Rivian Automotive has attracted die-hard fans by building a battery-powered truck with enough muscle for off-roading as well as the acceleration and suspension to comfortably glide through city streets. Its little brother — a company called Also — is trying to do the same for e-bikes.

The Palo Alto company wants to reinvent the battery-driven bicycle using a powerful generator and software to change the look, feel and capabilities of two-wheelers. Also announced its flagship bike last October and is preparing to begin deliveries later this year.

E-bike enthusiasts often need separate bikes for different uses. Some bikes are good for carrying kids and cargo, others for daily city commutes. Another type is good for biking rough mountain paths.

Also claims its e-bikes can do it all by swapping out a few key components and pressing a button, so the bike behaves differently depending on the day’s needs.

“Let’s take the same approach as Rivian, the latest and most modern EV approach in architecture, but re-optimize it for smaller-than-car modes,” said Chris Yu, president and co-founder of Also. “The best EVs have new features and new capabilities that come through a software update every few weeks.”

Also’s e-bike, dubbed the TM-B, starts at $3,500 and can travel up to 28 miles per hour. Many e-bikes are available for around $1,000, though some high-end options go for more than $5,000.

The company is betting that the $57-billion global e-bike market and $3-billion U.S. market have room for a new player with a unique offering. It’s also making a four-wheel electric vehicle with pedals designed to deliver cargo.

Yu, a Stanford-educated aerodynamics engineer and former bike racer, had done an internship at NASA and ten years at bicycle manufacturer Specialized before he met Rivian Chief Executive RJ Scaringe in 2021. The two hit it off, and Yu joined Rivian in 2022 to work on a new secret project to develop smaller electric vehicles.

Also split off from Rivian in 2025. Irvine-based Rivian owns a minority share in it.

Also, which employs about 300 people, would not share whether it was profitable or how many bikes it plans to produce per year. In a promotional video earlier this year, an Also employee said the company hopes to eventually produce hundreds of thousands of units per year.

Like Rivian, Also makes all the major parts of its products, from the handlebars to the circuit boards. Also wants to offer e-bike riders the same software-powered ease and customization that has become standard in high-end electric cars from Rivian and Tesla.

“We can really craft an experience that mirrors a modern car-like experience,” Yu said. “We’re taking that recipe and applying it to this really fast-moving electrification of smaller things.”

Its TM-B e-bike is decked out with features, including Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, a built-in touchscreen, and software that supports over-the-air updates. Riders can switch out their bike’s seat and wheels depending on whether they are riding to work, dropping off kids or tackling a mountain trail.

A rack of motor and transmission components for e-bikes and other vehicles at Also headquarters in Palo Alto.

(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)

The company is hitting the market during a rocky period for the e-bike industry. After a pandemic-era boom in demand that led to a proliferation of options, many e-bike companies have struggled with slowing interest and rising costs.

Rad Power Bikes, once a leading brand in the U.S., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2025 and was sold to Life Electric Vehicle Holdings in January for $13.2 million, a 99% drop from its peak valuation. Its competitor, Juiced Bikes, collapsed in 2024. Late last year, Porsche scrapped its plans to launch its own e-bikes, citing a cooling market in its statement.

David Zipper, a micromobility expert and senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, said he isn’t convinced there’s heavy demand for a product like the TM-B.

“I have never met anyone who said, ‘I really wish my bike could take over-the-air updates,’” he said. “Part of the beauty of the bicycle is its simplicity.”

Yu hopes Also’s bikes will speed up the electrification of micromobility, but Zipper said the bikes’ complexity and price point might hinder that mission.

“A lot of people won’t feel like they can afford it, and for that reason, I don’t necessarily see it as being transformational,” Zipper said. “They have a lot of interesting technology, but if we’re trying to really change American transportation, I’m not sure that a luxury, software-enabled e-bike is the first place I’d look.”

Yu said electric micromobility is going to surge as more cities ban combustion engines from certain areas. Hanoi banned gas-powered two-wheel vehicles in the city center and Paris closed a core part of the city to cars last year.

Also is partnering with Amazon to use its four-wheel electric vehicle, called the TM-Q, to expand Amazon’s micromobility delivery fleet across Europe and the U.S. Also did not share when its delivery vehicles would be deployed.

