A key hallmark of a challenger brand is a desire to bring progress to their category or to the world in general. How that challenger defines progress is largely up to them — but for many, it’s a move from the broken and conventional thinking of today, towards a more promising future.

For Van Moof, the Dutch electric bicycle manufacturer — that future can’t come soon enough. And as someone living in Los Angeles, one of the most congested, traffic-cursed cities in the world, I’m right with them in wanting that same future.

For many of the major cities of the world, the car has become a huge problem. In 2018, London passed its annual legal air pollution limit by the end of January. A move from bricks and mortar to online shopping has increased the number of delivery drivers crisscrossing our cities, and the (once) added convenience and affordability of rideshare platforms has made hopping into a car a viable alternative to finding public transport. All of these elements are strangling our cities — even the ones that were built to be “car-centric”.

VanMoof wants us all to do something about that. For the last couple of years, they’ve been waging a public war against cars and car culture — most notably with a 2020 advert that was banned from airing on TV (always a guarantee for greater visibility!) in France.

“We were always aware that this commercial isn’t your usual bike ad,” co-founder Taco Carlier told The Verge. “It’s really a call to action, a chance to leave the past behind and make real progress that benefits everyone. Questioning the status quo will always be confrontational, but that was our purpose from the start”. 

Having raised $182m worth of funding over the past two years, founders and brothers Taco and Ties Carlier have explained that they want to put that money towards changing the way we think about our city lives. “We’re on a mission to make two wheels the default for commutes worldwide… We want to help get the next billion onto bikes”.

To do that, VanMoof offers one of the world’s most advanced and stylish electric bikes - they’ve unimaginatively been dubbed the Tesla of e-Bikes by several outlets — but the comparison in making electric bikes a “want” instead of a “should” is notable. The bikes include many top-of-the-range features thoughtfully designed around a city dweller’s needs, including a dedicated Bike Hunter theft squad that will hunt down your bike within two weeks or replace it with a bike of a similar standard and age. Prices are premium but considerably cheaper than owning and running a car. And as an e-bike user myself, I can attest to how much fun they are to ride.

Their focus is often on what these bikes can do for the cities we live in, not just those that choose to ride them. The company feels that now is the time to launch an all-out assault on car culture and the damage this obsession has wreaked upon our cities. As we all begin to emerge from this pandemic and head back to our normal lives, VanMoof wants to consign the automobile to the past.

It’s a timely mission to be on, and one that is gathering attention in all sorts of different spaces, particularly as Americans reckon with the failures of their current infrastructure and questions about how they serve the communities of the future — with better standards for city dwellers being rightly positioned as a social justice issue. Cities as large as Paris and London are working to rid us of our dependence on the car by making it less and less appealing. Last year, I wrote about Culdesac - a development in Tempe, Arizona, that wants to be a proof of concept for a car-free neighbourhood.

Amongst this backdrop, a challenger that can show us a fun and enjoyable way forward surely stands a fantastic chance to capitalise on our changing relationship with our cities.

Here’s to us all riding into a better future in 2022.

Nick Geoghegan is a Strategy Director at eatbigfish.