The 25 km/h Deadlock — Why E-Bike Speed Limits Can't Be Enforced

On August 2, 2026, Guanchazhe Wang (a Chinese current-affairs commentary website) published a long-form essay that pulls the e-bike speed-limit question out of the simple narrative of "regulatory failure" and restores it to what it really is: a stalemate in which three parties each have their grievances and none is willing to move first. Consumers vote with their wallets; regulators advance and retreat between people's livelihoods and public order; and brands arbitrage between compliance and profit. The reason the speed limit cannot be enforced is that what is locked is not the motor — it is an entire governance system lagging behind reality.

The Smarter It Is, the Easier to Modify — Brands Have Built the Backdoor Into the Firmware

The image that opens the essay is striking: CCTV's Weekly Quality Report exposed the e-bike market in Taizhou, Zhejiang, where brand stores of Lüjia, Aima, and Zuanbao repackaged over-standard new bikes — explicitly banned from sale by the state — as "zero-kilometer used vehicles." Merchants collect ID cards in advance to pre-register license plates in batches, and there is even the absurd practice of "registering the plate first, building the bike later," with the production date on the certificate of conformity later than the plate's registration date.

But more awkward than the gray trade is the technical fact: on a Ninebot e-bike, download a BLE Bluetooth debugging assistant, enter a string of hexadecimal code, and the 25 km/h limit is lifted, sending the top speed straight past 50 km/h; on a NIU e-bike, turn off the power, hold down the start button and front brake at the same time, turn on the ignition and hold for ten seconds, and the limit vanishes. There is no need to disassemble the bike, no need to replace parts, no need to find a repair shop — the owner can do it alone, more easily than pairing a Bluetooth headset.

Here lies the paradox of "intelligence": no one can casually alter the chip parameters of a phone or a computer, yet a "smart vehicle" can break its speed limit by plugging in a cable and pressing a few buttons. The essay's explanation is blunt — it is not that anti-tampering is technically impossible; it is that brands do not want it. OTA updates, app connectivity, and BeiDou positioning are selling points written into launch-event slide decks; effortless modification, one-tap limit removal, and seamless speed boosts are the selling points actually written into consumers' purchase decisions. Anti-tamper chips, encrypted controllers, dynamic monitoring — each one is a cost, and each one makes the "modify it out of the box" experience a little less smooth. When "easy to modify" becomes the core competitive edge, "tamper-proofing" becomes self-sabotage.

25 km/h Is Not Arbitrary — It Is a Dividing Line

The most surging emotion in public opinion is always: "25 km/h is just the speed of a bicycle — the people who made this rule don't ride e-bikes, do they?" The essay says this anger is understandable, but it has the wrong target.

The new edition of the Safety Technical Specification for Electric Bicycles (GB 17761-2024), which took effect on September 1, 2025, is built not on the logic of "limiting speed" but on tiered governance: below 25 km/h, e-bikes belong to the non-motor-vehicle category alongside bicycles — no motor-vehicle license plate, no driver's license, and use of the non-motor-vehicle lane; above 25 km/h, they are in essence electric motorcycles and should fall under the motor-vehicle management system — a license plate, compulsory traffic insurance, a driver's license, and the motor-vehicle lane. 25 km/h is the internationally common reference ceiling for non-motor-vehicle speed, the threshold beyond which braking distance, collision energy, and pedestrian fatality rates climb steeply; the braking distance of an over-speed modified bike more than doubles.

The regulators' original intent was: if you want to go fast, fine — but enter the motor-vehicle management system and bear the corresponding obligations and costs. The problem is not the number 25; it is that the road above 25 km/h is impassable.

Motorcycle Bans Have Sealed Off the Compliant Path — The Formation of an Institutional Deadlock

The new national standard drew two lanes: the slow ones take the non-motor-vehicle lane, the fast ones take the motor-vehicle lane. But in reality, the second lane simply does not exist in many cities.

Counting from the first batch of cities that introduced motorcycle-restriction policies in 1985, the blanket ban on motorcycles has continued for forty years; around 100 cities nationwide still maintain motorcycle bans and restrictions, and the restriction rules in the core areas of Beijing and Shanghai have not budged. The logic of the ban is simple: motorcycles are hard to manage and cause many accidents, so just keep them off the road. But demand does not disappear — it merely changes shape.

If the electric motorcycles widely used by food-delivery riders and couriers are lumped into the same management system as the big-displacement fuel motorcycles that roar through streets late at night, the cost of compliance becomes far more than an ordinary person can bear — a motor-vehicle plate, compulsory insurance, a driver's-license exam, annual inspection. For a delivery rider earning six or seven thousand yuan a month, the time and money cost of this process is enough to make him abandon compliance and turn to the gray zone. Conversely, what if the bans were fully lifted? The number of motor vehicles would surge in the short term; elevated roads, tunnels, and urban expressways would fill with electric motorcycles; accidents and congestion would worsen sharply — and no city manager would dare open that sluice gate.