“We can really craft an experience that mirrors a modern car-like experience,” said Also President Chris Yu, pictured at the company’s headquarters earlier this month. “We’re taking that recipe and applying it to this really fast-moving electrification of smaller things.”

(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)

“There are hundreds of millions of smaller-than-car vehicles today that will, almost without debate, electrify over the next decade,” Yu said.

The TM-B and TM-Q rely on the same underlying technology, but are designed for different use cases, Yu said. They differ from other products on the market in the way the pedaling mechanism works — the e-bikes have no chains.

“There’s no physical connection between your input and the result of the bike moving,” Yu said. “It’s all software. We turn your leg power into electrical power, we send that electrical power to the battery, and then the battery sends it to the wheel.”

Also’s engineers have worked to mimic the feeling of riding a real bike and shifting gears even without a chain connecting the pedals to the wheels. Riders can choose an electric-assist level that makes pedaling easier or harder.

The bike charges to full battery in a couple of hours and has a range of 25 to 100 miles, depending on the level of electric assist used.

Its battery is a removable block that can charge separately from the bike and even be used as a power bank at the beach or on camping trips.

A close-up look at the motor and transmission mechanism of an Also e-bike, which charges to full battery in a couple of hours.

(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)

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Using more software and fewer moving parts makes Also’s e-bikes more efficient, durable and easier to handle, the company says. It also lets the bikes perform differently depending on need.

Ed Benjamin, chairman of the Light Electric Vehicle Association, said Also’s approach reflects the direction the small EV industry is heading in.

“The future of electric two-wheelers is going to be driven by software,” he said. “In new cars, the software provides safety features, comfort features and efficiency features. The same thing is going to happen with bikes.”

According to Department of Justice officials including FBI Director Kash Patel, the indictment of David M. Morens for using his personal email account on official business is all about protecting the sanctity of government communications and upholding the federal Freedom of Information Act.

“Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI,” Patel said in the announcement of Morens’ indictment Tuesday.

Many news reports of the indictment, which was unsealed Monday in Maryland federal court, took the DOJ at its word. That’s an error. In reality, the indictment has nothing to do with government email rules.

Rather, it’s a transparent effort to revive the largely discredited hypothesis that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory through experiments there that were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed at the time by Anthony Fauci. (Timothy Belevetz, a lawyer for Morens, declined to comment on the indictment.)

A few points about this.

First, there has never been and still isn’t any evidence that COVID originated in a Chinese lab, much less that Fauci, a revered epidemiologist, was complicit in the pandemic. The overwhelming weight of scientific opinion in the epidemiological and virological communities is that the virus reached humans via naturally infected wildlife, a process known as zoonosis.

Nor is that only a consensus among virologists and epidemiologists: In a declassified 2023 assessment, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the government’s intelligence services including the FBI, exploded the most common claims made for a lab leak.

As for the Trump White House’s ostensible devotion to “transparency,” New York University’s litigation tracker finds that the roster of pending lawsuits in federal courts coast to coast from nonprofit organizations, state agencies and individuals complaining that the administration has ignored or slow-walked FOIA requests now numbers an astonishing 110.

News about the Morens indictment was drowned out over the last few days by administration attacks on other Trump targets, such as a new indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a photo of sea shells that the DOJ argues, absurdly, was a subtle call for Trump’s assassination; and an effort by the Federal Communications Commission to terminate ABC’s broadcast licenses, amid late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel’s criticism of Trump.

As I’ve written before, however, the Trumpian attacks on science may have more lasting and profound effects than those cases on public health and the U.S. economy. The anti-science campaign doesn’t merely undermine public confidence in expert judgments; it also poses a generational threat to public health and to America’s economic stature in the world discouraging promising students from entering important research fields.

Those are the long-term consequences; in the short run, Trump’s anti-science campaign has cost U.S. taxpayers a mint. According to the “Bethesda Declaration,” an open letter to National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya published in June 2025 and signed by some 500 NIH employees, the agency had terminated 2,100 research grants totaling $9.5 billion since Trump’s inauguration.

The terminations “throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars,” the declaration observed: “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million.”

