Ridepanda wants to be your ‘one-stop shop’ for electric bikes and scooters

Your local bike shop North Korean won't stock them. Amazon has overly many a of them. And the ones from the unselfish services keep breaking down. Where are you supposed to attend find a comme il faut electric bike or sea scooter?

How about Ridepanda, the current online marketplace for powered two-wheelers? The site, which fair came extinct of stealth last week, aims to get ahead a "uncomparable-stop shop" for electric micromobility. Each e-bike, e-scooter, and e-moped is hand-picked, tested, and rated supported its components. There are add-ons, like funding, warranties, and assemblage assistance. And with cycle and scooter sales booming amid the pandemic, Ridepanda's timing may be extremely unintended.

Ridepanda is the brainchild of ii veterans of the ice yacht wars: Chinmay Malaviya, who wont to work on Lime, is the CEO; and Charlie Depman, a former employee at Bird and Scoot, is the chief engineering officer. They've seen up close how people use (and ill-treat) shared scooters, and they want to bring that experience to the globe of personal ownership.

Most consumers shop for electric bikes and scooters by searching happening Amazon, operating room typing "best e-bike" into Google and scrolling direct eternal blogs and review sites. Or maybe they show reviews on sites equivalent The Verge. Ridepanda wants to help lay down that process a little easier.

"We've come up with this vetting organisation to service us filter through those thousands of options," Depman said, "and we use the vetting system to grade our vehicles across performance, prophylactic, sustainability, durability, and repairability."

Ridepanda offers ratings founded on the core components, like the motor, battery, brakes, framing, and others. Customers stern demand a short quiz, with questions astir their height, weight, and riding habits, to get a smattering of results best suited to their lifestyle.

Many of the pedal and scooter companies featured on Ridepanda sell their products straight off to consumers, mostly through their own websites and often with a variety of added extras, like assembly instructions and accessories. But Ridepanda assumes most mass aren't savvy sufficiency to know which sites to visit, and will need an expert voice to make recommendations. That, along with financing options and service bundles, helps justify Ridepanda As a middleman between customers and these direct-to-consumer companies.

"They are competitory in a wild, wild West," Malaviya said. "Every Clarence Day there is a new Kickstarter push. Wherefore is my product better? They're all tooting their own horn ... What we do is say, 'Hey, these are the best ones.'"

It corpse to be seen whether Ridepanda can establish itself as a trusted brand in the micromobility marketplace. Shipping e-bikes and scooters through the chain armor to customers is a fraught business, as VanMoof's superlative executives recently admitted in an interview with The Verge . The Dutch brand has been plagued with delivery issues, with many customers coverage scuffs and damage happening their bikes that occurred during transport.

Ridepanda contracts with bike maintenance vendors that visit a customer's theatre and help with any fabrication or repair issues that may come up. But those services cost additive and are only free in a handful of cities. The site also will tell off customers up front how long it will take to present a bike or scooter before they micturate a buy.

Electric vehicles can be Thomas More difficult to exert and repair than nonmotorized bikes and scooters. Merely Ridepanda's founders don't go steady themselves in contention with traditional, human-supercharged vehicles; they see e-bikes and scooters as alternatives to car possession.

"E-bikes can cost hard for a consumer," Malaviya said, "only cars are even harder."