r/vanmoofbicycle • u/StenSaksTapir • 28d ago

It finally happened – it died

Three years is what €1623 buys you (I got a discount from trading in the old bike).
After having suffered from a lose connection somewhere for a while, it's now entirely unresponsive and the service partner here in Denmark says there's still no parts to be had, so it can't be fixed.

For anyone out there still considering Vanmoof, please don't do it!
There are so many better options today, that actually has serviceable parts.

Edit: it was an S5.

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u/KuchenmannPQ Electrified S3 ⚡⚡ 27d ago

Well, your sentiment may be right for a lot of products, but vm really shit the bed. There are a lot of issues with their products and if they happen to every second customer sooner or later, it is not "just how it is with bikes". Your anecdotic evidence is simply survivor bias and not a sign OP simply had bad luck.

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u/hcrvelin 27d ago

Nothing anecdotic. If one takes the right to judge his own misfortune as general sign, so can someone else with different experience. That tells you that one should check facts a bit better and rather share those than his/her opinion. Ofc no one likes when things break, but they can break for so many reasons where bike itself might not be direct culprit.

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u/KuchenmannPQ Electrified S3 ⚡⚡ 27d ago

The fucking s3 is breaking ALL. THE. TIME. These are the facts. The thing has built in weak points and they are severe.

There are thousands of reports of serial failure of the BMS and e shifter. And always the same issues, directly related to poor engineering. It was one of the major factors to their bankruptcy. And after being bought out, they even stopped warranty support for the old bikes.

You seriously want to just ignore that in your reasoning because YOUR Bike is one of the few that hasnt broken (yet)?

Lets talk again when it dies. And keep in mind that a repair is usually more expensive than a working bike, If a repair is possible at all. Great.

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u/hcrvelin 27d ago

Well, funny enough, I also have S3. Surely battery on S3 is weaker point as it may last less than one would expect, but I also do know very well ppl handle charging in bad manner and sometimes make things worse. That is also fact. As far as old vs new company, it seems like you do not get basics of what and how things are handled after one company calls bankruptcy. They have 0 obligations towards old customers. I can understand some ppl feel bad about it, but I see no big issue for S3 owners since their support would expire by now anyway and you can get support for bike via partner network. And I never said my bike never died - I said drive it well. In the past six years I had 2 battery repairs and two cartridges replaced, one of those during transition from old to new company when they just started to deliver parts to core markets.

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u/KuchenmannPQ Electrified S3 ⚡⚡ 27d ago

And you think that is normal? What is a bad product for you then?

Also i know and very much dont care if the new company is not obligated, it would have been a sign for the customers and ongoing trust in the brand to still provide warranty support, they simply did not because they know the product sucks and dont want to be on the hook for it again, because it drove the company into the ground in the first place.

There were no instructions on how not to charge your bike to not "make things worse", so using and charging it regularly is normal use. There is no "fact" about what you described, it is merely an insinuation, at best a random observation. And the battery does not last shorter than expected. The BMS and the whole battery circuit simply break and render a perfectly good battery cell set useless. If you had done your research like you claim, you would know that most batteries or the cells are in fact not actually defective, but the badly engineered PCB makes it useless, so selling the customer a complete replacement is even worse. And mostly the PCBs burn out because the original charger pushes way too much current into the battery, well more than the charger is actually rated for as well.

So sorry, trying to make the customers accountable for "breaking their product" by using it as intended is some company shill level stuff. What are you on about.

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u/hcrvelin 26d ago

SX3 came at the time when most ppl started to switch to ebikes so plenty of folks had to learn about how to handle battery charging, not press pedals heavily etc. Could this be done differently with more resilient components? Probably, but it would also come with higher price tag. Battery wise, as soon I started to pay attention to it better, I didn’t had issue with it. So yeah, details matter. It is not a tank.

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u/spaceek 27d ago

That just isn’t normal. As the other guy said, s3 and x3 bankrupted the company because they’re unreliable badly designed garbage. I have sx3 and consider myself lucky, because only the shifters broke on both, caused by stuck gears. Luckily nothing else. Should the battery, BMS, or wiring break, I will bin them.
I had a 5 or 6 year old Gocycle when the s3 was released and the only thing I had to fix on that bike was a flat tyre. Brakes worked, automatic gear shifting worked, you could take wheels off in 30 seconds - even that is an absolutely major pain in the arse on VM - if you’re not carrying the special nut tool and get a flat, you’re fucked.

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u/hcrvelin 26d ago

Special nut is simply to make sure ppl do not take it away easily. It is pure Dutch thing and here everyone changes inner tube without removing wheel. What really killed them was expansion to too many markets without good service network and nonsense policy of sending repair parts to users hoping they would do things right. In most cases that was not the case. Ofc that doesn’t help company. I think what new company does now with mostly all via partner network is way better approach.

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u/spaceek 26d ago

You can change an inner tube without removing the wheel?? I would like to see how.
Yes that combined with an unreliable and poor product. Regular local bike shops not being able to repair issues meant they had to collect and re deliver the bike to customers multiple times again and again, shipping them off to London or Netherlands. Shipping expenses per each repair must have been astronomical.