VanMoof’s new owner Lavoie has outlined its plans for the future of the e-bike brand, after acquiring it a couple of months ago. The McLaren Applied-backed e-mobility company said the production and sales of a selection of models will recommence “soon” and they will also make parts more widely available for servicing.
VanMoof was declared bankrupt in July when an Amsterdam judge removed the “suspension of payment" ruling protecting the firm from creditors. McLaren Applied’s chairman Nick Fry later said the company’s acquisition, “underscores our commitment to strengthen and grow our world-leading e-mobility business.”
In their latest statement, Elliott Wertheimer and Albert Nassar, co-CEOs of Lavoie and now VanMoof, said: “We’ve spent the last month working around the clock to understand what needs to be done at VanMoof in both the short and the long term.
“We’ve been reassembling teams, reaching out to stakeholders across the world, and putting plans in place to build a sustainable but also crucially a viable operation going forwards. There’s a lot of work to do in a short space of time, but we want to do it right rather than quickly."
> The VanMoof S4 has turned up – and there’s an X4 too
The CEOs said they are looking to work to three commitments: keeping riders on the road, staying true to VanMoof’s innovative spirit, and delivering on reliability and communicating transparently. (Sounds like four commitments to us.)
A major factor in VanMoof's bankruptcy was that quality control issues were hugely compounded by the firm's widespread use of proprietary tech. Wertheimer and Nassar now plan build a platform to make parts more widely available and will give more third parties access to the technical know-how, with the goal being that any qualified bike shop will be able to service a VanMoof bike.
The production and sales of a selection of VanMoof’s current models will also recommence “soon”, they added, while R&D teams will be working on “groundbreaking new products”.
They also said they’ll make VanMoof products more reliable: “We’ll rebuild the supply chain and redesign and improve parts to make current models more robust and easier to fix. Our new products will be best in class and built to last.”
