Rivian’s e-bike offshoot has finally started putting hardware on trucks. The interesting part of this story isn’t the delay — it’s what the company’s own paperwork reveals about how it structured the deal with its earliest customers.
Also, Inc., the micromobility outfit Rivian spun out in March 2025 with $105 million from Eclipse Ventures, announced its TM-B electric bike in October 2025 with deliveries promised for spring 2026. Spring came and went. On its own support site, Also blamed “current stress on global supply chains,” citing a demand spike for raw materials and electronic components, and reset the shipping window to July, with the last Launch Edition units landing by mid-September.
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The more telling detail on that same page is the make-good: every Launch Edition buyer gets a free Alpha Wave helmet from the first production batch plus a $250 credit for a gear shop that doesn’t exist yet. Companies don’t hand out roughly $500 in goods per customer because a few people grumbled. That’s a retention spend, and it tells you how loud the reservation holders got.
Read the contract before you read the forums
Here’s where it gets genuinely instructive for anyone who’s ever wired money to a hardware startup. Also’s reservation agreement charges the full purchase price — not a $100 placeholder deposit — at the moment you reserve. Section 5 states plainly that there’s no guaranteed delivery date. Section 9’s force majeure clause suspends Also’s obligations for, among other things, shortages of materials. Read that against the supply-chain explanation and you’ll notice the company essentially pre-wrote its own excuse into the terms fourteen months before it needed one. That’s not sinister; it’s standard startup lawyering. It’s also exactly why you should read these documents.
The saving grace, and the reason this is a customer-service story rather than a consumer-protection story: Section 6 lets you cancel for a full refund at any time, processed in roughly five to ten business days. Anyone who walked away got made whole. Compare that to the deposit graveyards of the last EV startup cycle and Also looks positively responsible. Note as well that the terms route disputes to individual arbitration and waive class actions — meaning if deliveries had gone sideways, there would have been no class-action lever to pull.
What the money actually buys
The TM-B is a series hybrid, which is the part most coverage glosses over. There is no mechanical path from your feet to the rear wheel. You pedal a generator; the generator feeds the battery; software decides what the traction motor does. Also’s own spec page lists 180 Nm at the traction motor and 195 Nm at the generator input, 0.3 g of acceleration, and the ability to hold a 30 percent grade. The display — the “Portal” — is 2.75 inches, not the five-inch panel some early write-ups claimed. Batteries come in two sizes rated for 60 and 100 miles, charging over USB-C at up to 240 watts, roughly 2.3 and 3.75 hours to full respectively, and doubling as power banks.
The mechanical implications are the fun part. Because the gears are simulated in software, there is no derailleur, no cassette, no chainrings, and no shift cables. That eliminates the single most common wear-and-adjustment category in bicycle ownership. Your local shop’s most profitable routine service just stopped existing.
What replaces it is less comforting. Everything on this bike — motor, generator, battery, electrical architecture, software — is developed in house, per Also’s own launch release. When a bespoke generator with integrated torque sensing fails at 4,000 miles, there is no aftermarket. There is Also, or there is a paperweight. The company has said it partnered with mobile service provider Velofix, which is the right instinct, but a service network’s quality only becomes knowable after the warranty claims start.
Two other things worth flagging: Also does not publish a curb weight anywhere on its spec page — an omission that’s rarely accidental on a bike with two motors and an automotive-grade battery pack — and the Utility top frame is rated for 300 pounds with 77 pounds on the rear rack, which is genuinely useful cargo capacity if you’re pricing this against a second car rather than against a bicycle.
A regulatory question nobody has answered yet
Federal law defines a low-speed electric bicycle at 15 U.S.C. 2085 as a vehicle with “fully operable pedals” and a motor under 750 watts. California’s Section 312.5 uses the same pedal language and adds that a Class 3 bike must not be capable of propelling itself except in a walk mode up to 3.7 mph.
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The TM-B’s pedals are fully operable — they turn, they generate, the software responds. But no statute anticipated a bicycle where pedaling never mechanically reaches the wheel. Nobody has litigated whether “fully operable pedals” means pedals that work or pedals that drive something. Also appears to be navigating the adjacent problem in software: its own product page notes that in some jurisdictions the “throttle will act as an assist boost,” temporarily raising the assist multiplier rather than propelling the bike independently. A geofenced, software-defined regulatory class is clever engineering and an untested legal posture. Buyers in trail-access-restricted areas should confirm what class label is physically affixed to their bike before assuming path access.
The exit costs
If the pedal-by-wire experience doesn’t land, Also’s return policy gives you 30 days and a 25-mile odometer ceiling. Ride it and the refund takes a 25 percent restocking hit plus $175 return shipping — on a $4,500 Launch Edition, that’s roughly $1,300 to change your mind after a couple of rides. Unridden bikes cost only the $175. Twenty-five miles is not a long enough test to evaluate a novel drivetrain, so treat the purchase as a commitment and use the company’s demo events first.
Why this matters beyond one bike
The TM-B is the smallest thing Also is building. The company closed a $200 million Series C led by Greenoaks with DoorDash investing as a strategic partner in March, on top of a multi-year Amazon agreement for pedal-assist cargo quads. Also now describes itself as a small-EV company building for autonomous delivery — the bicycle is the proof of concept and the trust-builder for a logistics platform.
Which means the first few hundred customers aren’t just early adopters. They’re the reference customers for a company trying to convince Amazon and DoorDash it can build fleets. The bikes are on trucks. Now Also has to answer the phone.
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