The e-bike regulation gap is closing

One of these needs a drivers license and license plate. The other does not:

A decade ago, California wrote the national playbook for e-bike law:

• 3 categories (called “classes”)
• 750 watts “maximum” motor output
• 20 or 28 mph speed limiters
• no operator license mandate (for class 1 or 2)
• no vehicle registration or license plate mandate
• no minimum coverage insurance mandate

46 other states followed California’s example.

The policy worked exactly as intended by largely keeping e-bikes legally indistinguishable from bicycles and permitting a new mode of transportation to scale without friction.

E-bikes have scaled to tremendous popularity across all demographics, but particularly among youth riders–and with this growth comes pressure on the 2015 policy as youth injuries and deaths receive high profile news coverage.

While these children are most often being injured and killed by drivers, drivers are still the dominant median voter in the US so reform does not focus on restricting greater driver safety.

As a result, California’s historically lenient e-bike policy regime is ripe for challenges with every news story of a youth e-bike injury.

Here is what has happened so far and what I think comes next:

The boom

US e-bike imports hit ~1.7 million units in 2024 — up 72% year-over-year. California alone is ~$500M of that market. E-bikes outsell electric cars globally by a wide margin, and in the US they now outsell electric cars by unit volume. A growing share of American teenagers gets an e-bike before (or instead of) a driver’s license.

Alongside legal e-bikes, a parallel category has exploded:

Vestigial (or no) pedals, 3,000–6,000 watt “e-motos” (Sur-Ron, Talaria). They are sold online, are capable of 50+ mph, and are ridden overwhelmingly by youth under 18. These are unregistered motorcycles, but in practice they are what most of the “e-bike” news coverage is actually about.

The asymmetry

Here is the central fact:

A Class 3 e-bike and a sub-30 mph gas moped have similar top speeds and similar crash energy. One requires nothing from the state. The other requires a motorcycle license and a DMV plate.

The physical gap between a Class 3 e-bike and a 50cc moped is narrowing, but the regulatory gap has not moved.

That gap is exactly why e-bike adoption has scaled so rapidly, and yet it is also why the pressure to crackdown on the gap is now coming from every direction at once.

What California is actually doing

There is a herd of new and proposed legislation to tighten the prohibitions on e-bikes in CA:

SB 1271 (Min, signed Sep 2024; effective phases through 2026). The big one. Reclassified any e-bike with a throttle as Class 2 (throttles now prohibited on Class 1 and 3). Criminalized aftermarket speed-mod kits. Required UL 2849 / EN 15194 battery certification for any e-bike sold, leased, or distributed in California starting Jan 1, 2026. Gave police clearer authority to impound sub-four-wheel vehicles that don’t meet the e-bike definition.

AB 2234 (2024). Authorized San Diego County jurisdictions to bar riders under 12 from Class 1 and 2 e-bikes.

AB 1778 (Marin pilot). As of July 2025: 16+ to operate a Class 2 in unincorporated Marin, helmets required for all ages.

AB 544 (2026). Rear red reflector or light required at all times — day and night.

AB 1942 (Bauer-Kahan, introduced Feb 2026). Would require DMV registration and a special rear license plate for every Class 2 and Class 3 e-bike in California. Creates an Electric Bicycle Registration Fund. Non-compliance is an infraction. Currently in Assembly Transportation. Opposed by Bike East Bay, CalBike, and most active-transportation advocates; supported by a coalition of parents, local officials, and law enforcement citing enforcement difficulty on modded bikes and e-motos.

SB 586. Tries to solve the e-moto problem by creating an “Off-Highway Vehicle” classification for pedal-less, >750W, Sur-Ron-style two-wheelers.

Meanwhile police departments across the state are now routinely confiscating e-motos from teens, and school districts are banning them from being parked on campus.

What the rest of the country is doing

Three states have broken from the 3-class framework. New Jersey went furthest and the fastest.