Between the lines, the Morens indictment looks like a proxy salvo in the GOP attack on Fauci, who has been a target of Republicans and the far right since the pandemic.

Charging Fauci directly may be a tough lift, because President Biden, aware of Trump’s inclination to punish his perceived adversaries, preemptively pardoned him for any supposed offenses stemming from his service at NIAID and as a pandemic-era advisor to the Trump White House.

Morens served as a senior advisor to Fauci (who is identified in the indictment as “Senior NIAID Official 1”) from 2006 through Fauci’s retirement in December 2022. Among other counts, he’s charged with conspiracy and “destruction, alteration, or falsification” of government documents. The maximum prison term for the five counts in the indictment comes to 51 years. Morens is 78.

The indictment stems from the earliest days of the pandemic in the first months of 2020, when scientists were trying to get their arms around the novel coronavirus and delve into its features and origins.

Morens corresponded with scientists researching the question. Among them was zoologist Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that managed government grants concerned with potential global pandemic threats. He and his organization sounded an early alarm that COVID-19 represented a serious public health threat.

Daszak, 60, is identified in the indictment as “co-conspirator 1” and EcoHealth as “Company #1”; Gerald Keusch, 87, a retired expert in infectious diseases at Boston University who participated in some of the email exchanges and was an outspoken defender of Daszak and EcoHealth, appears in the document as “co-conspirator 2.” Neither he nor Daszak is accused of any crimes in the indictment.

At an early stage, Morens asked his correspondents to communicate through his personal email address so their exchanges wouldn’t be subject to freedom of information requests. This is illegal, but almost never prosecuted.

Still, Morens’ concern was understandable, since FOIA requests had been weaponized by conservatives mining academic correspondences to undermine research into global warming and harass researchers. Morens was pilloried for his email practices during a House Oversight Committee hearing two years ago, and apologized.

“Scientists rely on open communication and collaboration, so you’re constantly emailing everybody,” Daszak told me. “So everybody’s connected, and that’s what’s exploited in these conspiracy stories. It’s made to look nefarious. It’s preying on the openness of science and shutting that down.” I couldn’t reach Keusch for comment.

Some of Morens’ efforts were aimed at restoring a $3.4-million NIAID grant to EcoHealth to fund research into the origins of pathogens in the wild. Trump had ordered the grant canceled in April 2020, a few days after a Fox News reporter told him it had all gone to the Wuhan (China) Institute of Virology, which was a target of lab-leak advocates. (In fact, only about $600,000 had gone to the lab, one of eight foreign and domestic sub-grantees.)

Biden restored the grant after an internal NIH investigation deemed the politically inspired cancellation “improper,” but by then three precious years of research had been lost. It was later canceled again. EcoHealth has shut down completely.

Several emails cited in the indictment referred to government reports that were public and remained so. Some were private exchanges bemoaning the conservative slander that, as Daszak put it, a “powerful cabal of scientists from within NIH helped draft anti lab-leak narrative.” In others, Daszak alerted Morens that batches of EcoHealth emails had been “FOIAed.”

As for the indictment’s assertion that Morens had destroyed government documents, it doesn’t specify any official reports that were concealed or destroyed; the reference may be to Morens’ own emails, which he deleted from his personal account.

Other emails were jocular personal exchanges between colleagues and friends. One exchange concerned a gift of two bottles of inexpensive wine Daszak sent Morens, implying that this was a bribe aimed at persuading Morens to obtain the grant for EcoHealth or to try to get it reinstated. In fact, the grant had been given a high grade by an independent panel charged with selecting grant recipients; neither Morens nor Fauci was personally involved in the process.

The debate over COVID’s origin isn’t an academic exercise. Protecting humanity from the next pandemic, and the ones after that, depends on gaining an accurate understanding of how pathogens originate and reach human communities. Obsessing over a factually unsupported and politically inspired accusation that a Chinese lab foisted COVID-19 on the world will distract from the hard work of addressing the more likely scenario, say by better policing of the illicit trade in infection-prone wildlife species.

Punishing scientists for exploring politically unpalatable research won’t help. “This is the reward for our warning the world that these viruses were coming,” Daszak says of the campaign to discredit EcoHealth. “These were good grants for very important work, and that’s all gone now.”