The World's First LiDAR E-Bike Is Coming

This article is sponsored by ADO E-Bike. They paid for the slot; the words are mine.

Modern cars watch their blind spots. Your bike doesn't.

It's always struck me that having to frequently take your eyes off the road in front to look over your shoulder is one of the most unsafe parts of cycling.

Of course, you could attach a very fetching mirror to your handlebars, but I've never found them to survive long on a bike.

ADO think there's a better answer. So they've built a bicycle that looks for you.

IMAGE CREDIT: ADO E-BIKE

What ADO have actually announced

The bike is called, officially, the ADO Air 20 LiDAR — built around ADO Sense 3.0, the LiDAR-based perception platform ADO are billing as the world's first fitted to a bicycle. Their own tagline is my favourite bit of it: inspired by the owl.

Two sensors, pointing in opposite directions.

Facing forwards, an automotive-grade LiDAR unit scans up to 20 metres ahead, building a live three-dimensional read of the road — obstacles, kerbs, changes in gradient and surface. Facing backwards, a millimetre-wave radar covers what you can't see over your shoulder: blind-spot detection across a 5 by 5 metre zone, and lane-change assistance monitoring 5 metres wide by 40 metres back. Forty metres is roughly the distance a car doing 30mph covers in three seconds.

Underneath, a gyroscope reads the bike's posture and a dual-sided torque sensor reads what your legs are asking for. An AI layer learns your habits and feeds all of it into the bike's automatic gearbox, a Bafang 3-speed auto-shift hub, so it's meant to select the right gear for a hill before you've reached it.

IMAGE CREDIT: ADO E-BIKE

IMAGE CREDIT: ADO E-BIKE

The hardware, in the photos, is a small twin-lens box sitting where a computer mount usually goes. Not elegant, exactly. But not the bolt-on afterthought I was bracing for either.

So what actually happens when it sees something?

This was the question none of ADO's published material answered, so I asked them directly. The answer is more interesting than I expected, and it isn't what the car industry would have done.

There are two responses, one for each direction.

Behind you, the radar puts an icon on the display — warning you off a turn you're about to make into something you haven't seen. Ahead of you, the LiDAR does something rather cleverer: when it detects an obstacle, it quietly reduces the motor assist.

Sit with that second one for a moment, because I think it's the best idea in the whole system.

Every warning technology on a bicycle fights the same problem: you're already busy. Your eyes are on the road, and your attention is spread across everything moving around you. Garmin solved it for rear-facing radar with a light in your peripheral vision, which works well.

ADO have gone somewhere different. Reducing the assist isn't a warning you have to notice and interpret — it's a change in how the bike feels through the pedals. The bike goes slightly heavy, and you slow down, and you're already reacting before you've consciously registered why. On a bicycle, in traffic, I think that's a genuinely smart piece of design.

Two honest reservations, though.

The rear warning is a screen icon, and screen icons only work if you're looking at the screen. The entire premise of blind-spot detection is that your attention is somewhere else — that's what makes it a blind spot. A light in your peripheral vision, or on the bars where your hands already are, would catch you when the display can't. I'd want to know how visible that icon is in bright sun, and how much of a glance it costs you.

And cutting power when something's ahead deserves testing. Most of the time, slowing down is exactly right. But there are moments in city riding where the safe move is the opposite — accelerating out of a closing gap, clearing a junction before something turns across you. A system that takes power away at that precise moment would be working against the rider. I'd want to know how aggressive it is, and whether you can override it.

Neither of those is a reason not to build it. Both are reasons to ride one before I tell you it works.

It folds — and now we know exactly how small

IMAGE CREDIT: ADO E-BIKE

For British riders, that's arguably the most important line on the spec sheet. Since March 2025, non-folding e-bikes have been banned from almost the entire TfL network — Underground, Overground, Elizabeth line, DLR. Folding e-bikes are still allowed.

Folded, the Air 20 LiDAR measures 900 × 500 × 670mm; unfolded, 1580 × 590 × 1180mm. So if it arrives in Britain as specced, the world's first LiDAR bicycle will also be one you can take on the Northern line. For a London commuter, that might be the bigger deal.

The numbers, for once

For a bike that doesn't officially exist yet, ADO have been surprisingly precise about it. A CE-certified datasheet confirms the following:

• Weight: 23kg net — about a kilogram heavier than the Air 20 Pro, which seems a fair price for carrying LiDAR, radar and the wiring that ties them together.
• Battery and range: 370Wh (37V, 10Ah), meeting the EN50604 safety standard, for a claimed 100km on a 3 to 5 hour charge.
• Motor: a Bafang 3-speed auto-shift hub, 250W and 50Nm, capped at the UK's legal 25km/h.
• Colours: Owl Gray, Berry Red, Horizon Blue — the one pictured above.

There's a belt drive rather than a chain, a hydraulic lockout suspension fork, a 2.4-inch colour display with NFC unlock, three riding modes (Eco, Sport, Auto), and — a nice touch amid all the sensors — a plain mechanical bell.

What we still don't know

Two things, now: the price, and the date. ADO haven't announced either. Given how far along the certification and the spec sheet already are, I'd guess a launch isn't far off — but a guess is all it is.

I haven't ridden it. Nobody outside ADO has. A spec sheet tells you what a bike should do; it doesn't tell you whether the LiDAR still works in Manchester drizzle at dusk, or whether the assist reduction feels natural after a week of riding rather than five minutes on a demo unit. That's a different article, and I'll write it the day I can actually get on one.

Learn more about the Air 20 LiDAR →

The verdict, such as it is

Every few years the bike industry announces something that sounds like it belongs on a car and turns out to belong on a bicycle after all. Disc brakes. Electronic shifting. Integrated lighting that's actually bright enough.

Perception might be the next one. The argument is hard to fault: the road user with the least protection currently has the least information, and that's an odd way round for it to be.

Whether ADO have built the thing that fixes it, I genuinely can't say yet. But I'd rather a brand aimed at the actual problem — riders getting hurt in traffic — than shave another 200 grams off a frame and call it progress.

Ask me again when I've ridden one in the rain.

ADO E-Bike sponsored this article. Some links above are affiliate links, which means Velorution may earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. Neither arrangement changed a word of what I've written.