After months of delays, missed delivery windows, and increasingly impatient reservation holders, Rivian spinout ALSO is finally putting its electric bikes into the hands of actual customers.
Early Launch Edition deliveries of the US $4,500 ALSO TM-B e-bikes have begun showing up, with a few owners posting their first impressions and real-world riding results on social media. And so far, the reports seem largely positive – though the first range numbers also offer a useful reality check on some of the bike’s loftier claims.
For those who haven’t been following the saga, ALSO’s TM-B is one of the more unusual new electric bikes to hit the market in years. The company was spun out of Rivian and brought plenty of that EV-style thinking with it, resulting in a bike that looks and operates quite differently from the sea of relatively conventional e-bikes already on the market.
The TM-B uses ALSO’s proprietary DreamRide drive system, combining a pedal-by-wire setup with a powerful motor. There’s no conventional bicycle drivetrain mechanically connecting the pedals to the rear wheel. Instead, pedaling generates an electronic input that controls the motor, creating a system that ALSO can tune largely through software.
It’s one of many interesting features on the bike, including swappable top frames and the company’s unusual take on a throttle.
One early Launch Edition owner explained that the thumb control doesn’t simply turn the TM-B into a typical throttle-controlled e-bike.
“When you depress the throttle and you’re not pedaling, nothing happens. But when pedaling, it temporarily increases the assist to the max level and the bike takes off like a rocket. It’s unbelievably responsive and fast. I’m completely satisfied with how this works; I don’t really have any interest in an eBike that operates like a motorcycle and accelerates without pedaling.”
That’s an interesting distinction, especially as the industry increasingly wrestles with an increasing number of differing regulations from state to state. ALSO has effectively created a temporary “boost” button rather than a traditional independent throttle.
And early riders appear to be enjoying the result.
Another new owner summed up the experience fairly succinctly: “Very happy and impressed with the bike but please keep in mind I have never owned an e-bike so my summary might not be as detailed as others. To me this thing is a home run.”
But about that 100-mile range…
One of the more interesting early reports comes from an owner who deliberately set out to see what kind of real-world range the TM-B could deliver.
Starting with a full charge, the rider covered 30 miles (51 km) before reaching 4% battery remaining. That ride admittedly represents something close to a worst-case range test: the rider said they used high levels of pedal assist throughout the entire trip, encountered several steep hills and dealt with significant headwinds.
The bike also apparently begins progressively limiting its maximum assistance as the battery gets low, starting to reduce output power when the battery reaches 40% charge. According to the owner, maximum assistance dropped from the highest 10x setting to 9x at 40% battery, then gradually stepped downward until only 2x assistance remained at 6%.
Below that point, the owner described the TM-B as beginning to feel more like pedaling a normal bicycle instead of an electric bicycle.
The reported 30 miles (51 km) from essentially a full battery certainly isn’t anywhere close to the 100-mile (160 km) claim, but it also shouldn’t be especially surprising. E-bike range figures are notoriously optimistic across virtually the entire industry, generally representing low-assistance riding under favorable conditions rather than someone spending an entire ride asking the motor for everything it has.
Even if the range numbers don’t quite live up to the advertised figures, at least under real-world riding scenarios, most owners are likely just happy to finally be getting the long-delayed bikes.
ALSO originally expected to have these bikes in customers’ hands much sooner, only to suffer repeated delays. Customers who put down money early watched delivery timelines slide while ALSO simultaneously took demonstration bikes around the country as part of a promotional tour. The company has attributed recent delays to hardware changes related to component supply as well as regulatory approval challenges surrounding its battery and high-power USB-C charging system.
Now, at least, the story is finally changing from when customers will get their bikes to what those customers actually think of them.
There will undoubtedly be quirks, complaints and perhaps a few first-generation teething problems that emerge as hundreds of TM-B e-bikes rack up real-world miles. And we’ll need considerably more range testing – particularly at lower assist levels – before drawing conclusions about how realistic ALSO’s upper-end range claims actually are.
But after such a long wait, seeing Launch Edition TM-Bs underneath actual customers instead of company representatives might be the most important milestone yet.
And as more of them land on doorsteps over the coming weeks, we should finally get a much clearer picture of whether ALSO’s unconventional vision of the electric bicycle was worth waiting for.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
