Cowboy allays e-bike riders' greatest fears with on-demand repairs and tune-ups | TechCrunch

Cowboy is rolling out a new repairs and service program designed to give its e-bike riders more ways to keep their wheels on the road.

The new service option is more reassurance to European Cowboy riders eager to keep their e-bikes on the road. While traditional bikes are famously easy to maintain, electric bikes are both expensive and have much more that can go wrong, both on the software and hardware side — a fact that any e-bike owner is acutely aware of.

The company just announced that it will begin offering a new on-demand service program for basic maintenance, customization and repairs, delivered at a rider’s home. The services, which include tire repairs, set-up, rear rack installs and the like, are now bookable through Cowboy’s existing app starting at €69/£69. The on-demand service option is available nationwide across Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and “capital regions” in France, the U.K., Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Italy.

Cowboy already offers repairs and tune-ups through a few brick and mortar stores in Berlin, Brussels and Paris, and via a series of partnered European bike shops trained to maintain its bikes. The company also lets riders in some markets buy a £20 monthly service subscription known as Cowboy Care, which covers 14 European cities including Amsterdam, Munich, Brussels, Paris and London.

Like any startup, an e-bike company can vanish overnight, potentially leaving so many multithousand-dollar hunks of bricked e-waste in their wake. Cowboy’s rival the Dutch e-bike maker VanMoof declared bankruptcy last year, leaving its loyal customers (present author included) scrambling to figure out how to keep their bikes running.

Cowboy actually worked overnight on an app that empowered VanMoof owners to download their bike’s digital keys after their rival’s bad news broke last summer. The remains of that company have since been been acquired by Lavoie, a division of McLaren Applied, giving VanMoof riders a faint glimmer of hope that their bikes will continue to work.

Cowboy’s robust service expansion is a good sign for the company and its ridership, particularly anyone who isn’t near a partnered bike shop area and wouldn’t be interested in paying for a monthly subscription. While the company now also sells its handsome bikes in the U.S., the company tells TechCrunch that it is focusing on Europe first to “establish a strong foundation for its success” in its core region, with any plans to expand the new repair options state-side down the road.