E-Bikes and Autonomy

Five levels

Two-Wheeler Automation Stops at Rider Assistance

A car can drive an empty cabin. An e-bike carries a rider who balances it, leans it into turns and makes up most of its weight, so a driverless e-bike has no rider to carry and no use case.

Connected drives

Connected Drives Lock the Motor and Track a Stolen Bike

Bosch's eBike Flow app turns the phone into a digital key: eBike Lock disables motor support until the paired phone is near. In July 2022 Bosch added eBike Alarm and GPS tracking through the ConnectModule, a dealer-fitted unit with its own radio, GPS module, battery and motion sensors. Slight movement of a locked bike sets off warning tones, and larger movement without the owner's phone nearby triggers a loud alarm, a phone notification and automatic tracking. Alarm, tracking and live battery status sit in the paid Flow+ subscription.

Specialized's Turbo System Lock immobilizes the motor and can sound a beeper or flash the lights if the bike is moved; the owner unlocks it from the Specialized app or with a PIN on the handlebar remote. VanMoof bikes combine Kick Lock, an alarm, cell-tower tracking and, on units built from April 2021, Apple Find My; the S6 series adds higher-accuracy location. In November 2023 Cowboy pushed a Find My Bike update to all of its e-bikes with GPS location, real-time theft alerts, an app-triggered alarm audible to 30 m and a backup cell that keeps the bike trackable for up to a week after the main battery runs flat.

Segway, the Chinese maker owned by Ninebot, gives the Myon and Muxi e-bikes its Intelligent Ride System: Apple Find My, AirLock proximity locking and a Lost Mode that disables the bike or its battery remotely. Shimano handles drive settings and firmware through its E-TUBE apps. The same speed, cadence and torque sensors that run these drives feed the assistance features below. Drive Systems covers the motors themselves.

Rider assistance

Radar, ABS and Automatic Shifting Are the Assistance Features on Sale

Garmin's Varia set the pattern in 2015: a radar unit on the seatpost that warns, while the rider decides. Bosch's ABS, first sold on city and trekking e-bikes in autumn 2018, was the first feature that acts on the vehicle itself. Automatic shifting takes one task away from the rider, and Shimano's Q'Auto brought it to bikes without a motor battery in June 2025. Segway showed the Myon at CES in January 2026 with its RearView Radar as a factory upgrade wired into the bike's own electrical system, so the radar needs no separate charging.

Scooters and motorcycles

Scooter and Motorcycle Makers Are Adding Car-Style Radar ADAS

The Ducati Multistrada V4 entered production in 2020 as the first motorcycle with front and rear radar, using it for adaptive cruise control and blind-spot warning. Electric makers followed. India's Ultraviolette launched the X-47 in September 2025 with 77 GHz radar for blind-spot detection, overtake alerts, lane-change assist and rear-collision warning, plus front and rear recording cameras.

At CES on January 8, 2026, Valeo and Hero MotoCorp, India's largest two-wheeler maker, signed an agreement to co-develop Advanced Rider Assistance Systems for Hero's petrol motorcycles and scooters and its electric VIDA range. Valeo radar handles forward-collision, distance, blind-spot, lane-change and rear-collision warnings; Valeo cameras add pedestrian detection, lane detection and traffic-sign recognition. Valeo said proof-of-concept systems were already running, and the companies gave no production date. Ola Electric's chief executive Bhavish Aggarwal posted video in March 2023 of an S1 Pro scooter with a front camera and a screen tracking nearby vehicles, a test that has not reached a production scooter.

Among Chinese makers, NIU showed the Concept 06 maxi scooter at EICMA in November 2025 with radar warnings of approaching traffic and adaptive cruise control, and lists blind-spot detection on the 2026 NQiX 500. Segway-Ninebot builds the S90L shared scooter with cameras and onboard processors that run rider-assistance software from Drover AI or Luna Systems to detect sidewalk riding; about 20,000 had been sold by mid-2023, mainly to Lyft.

Self-balancing

Self-Balancing Motorcycles Remain Concepts

Honda showed Riding Assist at CES in January 2017. It keeps a motorcycle upright at rest using control technology from Honda's UNI-CUB personal mobility device instead of gyroscopes, which add weight and change how the bike rides. Yamaha first showed the Motoroid in 2017 and the Motoroid2 at the Japan Mobility Show in October 2023. Its Active Mass Center Control System tilts the battery and swingarm together and, with electronic steering, lets the bike stand, lift off its kickstand and follow its owner using face and gesture recognition.

Neither has reached a production model. Both address slow speeds and standstill, where a heavy motorcycle tips over; on an e-bike the same job is done by the rider putting a foot down, and Segway's auto-lowering dropper post, shown alongside the Myon at CES 2026, makes that easier at stops.

Self-repositioning

Teleoperated Scooters Reached a Pilot, Not a Fleet

Tortoise, founded in 2019 by former Uber executive Dmitry Shevelenko, retrofitted shared scooters from Acton and Yimi with about $100 of hardware so a remote operator could drive an empty scooter at up to 5 mph. Its operators worked from a teleoperations center in Mexico City, and fleet software maker Joyride built Tortoise repositioning into its operator dashboard. In May 2020 Tortoise and the sharing company Go X began a pilot in Peachtree Corners, Georgia, where riders summoned a scooter that drove itself to them and returned to a cleaning station after the ride.

Robotaxis and cyclists

Robotaxis Detect Cyclists With Lidar, Radar and Cameras

Waymo's 6th-generation Driver went fully driverless in February 2026 with 13 cameras, four lidar and six radar units. Its May 2025 analysis of 56.7 million rider-only miles found 82% fewer crashes injuring cyclists than a human-driver benchmark, counted regardless of fault. Waymo holds a US patent, 9,014,905, on detecting cyclist hand signals and has said its system is still learning to read them. Pony.ai's Gen-7 robotaxi carries nine lidar units, 14 cameras and four radars; Baidu's Apollo RT6 carries five lidar units among 40 sensors; Zoox mounts cameras, radar and lidar on all four corners for a 270-degree view from each. Tesla's Robotaxi, launched in Austin in June 2025, sees cyclists with cameras alone. ElectronsX covers robotaxi fleets and sensor stacks.

Signaling in the other direction is still being organized. The Coalition for Cyclist Safety, with 19 founding members including Audi, Bosch, Qualcomm, Shimano and Trek, is working on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) radio links so a bicycle can broadcast its position, speed and heading to cars, and later robotaxis, before a camera or lidar can see it.

Sidewalk delivery robots are the autonomous vehicles that share space with cyclists and scooters most often. Starship Technologies, founded in 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, passed 9 million deliveries in October 2025 with about 2,700 robots. Serve Robotics passed 2,000 robots in December 2025 in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami and Chicago, working with Uber Eats and DoorDash, and Coco Robotics raised $80 million in June 2025 to expand its fleet. ElectronsX covers delivery robots.