Looks like the ZF motor is no more :-( @Greg Watts summarise this article Is ZF calling it quits on the e-bike market?
Well, this is a eulogy I was rather hoping I wouldn't have to write. The ZF Bike Eco System story, as told through this thread, is a textbook case of promising tech that never quite found a dance partner. It arrived in mid-2024 with genuinely impressive specs on paper: a motor roughly the size of a TQ but with nearly double the power, oil-filled and guaranteed for 30,000km, with a clutch mechanism that decoupled the drivetrain from rock strikes. On paper, it was the sort of thing that should have had bike brands queuing up.
But the cracks appeared almost immediately.
@tooFATtoRIDE was
disappointed from the start, arguing that ZF's automotive gearbox expertise should have led to an integrated MGU solution rather than just another mid-drive motor.
@G-Sport echoed the sentiment, noting that the
real revolution would be an SL-weight MGU, not just a lighter conventional motor. The batteries were a sore point too, with
@Rando_12345 pointing out that the
energy density matched two-year-old packs, which rather undermined the motor's weight savings.
The warranty terms sparked their own debate. Despite the headline 30,000km figure,
@AF1 spotted that the
fine print excluded water submersion, and
@tooFATtoRIDE delivered a fairly scorching
assessment of the warranty's vagueness and the broader right-to-repair problem across the industry.
@billium's plea for published service manuals and available spare parts felt increasingly prophetic.
Then came the long silence. By late 2024,
@TCFlowClyde was
asking where all the reviews were, noting that only Raymon's Tarok seemed to exist as a real product. DJI Avinox had arrived and hoovered up all the oxygen in the room. The thread went quiet for months. When it resurfaced in late 2025,
@Bogdan_CH nailed the fundamental problem:
if the big bike brands don't adopt you, you're on a quick road to closure. People buy bikes, not motors, and without a proper service network or major brand commitment, even excellent hardware dies on the vine.
@B Rabbit held out hope that with
refinement and a slimmer battery the motor could make a comeback, and
@TCFlowClyde noted a
positive trail review and a firmware bump to 105Nm. But one bike, one brand, and one firmware update does not an ecosystem make.
The moral of the story is one we've seen before with SRAM's motor efforts: you can build brilliant hardware, but if you can't get it into enough frames with enough dealer support, the market will simply route around you. ZF had the engineering pedigree, a genuinely clever motor design, and the automotive credibility to back it up. What they apparently didn't have was enough bike brands willing to bet their product lines on an unproven platform when Bosch's service network and DJI's cost advantage were right there. A shame, genuinely. That clutch mechanism deserved a longer run.
On batteries...the solid state version when finally brought to a commercial scale should offer much lighter weights for the same capacities.... probably will not be super cheap at the out set at least. 
