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Juiced Bikes sold at auction for $1.2 million, report says

By Nick Godt Published October 19, 2024

The Juiced Bikes Scorpion X2 adds more power, upgraded tires, and an improved battery to the popular moped style e-bike. — Juiced Bikes

Juiced Bikes, the San Diego-based maker of e-bikes, has been sold on an auction website for $1,225,000, according to a report from Electrek.

Digital Trends recently reported how the company was showing signs of being on the brink of bankruptcy. The company and its executives had remained silent, while customer inquiries went unanswered and its website showed all products were out of stock. In addition, there were numerous reports of layoffs at the company.

Yet, the most convincing sign was that the company’s assets appeared as listed for sale on an auction website used by companies that go out of business.

Now, it appears that Juiced Bikes’ assets, including a dozen patents, multiple URLs, and the company’s inventory in both the U.S. and China, have been sold at auction, according to the report.

It is likely that the buyer, who remains unknown, can capitalize on the brand and the overall value of the 15-year old company.

Founded in 2009 by Tora Harris, a U.S. high-jump Olympian, Juiced Bikes was one of the early pioneers of the direct-to-consumer e-bike brands in the U.S. market.

The company had quickly built a reputation for the versatility of its e-bikes and the durability of their batteries. Over the years, the popularity of models such as the CrossCurrent, HyperScrambler, and RipCurrent only bolstered the brand’s status.

Last year, Digital Trends named the Juiced Bikes Scorpion X2 as the best moped-style e-bike for 2023, citing its versatility, rich feature set, and performance.

Juiced Bikes’ getting sold quickly might be a sign of what consulting firm Houlihan Lokey says is a recovery in the North American e-bike market.

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The industry has had a roller-coaster ride during and after the COVID-19 pandemic: A huge spike in demand for e-bikes had combined with disrupted supply chains to create a supply/demand mismatch of “historic proportions,” Houlihan Lokey said.

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Freelance reporter

Nick Godt has covered global business news on three continents for over 25 years.

Computing

Amazon’s AI shopper makes sure you don’t leave without spending

Amazon Buy for Me feature.

The future of online shopping on Amazon is going to be heavily dependent on AI. Early in 2025, the company pushed its Rufus AI agent to spill product information and help users find the right items. A few weeks later, another AI tool called Interests made its way to the shopping site.

The new Alexa+ AI assistant is also capable of placing orders semi-autonomously, handling everything from groceries to booking appointments. Now, the company has started to test yet another AI agent that will buy products from other websites if they’re not available on Amazon — without ever leaving the app.

Computing

Google Gemini’s best AI tricks finally land on Microsoft Copilot

Copilot app for Mac

Microsoft’s Copilot had a rather splashy AI upgrade fest at the company’s recent event. Microsoft made a total of nine product announcements, which include the agentic trick called Actions, Memory, Vision, Pages, Shopping, and Copilot Search.

A healthy few have already appeared on rival AI products such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alongside much smaller players like Perplexity and browser-maker Opera. However, two products that have found some vocal fan-following with Gemini and ChatGPT have finally landed on the Copilot platform.

Cars

Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles

rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

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