And so the deadlock forms: the new standard says "if you want to go fast, take the motor-vehicle lane," but the motor-vehicle lane will not let you in; the new standard says "the slow ones can only do 25 km/h," but 25 km/h cannot meet real demand.

The Three-Way Stalemate and the Gracious Retreat of "Old Bikes, Old Rules"

Beneath the deadlock, all parties have tacitly found a "consensual solution": vast numbers of over-speed e-bikes continue to exist under the identity of "old-standard bikes." After the sales end imposed a full ban on old-standard bikes on December 1, 2025, this batch should in theory survive only as existing stock in a transition period, phasing out naturally. Yet on the roads, enormous volumes of over-speed vehicles are selectively ignored by law enforcement — because strict enforcement would mean delivery riders could not deliver meals, couriers could not dispatch parcels, and millions of commuters would be stranded. This "turning a blind eye" is a helpless compromise between the public's real demand and the insufficiency of institutional supply.

Each of the three parties has its reasons for "having no choice": consumers vote with their wallets out of genuine travel needs, emboldening the gray industry; regulators, caught in the dilemma of protecting livelihoods and managing traffic, choose a soft posture of "regulatory interviews first, penalties second"; brands, driven by profit maximization and window-period anxiety, repeatedly test the edge of compliance.

Behind the window-period anxiety lies precise calculation: once the loopholes in the rules are completely sealed, every brand will face the pain of a sudden spike in compliance costs and a short-term market contraction. While regulation is still "interviews first," grab market share now — when the era of compliance arrives, only those holding users, channels, and scale will be in a position to negotiate the next step. This is not short-sightedness; it is a rational choice — it is simply that this rationality is built on an industry's compliance floor being trampled again and again.

The Data of Reverse Selection: Who Stalls in Compliance, Who Sprints on Modifications

The data does not lie. In the first half of 2026, overall domestic sales of electric two-wheelers fell 12.6% year on year; in the first quarter, domestic sales plunged 17.1%. Traditional brands stalled across the board: Aima Technology's first-quarter revenue was 5.082 billion yuan, down 18.45% year on year, and net profit attributable to shareholders was 196 million yuan, down a staggering 67.57% — its stock hit the daily limit-down the next day, and its financial report made the rare admission that "new-standard products did not fully meet consumer demand in their configurations."

In the same period, Ninebot's first-quarter electric two-wheeler sales reached 1.2276 million units, up 22.3% year on year, with revenue of 3.382 billion yuan accounting for nearly 60% of total revenue; against an industry-wide 12.6% decline in the first half, Ninebot's sales grew 10.5% against the trend, and its 618 shopping-festival omni-channel sales reached 6.65 billion yuan, surging more than 70%; NIU grew 23.1%, and Jihe tore through the entire industry at a growth rate of 63.2%.

As compliance costs leave the industry wailing, the "smart" brands advance triumphantly. The answer is hidden in those repeatedly exposed modification tutorials — this is producing an industry reverse selection in which bad money drives out good. Compliance is a cost; violation is a dividend. This is not market competition — it is regulatory arbitrage.

The Key to Breaking the Deadlock Is Not Inside the Industry

Since 2026, the motorcycle-ban policy has begun to loosen: 21 large and medium-sized cities nationwide have successively eased or lifted their bans, shifting from "one-size-fits-all" to "classified and tiered" management, and pilots to "replace scrappage with inspection" have been launched. New rules on April 1 made clear: core areas of top-tier megacities may still ban motorcycles but the periphery is gradually eased; new first-tier cities replace blanket bans with time-limited controls; and third- and fourth-tier cities in principle should "open as much as possible."

The direction is right, but the pace is too slow. A compliant path for electric motorcycles in the core urban areas of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen remains nowhere in sight — and these are precisely the cities with the most vigorous demand for food delivery and short-distance commuting and the most thriving "zero-kilometer used vehicle" gray market. Until the compliant path for electric motorcycles is truly opened, a hundred regulatory interviews will not solve the problem — brands will keep changing vests, consumers will keep voting with their feet, and regulators will keep losing their footing between "strict enforcement" and "protecting livelihoods."

What an e-bike's speed limit locks is not the motor — it is an entire traffic-governance system that lags behind reality. Until the institutions catch up, the "zero-kilometer used vehicle" will not be the last gray invention; it is merely one more knot tied onto this deadlock.