New Jersey, Jan 19, 2026 (S4834 / A6235). All e-bikes are reclassified as motorized bicycles. Every rider needs a driver’s license or a motorized bicycle license (15+). Every e-bike needs DMV registration. Throttle e-bikes and 28+ mph pedal-assist bikes require liability insurance. Operators under 15 are banned outright. Online sale of 28+ mph “electric motorized bicycles” is prohibited for a year. The deadline to comply is July 19, 2026. The MVC has not finished building the registration system

New York, NYC. Throttle e-bikes capped at 25 mph citywide; enforcement ramping against delivery riders

Local bans. A growing list of cities and school districts have banned throttle e-bikes from specific corridors, campuses, or age brackets

The New Jersey law matters because it is the template other states will now copy.

And yet it is catastrophically bad policy: it treats a 16 mph pedal-assist cargo bike used by parents to take their kids to school the same as a 45 mph Sur-Ron. The bicycle industry, parents, and advocacy community were blindsided by it.

Where California lands

My prediction (not desire) for California in the next 3-5 years:

1. AB 1942 or a successor passes. Class 2 and Class 3 e-bikes get DMV registration ($) and a rear plate. Class 1 pedal-assist stays untouched.
2. A driver’s license or motorized bicycle license becomes required for Class 2 and Class 3. The mechanism already exists for 50cc mopeds.
3. A throttle age floor. Operators under 16 are effectively banned from any throttle-equipped e-bike.
4. Speed/power enforcement at the point of sale. tighter manufacturer liability, import screening for non-compliant e-motos, and platform (Amazon, Alibaba) pressure.
5. Insurance does not arrive — at least not for Class 2. California doesn’t even require insurance on gas mopeds. The political lift to add it for e-bikes when it doesn’t exist for their ICE analog is too high. This is the single most important thing that distinguishes California’s likely endpoint from New Jersey’s.

In summary:

• Class 2 and Class 3 e-bikes are regulated roughly like <50cc mopeds. License, registration, plate — no insurance.
• Class 1 stays a bicycle.

This is roughly treating e-bikes at parity with ICE two-wheelers.

The stakes if you care about converting drivers to 2-wheels

This is something I care about a lot.

3 things are true:

1. The current framework is unsustainable. The asymmetry with ICE two-wheelers was tolerable when e-bikes were all 20 mph pedal-assist commuter bikes, but is intolerable when retailers are offering 50 mph pedal-less motor vehicle sold as “e-bikes” to 13-year-olds.
2. New Jersey–style blanket moped treatment is a disaster for climate and cities. Requiring a driver’s license, registration, and insurance to operate a 16 mph pedal-assist bicycle destroys the mode-shift attraction of e-bikes, converting a car replacement back into a car, and re-opening the biased-enforcement problem that California closed with AB 1909 in 2022.
3. The choice is not “regulation vs. no regulation.” It is avoiding blunt-hammer regulation that treats everything electric as a motor vehicle.” The advocacy fight worth having is for the first.

That means drawing sharp lines:

• Infrastructure still matters more than licensure. No amount of registration prevents the thing that actually kills cyclists which is a 4,500-pound SUV making a right turn across an unprotected bike lane. License plates on e-bikes are not a substitute for protected bikeway networks, and nobody should let them be framed as one.
• Go hard at manufacturers and importers. Every hour spent regulating a commuter is an hour not spent regulating the Alibaba pipeline that ships 50 mph motor vehicles into suburban garages.
• Class 1 stays a bicycle, forever. No license, no plate, no registration. This is the hill.
• Class 2 and Class 3 can take plates. Throttles and 28 mph pedal-assist are close enough to moped performance that treating them analogously is defensible. A one-time DMV plate is not the end of the world; it is, arguably, what the bikes already should have had.
• Age restrictions on throttles are fine. A 12-year-old operating a 20 mph motor vehicle in mixed traffic is not a civil-liberties issue; it is a parenting-and-product-safety issue.

There is a version of the next decade where California writes a second, more mature framework for e-bikes — one that preserves frictionlessness for real bicycles, treats higher-performance electric two-wheelers like the motor vehicles they functionally are, and goes after the actual problem (e-motos, imports, kids on 50 mph unregistered motorcycles) at the source.

Or there is a version where we sleepwalk into the New Jersey template.

If you want to do something about it: the California Bicycle Coalition, Bike East Bay and Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition are tracking AB 1942.