A German cycling industry association proposal could safeguard the future of electric bikes or devastate the market entirely, depending on who you ask.
Supported by the Confederation of the European Bicycle Industry, Zweirad Industrie Verband's (ZIV) position paper on future ebike regulations was released in April, and comes at a time when the European Union is giving the industry a deadline of until 2027 to redefine electric bike standards.
ZIV's proposed changes include a limit to peak power of 750W and a support ratio of 1:4 (where 100W of pedalling power is met with 400W from the bike’s motor). Critically, it wants to ensure ebikes have equal legal status to non-assisted bicycles.
The changes may seem innocuous at first. But behind ZIV’s proposal is a complex and ongoing dispute around ebikes standards and legislation, with accusations of protectionism and fears it could freeze out competition, throttle innovation, and limit access to more powerful or inclusive electric vehicles.
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The foundation of the ebike’s success?
At the heart of ZIV's position paper is the aim to ensure ebikes have equal status to non-assisted bicycles.
Tim Salatzki, ZIV’s chief technology officer, said the success of ebikes is due to their equal legal status to conventional bicycles: “[Electric bikes] can go everywhere where a normal bicycle can go and that's the foundation of their success”.
Salatzki said the 750W peak power will cover the vast majority of ebikes already on the market. But it’s included in the paper to avoid an arms race where bikes get more and more powerful.
“That road will lead to a motorcycle, or a motorcycle-like vehicle, which then cannot be considered as a normal bicycle, and we lose all the freedom that we now have,” he explained.
A loss of that freedom could mean ebikes become less easy to access, and the positive impact they can have will be curtailed in Europe. But others point to how ZIV's position paper will have a more harmful effect – especially because it doesn’t define parameters for heavier e-cargo bikes.
A devastating impact
What impact would ZIV’s position paper have? “Devastating,” Annick Roetynck, manager of LEVA-EU, a European trade association for light electric vehicles, told BikeRadar. “It would kill off major parts of the industry.”
Roetynck, who has worked in the industry since 1987, said one of the fundamental issues with ZIV’s position is that it will exacerbate the current situation, where legislation prevents certain light electric vehicles from coming to the market. These include heavier, larger EAPCs (electrically assisted pedal cycles), which are often used in logistics and could be subject to type approval, where a product must meet a minimum set of regulatory, technical and safety requirements.
By insisting that EAPCs remain equal to non-assisted bicycles, ZIV's position would make it far more difficult to get one of these vehicles to market and require them to have a license plate.
But Roetynck said type approval doesn’t make sense for these vehicles, especially when you consider the mass of the vehicles rather than their power and how they function.
“If you take a 25kg electric bike with pedal assistance only, and you take a 25kg pedal assistance bike with pedal assistance and a throttle – whether it’s 250W or 1KW – the kinetic energy of these two vehicles is exactly the same,” she explained.
This means that, in a collision, the effect is going to be the same, according to Roetynck.
Roetynck added that the lack of throttle assistance and the limit of 250W already limit who can use ebikes, because it requires you to be able to produce a certain amount of pedal power to get going.
This is discriminatory in Roetynck's eyes, and could have implications for workers who aren’t in strong physical condition. “If they can't pedal all the time, they don't get access to a job where they would need to use an electric bicycle,” she said.
Roetynck said that ZIV's proposed assistance ratio of 1:4 will lead to this situation getting “even worse”.
Is this protectionism?
So why is ZIV pushing this limited vision of EAPCs? Roetynck said it is “protectionism” and singles out ZIV member Bosch, one of the world’s biggest ebike motor and battery manufacturers.
“Bosch is trying to stop anything – anything – which would mean competition for conventional electric bicycles,” she said.
In response to the claim of Bosch’s influence, Salatzki said: “Bosch is a member of ZIV but is one of 140 members,” and that the position ZIV has been discussed for a long time. “We started that internal discussion more than one and a half years ago, so that [the position] went through a quite lengthy process to find that consensus.”
Claus Fleischer, Bosch eBike Systems CEO, has also said that the debate around ebike regulations isn’t about Bosch or any brand in particular. “It’s an industry aspect where we have to come up with one framework that we agree on before we get asked about what it should look like,” he said to MBR.
Yet Roetynck said there has already been pushback against ZIV’s proposals from the industry. She explained that ZIV brought its proposals to the EU working group that deals with EAPCs in November last year, where there was no majority for it, before raising them again in February 2025. She added that LEVA-EU members that are also part of the German trade association do not agree with the proposal.
Roetynck is not alone in suggesting Bosch’s influence. Hannes Neupert, who has worked in the light electric vehicles industry for even longer than LEVA-EU’s manager, said he considers Bosch to be in a “panic” due to the 2027 deadline on redefining ebike standards.
He sees Bosch as seeking to preserve its place in the sports ebike market. “I cannot accept that Bosch, just for primitive protection of their main market, is attempting to disqualify all others,” which he said includes electric tandems, cargo bikes, and those for families.
Neupert has been highly aware of Bosch’s activities since January last year when it proposed increasing maximum power to 600W. “The official reasoning behind this is that there is dangerous competition between the suppliers, making [more powerful] motors all the time,” he claimed.
In May this year Bosch increased the maximum power of its Performance CX gen 5 motor to 750W, so it’s in line with ZIV’s position and US electric bike law. But Neupert’s assertion of the reasoning behind the move still echoes Salatzki’s claim that the ZIV position is about limiting an arms race.
An uphill struggle
For Neupert, changing the rules around EAPCs comes down to a very simple aim: “If we want to get a very big reach of cycling mobility then the [ebike] is just making a level playing field for everyone because the electric assist will allow anyone to go up a steep hill with their family and shopping.”
Roetynck also highlighted what these proposals could mean for cyclists facing a gradient. “It becomes dangerous,” she explained, “because if a rider on a heavy cargo bike does not get enough support from the motor and he or she goes uphill, they can fall over.”
But Salatzki sees current legislation as posing its own safety issues. “We see products on the market which claim to be an EAPC. But when you look more closely, they behave like a normal, let's say, motorcycle,” he said.
Salatzki explained that, in the Netherlands, the popularity of fatbikes has led to an increase in accidents. Fatbikes are all-terrain ebikes styled like mopeds that are often capable of exceeding the legal limit of 25kph.
He added that singling these bikes – or any illegal ebikes – out is hard, but the issue can be solved by “imposing stricter rules and stricter regulation on all EAPCs”.
This brings us back to Roetynck's concerns over the equivalence between assisted and assisted bikes. Salatzki said there is still room for discussion with heavier EAPCs and he wants these vehicles to thrive. “It's just so complex to have a position for everything,” he explained. “That's why we took this first step.”
But if Roetynck and Neupert are right, where this first step leads will have deep ramifications for the future of ebikes and cycling mobility.
