Rivian’s ALSO e-bikes are finally hitting the road – but not for frustrated customers

Rivian spin-off ALSO is finally getting its futuristic TM-B electric bikes out across the United States.

Unfortunately for the customers who ordered them nearly a year ago, those bikes aren’t headed to their garages. They’re headed on tour.

ALSO has kicked off its “Test Spin Fall Tour,” a traveling demo program that will bring the high-tech TM-B to cities around the country from September through November. The tour started in Portland, Oregon, and includes stops in Philadelphia, Boston, Boise, Madison, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Atlanta, Bentonville, San Antonio, Nashville, Detroit, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Tempe, and more.

The company is bringing demo bikes along so prospective new customers can get an in-depth walkthrough and actually ride the TM-B before potentially placing an order.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

While ALSO is driving TM-Bs around the country to woo new customers, many of its earliest customers are still waiting for the bikes they already paid for.

The $4,500 Launch Edition TM-B was originally expected to begin reaching customers in spring 2026. That timeline slipped into summer, then into September. Earlier this month, customers received yet another update saying Launch Edition bikes were “now shipping,” but that deliveries would occur in waves stretching all the way into early November.

As of last week, several early reservation holders on Reddit – including self-described day-one customers – were still reporting that they hadn’t received individual delivery dates.

Others have sounded the alarm about worrying signs of a stunted rollout, including multiple reports of customers visiting local bike shops listed on the ALSO site as service providers, only for the staff there to not even know they’re considered to be official ALSO service partners.

To ALSO’s credit, the company has recently made a more concerted effort to explain what has gone wrong.

Following growing criticism from customers over both the delays and a perceived lack of communication, ALSO Head of Product Saul Leiken took to Reddit with a lengthy explanation and apology.

According to Leiken, part of the problem stems from supply-chain issues affecting the raw materials used for printed circuit boards and certain integrated circuits. ALSO says demand associated with the AI boom has made some components difficult to source, in some cases forcing engineers to source and requalify alternative materials – which means more engineering and testing instead of simply swapping in another part.

There’s also the battery.

The TM-B’s removable battery is particularly unusual because it supports USB-C Power Delivery charging at up to 240W. According to ALSO’s explanation, that level of power exceeds existing regulatory guidelines for the application, requiring the company to work with standards organizations on new safety and testing protocols. The bike’s unusual DreamRide pedal-by-wire drivetrain has created another manufacturing challenge, requiring what Leiken described as high-precision production and a slower ramp to maintain quality.

Leiken acknowledged that the company should have communicated those challenges more clearly along the way.

That explanation certainly provides more context for why one of the most technologically ambitious e-bikes we’ve seen in years has proven difficult to manufacture at scale, though the company’s discussion of some of those efforts in the present tense does raise questions about the veracity of the “now shipping” claims made by ALSO earlier this month.

In all fairness, building what amounts to a software-defined light electric vehicle with a novel drivetrain and battery architecture was probably never going to be as straightforward as ordering a few hub motors and welding together some aluminum frames.

But it also creates an increasingly strange situation for ALSO’s earliest supporters.

There are apparently enough functional TM-Bs available to send fleets of them around the country so prospective buyers can take test rides. ALSO has also been operating Test Spin programs through Rivian locations, part of an effort announced earlier this year to bring demo rides to ten cities nationwide.

Meanwhile, some of the people who put down $4,500 for their e-bikes last year are still checking their inboxes for an actual delivery date.

Obviously, demo and production bikes aren’t necessarily interchangeable. Marketing fleets are allocated long in advance, and pulling a handful of demo bikes off a nationwide tour wouldn’t magically solve a production ramp involving hundreds or thousands of customer units.

But optics matter here, too.

Seeing an ALSO van roll into your city full of shiny TM-Bs has to feel a little different when you ordered yours last October and are still waiting for the email telling you when yours will arrive.

The good news is that ALSO still maintains that Launch Edition production is underway and that deliveries are coming in waves through early November.

Hopefully, the next nationwide tour these bikes embark on will be inside delivery trucks headed to the customers who have been waiting for them.

Electrek’s Take

Look, from a marketing standpoint, a tour like this makes plenty of sense. The TM-B is an impressive engineering feat, but also a pretty weird bike – in the best possible way. It probably benefits more than most from getting butts in seats. Its unconventional frame, removable top tube/seat assembly, touchscreen interface, high-powered USB-C charging, and pedal-by-wire DreamRide drivetrain make it unlike basically anything else in the e-bike industry.

These are all things you have to feel to understand. And I imagine that they feel pretty impressive, though I can’t necessarily speak from personal experience. Readers may recall that I wrote an exclusive last year ahead of ALSO’s highly anticipated and secretive launch, revealing that the company had accidentally leaked their own bike’s design from a few poorly-edited frames in a flashy teaser video. An hour later, I received an email uninviting me from the ALSO launch. So while I can appreciate the impressive engineering that went into the bike, I can’t tell you how the bike rides – at least not unless the tour stops in my city.

But from a distance, I can appreciate the dueling desires here, for a new company to get its bikes out there as broadly as possible for the public to see and ride, and to meanwhile calm frustrated customers who have no idea when they’ll get their own paid-in-full e-bikes after months of delays.

There’s no doubt that ALSO has the engineering talent to pull this off. The question is whether the other pieces of running a successful e-bike company will fall into place.