FEATURE
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use an incredible amount of resources, and to become attractive for investment. At the present time, that latter point feels light years away from reality. As put by Tommy Sherlock, GM of the Bicycle Depot in the USA, “Shipping to the USA from China just got much more expensive — we’re now looking at a total tariff burden of 131.8%. It’s a serious hit for importers, especially for low-margin products. Time to rethink sourcing strategies, logistics, and pricing models. With the latest developments and announcements from both governments, it’s starting to feel like a high-stakes game of chicken. Eventually, someone has to blink, and hopefully, common sense will prevail.”
Britain: Bonkers as always
Back at home and 2025 has hardly been a normal year for the UK bike industry and the politics governing the success of our frontline retailers. Already, we’ve had the removal of anti-dumping on all but electric folding bikes from China, then, in a similar vein, Transport for London bowed to pressure from the ASLEF union to ban e-bikes, again, quite confusingly in this case, excluding e-folding bikes. That, you’d think, may catch like a cold for other rail services and their carriage of e-bikes. Then there was the conclusion of an unexpected
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proposal to double the continuous power limit from 250W to 500W, with UK market regulations staying the course and alignment to Europe. That’s quite a start to the year, and looking around, it’s stress we could have done without. To summarise, lots of problems, none of our creation, but ours to solve all the same.
What now seems logical, on account of China standing firm in the face of tariff threats, is that the USA won’t be taking any Chinese e-bikes in the near future. As happened in the UK when dumping duties were applied previously, imports dropped off a cliff thereafter, and those trade levellers weren’t half as sharp as the now 100-plus percent tariff in effect as I type this. So, with the UK having dropped its anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese e-bikes, going against the EU’s wisdom to retain the measures, well, you’d certainly expect diversions of product that has to land somewhere. Of course, if it’s already been manufactured or shipped, the product set for the USA will probably have been made or set to the differing U.S. e-bike regulations. If that product comes here (and it’s not unreasonable to assume some will), the UK will be flooded not only with generally lower-priced and possibly lower quality goods, but also with products not suited to the legalities of e-bike use on our roads. Again, probably the
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