ALSO, the electric bike company spun out of Rivian, has spent much of the past year in a position familiar to anyone who has followed the EV industry: taking money for a product and then not delivering it on time. Customers put down deposits for the $4,500 TM-B, delivery windows slid, and the company simultaneously ran demonstration bikes around the country on a promotional tour — which is a choice, when your paying customers are still staring at a tracking page that says nothing.
That chapter is now, at last, closing. Electrek reports that early Launch Edition deliveries of the ALSO TM-B have begun showing up at actual customers’ homes, with owners posting first impressions and real-world riding results on social media. The verdicts so far are largely positive, with one useful asterisk, which we will get to.
First, the bike, because it is genuinely odd in an interesting way. The TM-B uses what ALSO calls its DreamRide drive system, a pedal-by-wire setup. On a normal bike, and on nearly every e-bike, the pedals are mechanically connected to the rear wheel and the motor merely helps. On the TM-B there is no mechanical connection at all: pedalling generates an electronic input that tells the motor what to do. It is fly-by-wire for a bicycle, and the practical consequence is that ALSO can retune the entire character of the bike in software. There are other party tricks, including swappable top frames and an unusual answer to the throttle question.
The throttle question being: does twisting or thumbing a control make the bike go without pedalling, motorcycle-style? Regulations on this vary from state to state, and ALSO has engineered around them by making its thumb control a boost button rather than an independent throttle. One early Launch Edition owner explained:
“When you depress the throttle and you’re not pedaling, nothing happens. But when pedaling, it temporarily increases the assist to the max level and the bike takes off like a rocket. It’s unbelievably responsive and fast. I’m completely satisfied with how this works; I don’t really have any interest in an eBike that operates like a motorcycle and accelerates without pedaling.”
This matters because the regulatory patchwork around e-bikes is real and tightening — ask the Canadian investigators who recently found stores selling e-bikes that beat the speed limits. ALSO has essentially decided it would rather sell one bike everywhere than a different bike in every state, and solved the problem in firmware.
Another new owner, self-deprecatingly: “Very happy and impressed with the bike but please keep in mind I have never owned an e-bike so my summary might not be as detailed as others. To me this thing is a home run.”
About that 100-mile range
Now the asterisk. ALSO advertises up to 100 miles (160 km) of range. One owner set out to test this, deliberately, and covered 30 miles on a full charge before hitting 4% battery. To be fair to everyone, this was close to a worst-case protocol: high pedal assist the whole way, several steep hills, significant headwinds. It is less a review of the bike than a review of the marketing.
There is also a mechanical tell about how seriously to take advertised range. The TM-B starts rationing its own help as the battery drains: maximum assist drops from the top 10x setting to 9x at 40% battery, steps down progressively, and reaches a mere 2x at 6% — below which, the owner reported, it starts feeling like pedalling a normal bicycle. A bike that quietly turns off its own superpowers as the tank empties is, at least, honest with itself.
None of this is unusual for the category. E-bike range claims are optimistic across essentially the entire industry, generally measured at low assist in kind conditions rather than at full blast into a headwind — something Electrek notes, and something anyone who has read one of its real-world ride tests will recognise. The correct mental model is that the advertised number is what the bike can do, the way “the car seats seven” is something a car can do.
The delays that got us here had their own pedagogy, too. ALSO has attributed them to hardware changes related to component supply and to regulatory approval challenges around its battery and its high-power USB-C charging system — the unglamorous plumbing that separates a good demo from a shippable product.
There will surely be first-generation quirks as hundreds of TM-Bs accumulate real miles, and much more range testing — especially at lower assist levels — is needed before anyone can say how realistic the 100-mile figure is. But the important milestone has passed: the bikes are now under customers rather than brand ambassadors. What those customers think, over the coming weeks, will settle whether ALSO’s very Rivian vision of the bicycle was worth the wait. Spreadsheets of delivery estimates never answered that question. Thirty miles into a headwind might.