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Australia is in the midst of a moral panic about e-bikes. There is just one problem: many of the machines driving it aren’t really e-bikes at all. Poor regulatory design has allowed electric motorcycles to masquerade as bicycles, creating a very real problem on our streets and putting at risk the enormous potential of e-bikes and micromobility in our cities.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the e-bike hysteria.
Teenagers on fat-tyred machines. Wheelies through traffic. Groups travelling at speeds that look plainly incompatible with either the bicycles they resemble or the infrastructure they are using. Police operations, angry residents and the inevitable calls for governments to act, to crack down on this menace.
There is a real problem here. Riding an unregistered electric motorcycle at 50 or 60 kilometres an hour along a suburban street, bike path or footpath is dangerous. Putting one in the hands of a 14-year-old more so.
But there is also a problem with the language.
These things aren’t legally e-bikes. Calling them e-bikes doesn’t magically stop them being motorcycles.
And yet somehow, we have managed to confuse the two.
That matters because genuine e-bikes offer something extraordinarily useful to our cities.
Conventional cycling, particularly for commuting has some obvious limitations. Distance matters. Hills matter. Fitness matters. So does arriving at work on a 35-degree Adelaide morning looking vaguely like you did when you left home.
Electric assistance changes that equation.
It makes longer trips practical. It makes hills considerably less relevant. It makes carrying children, groceries and other loads easier. It opens cycling to people who might not otherwise consider it and allows people already riding to travel much further.
And it is that change in the useful geography of cycling that is by far the most important.
A bicycle has always been remarkably efficient at turning a relatively small radius around a home into an accessible area. Add electric assistance and that radius grows substantially. Suddenly more jobs, shops, schools, railway stations and services are within a realistic cycling journey.
We are not waiting for someone to invent this technology. It is already here. Making everyday use practical is a different task.
Australia’s original approach to the emerging generation of European-style e-bikes was actually pretty sensible.
In 2012, the Commonwealth recognised electrically assisted pedal cycles complying with European Standard EN 15194. These were, fundamentally, bicycles. The rider pedalled, and whilst they did so, an electric motor provided assistance of up to 250 watts, assistance that disappeared at speeds of over 25 kilometres an hour.
The important bit was not just the numbers. The vehicle had to comply with a recognised technical standard.
Where it all went wrong, was in 2021, when from a regulatory perspective, something seemingly minor happened.
The Commonwealth removed the requirement that these bikes meet EN 15194 and replaced it with a definition containing some of the standard’s key characteristics: 250 watts, pedal assistance and the 25 kilometre-an-hour cut-off.
The intention appears to have been benign. The explanatory material said the change did not alter the intent of the existing arrangements. Indeed, the Commonwealth assessed the amendment as having a “neutral regulatory impact”.
Except regulatory boundaries matter.
There is a difference between requiring a product to comply with a recognised standard and extracting a few characteristics from that standard and putting them into a definition.
At much the same time, both the technology and the market for electric two-wheelers were changing extraordinarily quickly.
Bigger batteries, cheaper motors and sophisticated controllers made it increasingly easy to build something that looked vaguely like a bicycle but performed much more like a motorcycle. Add pedals and software capable of limiting power, and the physical distinction became increasingly blurred.
Then add Australia’s peculiarly fragmented regulatory system.
The Commonwealth regulates vehicles entering the Australian market. States and territories largely determine what can actually be ridden on their roads and paths. Consumer law adds another layer again.
The result is a system in which the fact that something can be imported, advertised and sold does not necessarily mean it can legally be ridden down your street.
That is a pretty fundamental design problem for a consumer product.
Good regulation should make the lawful choice obvious and the unlawful choice difficult. We instead created a system in which a product that cannot lawfully be ridden as a bicycle on public roads could be relatively easy to acquire, difficult for consumers to distinguish and pretty much impossible for authorities to police.
What could possibly go wrong?
By the time enforcement occurs, the product has already been imported. It has been advertised as an e-bike. Someone has bought it. Quite possibly a well-meaning parent has bought it for their child.
We have moved regulation from the border, manufacturer and retailer to the suburban street.
And that is where poor regulatory design starts to become a much bigger problem.
Because the community does not see regulatory classifications.
It sees e-bikes.
When a teenager rides a multi-kilowatt electric motorcycle through traffic at 60-plus kilometres an hour, nobody stops to discuss whether its continuous rated motor output exceeds the statutory threshold.
It is an e-bike.
When groups of kids ride them dangerously along shared paths, they are kids on e-bikes.
When the police seize them, the media reports another e-bike story.
Slowly, the distinction between a 250-watt pedal-assisted bicycle and an electric motorcycle capable of motorcycle speeds disappears.
We would never see somebody riding an unregistered petrol dirt bike through a suburban shopping strip and conclude that we have a bicycle problem.
Put a battery in it and stick some largely decorative pedals on the side, however, and apparently, we do.
That is how a regulatory failure becomes a social problem.
A genuine issue involving illegal vehicles and dangerous behaviour becomes a media-hyped moral panic about e-bikes. Community concern grows. Governments respond. Reviews are established. Restrictions are contemplated.
Queensland has already introduced age and licensing requirements for riders of compliant e-bikes. Since 31 August 2026, the general rule has required riders to be at least 16 and hold a valid driver licence, with exemptions for supervised younger riders, certain recreational settings and qualifying medical or disability circumstances.
South Australia has also been reviewing its framework. Public consultation closed on 16 August and included questions about minimum ages, learner-permit requirements for compliant e-bikes, enforcement and the treatment of non-compliant machines.
Some regulatory response is clearly justified.
But we should be very careful about what problem we are trying to solve.
The irony is that governments have themselves begun rebuilding the regulatory boundary that disappeared. In November 2025, Australia’s transport ministers agreed that the Commonwealth would reinstate EN 15194. On 24 December, the amended Commonwealth rules actually did so. In August this year, the Commonwealth also directed the ACCC to develop a nationally consistent safety standard for e-bikes and other micromobility devices.
Five years after a regulatory change assessed as having a neutral impact, we had put an important part of the boundary back.
There is a broader lesson in that.
Regulation does not only fail because governments regulate too much or too little. It can fail because we regulate at the wrong point, because different parts of government regulate different pieces of the same problem or because the boundary between two things is poorly designed.
And once that happens, the consequences can extend well beyond whatever the original regulation was intended to achieve.
Australia should absolutely deal with children riding powerful, unregistered electric motorcycles on public roads. They are dangerous, they are illegal and there is no particularly compelling public-policy argument for pretending otherwise.
But if the response makes genuine pedal-assisted bicycles harder to own, harder to use or simply less socially acceptable, poor regulation will have achieved something remarkable.
It will have first helped create the problem, then damaged one of the solutions.
Our cities need more choices between walking and driving, not fewer. E-bikes occupy an unusually useful part of that space. They will not replace the car, nor should they be expected to. But they can potentially make millions of journeys that currently default to a car practical by bicycle instead.
It would be a peculiarly Australian failure of public policy if we allowed electric motorcycles masquerading as bicycles to convince us that bicycles with electric assistance were the problem.
