Since relaunching the Velorution newsletter, I've lost count of how many people have written in about bikes they bought from the old Velorution shops. A few names keep coming up — Brompton, Strida, Moulton, Schindelhauer, Gocycle. There's something about these bikes that really stays with people. Years later, still riding them, still talking about them.
The Gocycle is one of that group. And right now, its story has taken a significant new turn.
A one-bedroom flat and a very big idea
Richard Thorpe spent years working as a design engineer at McLaren Cars and in the light electric vehicle industry before deciding to build his own urban electric bike from scratch. He didn't come from the cycling world. He came from a world of precision engineering, lightweight materials and obsessive attention to performance. And he applied all of it to a bicycle.
In 2002, Thorpe established Karbon Kinetics from his one-bedroom London flat, with the ambition of creating the world's best urban electric bike. Seven years of development followed. In 2009, the Gocycle G1 launched to international acclaim, winning Best Electric Bike at Eurobike and becoming the first injection-moulded magnesium alloy bicycle in history.
It was, by any measure, ahead of its time.
What made it special
The Gocycle was not a conventional bicycle with a motor bolted on. It was designed from the ground up as an integrated urban machine, and the details reflected that.
The motor sits in the front wheel — unusual, but deliberate. It includes traction control, reducing motor power when the front wheel loses grip, just as it does in a car. The drivetrain is fully enclosed in Gocycle's patented Cleandrive system, which protects the mechanics from dust and water and keeps grease off your hands and clothes entirely. The wheels are single-sided, meaning you can change a punctured inner tube without removing the wheel at all.
The ride quality is excellent — stiff enough that you forget it has any folding joints in it, with 20-inch wheels and geometry close enough to a regular bike that it never feels like a compromise. Range on the current G4 is up to 40 miles. It folds in seconds.
Velorution stocked Gocycles for years. They were the kind of bike that stopped people in the shop. Not everyone bought one — the price made sure of that — but almost everyone wanted to understand how it worked.
The quiet years
The e-bike market boomed during and after the pandemic. Brands that had spent years building slowly suddenly found themselves with more demand than they could handle. For most, it was the moment everything accelerated.
For Gocycle, it went the other way.
Following a 2024 restructuring, the brand launched a crowdfunding campaign aimed at rebooting and expanding its product line. The campaign drew attention to the fact that the business was in difficulty. Gocycle went into a quiet period, struggling to secure investment at exactly the moment its competitors were expanding.
For a brand with Gocycle's heritage, it was a painful thing to watch.
The comeback
Gocycle has now ended its search for investment. JW Zhang, founder of Aventon, one of the biggest e-bike brands in North America, has acquired the brand. Richard Thorpe stays on, and a new European team has been established.
Aventon has grown to place its bikes into over 1,800 retail stores in North America and is said to be a more than $100 million business. The strategic logic is clear: Gocycle brings premium design credentials, a devoted following and decades of proprietary engineering. Aventon brings a serious supply chain, manufacturing capability and global distribution.
The UK will remain central to Gocycle's plans, as will much of Europe, with the USA and parts of Asia also on the roadmap. A full relaunch was planned from early 2026, with a bike shop network as the intended route to market.
The question worth asking
This is where things get interesting — and slightly uncertain.
Aventon generally targets the entry to mid-level of the e-bike market, rather than the top end where Gocycle has traditionally sat. That's not necessarily a problem. Access to Aventon's supply chain could bring Gocycle's prices down without compromising what makes the bike special. Or it could mean pressure to simplify, standardise, and sand off the edges that made Gocycle worth caring about in the first place.
The optimistic reading is that the two brands complement rather than compete with each other, targeting different customer tiers. The realistic one is that nobody quite knows yet — including, probably, the people involved.
What is clear is that the alternative — Gocycle disappearing entirely — would have been worse.
What the readers say
The people who bought Gocycles from Velorution are not sitting on the fence. They are, almost without exception, still riding them. One reader mentioned commuting on hers for years without a single mechanical issue. Another described it as the best money he'd ever spent on transport.
That kind of loyalty is hard to manufacture. It's what happens when a product is genuinely well made and genuinely thought through.
Whether the new Gocycle lives up to that standard is something we'll find out soon enough. But for now, it's back. And that's worth something.
