HOR bill banning DJI drones in the U.S.
Maybe it’s just them diversifying their business, but to me, DJI is at the forefront of this new wave of ‘world class’ Chinese tech and product companies.
They maybe don’t have all the Western pedigree of a Bosch and others, but I’m VERY curious to see what they can bring to this space given their general tech acumen. The DJI brand name has generally good equity. It will be interesting to see if they can make a dent in the cycling category.
EDIT: @dcrainmaker just posted a video.
This is challenging, in terms of the legislation. It’d impact this too (both motor, and bike as a whole, though that’s why it’s a seperate company). The reason is that the current draft bill basically targets the FCC license for the company, which is a pretty darn creative way to deal with it. So that covers both drone antenna signals, but also ironically enough, Bluetooth stuff (which this uses). At least, that’s the current reading of the law by a few people I know. One could plausibly argue the Bluetooth stack is by the chipset vendor (e.g. Nordic, TI, etc…), which would solve it here.
Yup, they are. To both.
The motor is OE’d to ebike companies, as Avinox. Then, they made an ‘incubator’ bike brand, Amflow, which is technically not DJI supposedly, and that brand is the bike brand that has the two models in it.
I really wonder whether this is the right approach to enter the ebike market. I have to remind myself that I am a tiny minority within the cycling universe. Most ebikes are city bikes (whatever they are called in your market), and this is where the bulk of motors is sold. At least using my trusty eyeball metric, I’d say Bosch has a large lead in Europe and Panasonic in Japan.
I would not have focused on an e-mountain bike as my first release.