When Rivian quietly spun out an e-bike startup called Also, the move generated real buzz — here was an electric vehicle company known for its engineering ambition trying to reshape personal micromobility from the ground up. Now, Also is doing something else familiar to the EV world: issuing an apology for falling behind on deliveries. The Verge reported the setback, detailing how the company sent customers a message acknowledging that shipments of its debut TMB e-bike are running late. For anyone tracking the EV rollout struggles playing out across the broader electric transport sector, this feels like a recurring pattern.
Also had positioned the TMB as a serious piece of hardware — a high-design, performance-oriented electric bike aimed squarely at riders willing to pay a premium for something that felt genuinely different. The company leaned hard into its Rivian DNA, promising build quality and software integration that most e-bike brands simply cannot match. That ambition, it turns out, comes with production complexity that the team underestimated.
What Also Told Its Customers — and What It Didn’t
The apology note sent to TMB reservation holders acknowledged the delay without providing a firm revised ship date, according to The Verge’s reporting. That kind of vague mea culpa — sorry we’re late, more details coming — has become a rite of passage for hardware startups navigating the brutal gap between a polished prototype and volume manufacturing. It is honest, but it does little to reassure customers who may have already been waiting months.
Also did not publicly disclose the scale of its reservation backlog or how many units are affected by the delay. The company has also not detailed which specific component or manufacturing step is causing the holdup, leaving customers without a clear picture of when their bikes will actually ship. In the absence of hard data, frustration tends to fill the vacuum — and social media commentary from early adopters suggests patience is already wearing thin.
The Harder Problem: Spinning Hardware Out of a Hardware Company
There is a certain irony in the fact that Also emerged from Rivian, a company that itself became synonymous with production delays during its early years scaling the R1T pickup and R1S SUV. Rivian eventually worked through those growing pains and has since made meaningful progress on output and cost reduction. But the lessons learned inside a large EV manufacturer do not automatically transfer to a lean spinout operating on a different timeline, budget, and supply chain footprint.
E-bikes occupy a particularly unforgiving middle ground in the hardware startup landscape. They are complex enough to demand serious engineering — motors, battery management systems, software, frame manufacturing — but the price points the market will bear are far lower than those of full electric vehicles. That math puts intense pressure on margins, and any supply chain disruption hits harder than it would at a company with deeper buffers. Also is not alone in this struggle; several premium e-bike brands have stumbled on delivery timelines over the past two years as component costs and logistics volatility bit into even well-funded operations.
For Also, the reputational stakes are especially high. The TMB is not just a product launch — it is the company’s entire identity. A rocky debut delivery experience risks coloring how the brand is perceived before most people have even ridden one. The Rivian name bought Also considerable goodwill and press attention at launch. Whether that goodwill survives a protracted delay will depend entirely on how transparently and quickly the team communicates from here.
