E-bike manufacturers are locked in an all-out war over performance, weight, and market share. Things have remained strangely quiet on the battery front—until the opening of Eurobike in July 2024: Bosch is hosting a press conference. The company announces that it will support the new Charge2Bike charging standard in the future—a unified system for charging plugs and cables designed to work across brands with any e-bike battery. That sounds like the end of the cable clutter. But all that’s shown that day is a short adapter cable: a Bosch connector on one end, a Charge2Bike connector on the other. No new connector on the frame—just an adapter for the charging station. On the battery itself, everything remains as it was: each drive manufacturer retains its own brand-specific connector. A common standard that, of all things, leaves out one of the most expensive parts of the e-bike seems counterintuitive at first, but follows a pragmatic logic based on safety and market power.

Open up to the charging station, closed at the battery

A cross-brand charging standard has existed for years. A robust, magnetic connector from Rosenberger, available as a standard component on the open market for any manufacturer that wants to install it. Nevertheless, it is used almost exclusively in-house—for example, by Stromer or BMZ—and interest from the industry remains lacking to this day. At public charging stations, charging still requires brand-specific plugs.

Charge2Bike aims to simplify this: In the future, charging stations should require only a single plug type, rather than having to provide a separate cable for each brand. The technical specification allows for two approaches: a direct connection to the e-bike or a connection via a compact adapter to the existing, brand-specific socket. The industry is banking on the adapter. Bosch itself confirmed in an interview as early as 2025 that it had developed and tested a Charge2Bike adapter. A year later, the company clarified in another interview that the adapter was intended to ensure compatibility with its own existing drive systems. The existing, brand-specific Bosch plug on the frame remains unchanged. To date, there is no production bike with a built-in Charge2Bike socket. A new standard will therefore, at most, be implemented at the charging station—not on the bike.

Drone manufacturer DJI entered the market in 2024 with its own e-bike motor, the Avinox. By the end of 2024, only a single bike brand was using the motor; by early 2026, that number had already risen to around twenty. DJI also appears to have no interest in a standardized connector. Instead, Avinox manufactures two proprietary charging connectors: a round one for built-in batteries and a square one for removable ones. Anyone switching brands will still have to switch cables.

In Germany, according to a market analysis by the Velotech Institute, Bosch holds about 70 percent of the drive market as of 2024; across Europe, it holds about 50 percent. Shimano and Bafang follow at a considerable distance. Avinox continues to grow and is expected to be featured in over 60 bike brands by the end of 2026. There is no new market share figure for Bosch, but a recent Ride article already asks whether Bosch is shifting from “technology leader” to “yesterday’s market leader.” This doesn’t change the basic rule: Whether an established market leader or an up-and-coming challenger, whoever is at the forefront builds its own ecosystem. A universal connector would be easier for riders. For manufacturers, however, that’s apparently not the most important consideration. Nothing will change in the short term regarding the e-bike itself or the battery.

What a proprietary connector offers manufacturers

There is a valid technical and business reason why the battery remains brand-specific. First, the technical reason: E-bike batteries store several hundred watt-hours of energy in densely packed lithium-ion cells. If a malfunction occurs during charging, there is a risk of so-called thermal runaway—a chain reaction within the cell that leads to fires that are nearly impossible to extinguish. The cell provides the oxygen for its own fire; from the outside, it can only be cooled, not smothered. The battery management system in the battery therefore communicates with the appropriate charger via a manufacturer-specific protocol and rejects external voltages. A manufacturer that abandons this control is liable, in the event of an emergency, for fires caused by a third-party charger. With a standardized connector, even a cheap, untested third-party charger could theoretically be connected to the battery. With today’s brand-specific connectors, only the manufacturer’s tested original remains compatible.

From a business perspective, a standardized connector would also be disadvantageous for individual manufacturers. A replacement battery costs between 450 and 650 Swiss francs at Swiss specialty retailers, depending on the manufacturer—making it one of the most expensive individual components on the entire bike. Whoever controls the connector also controls where the battery is replaced: at the brand’s own specialty retailer, at its prices, not on the open aftermarket. Although the EU’s “Right to Repair” directive, effective since the summer of 2026, requires manufacturers to provide replacement parts for e-bike batteries, the law does not specify anything regarding the connector. Manufacturers may continue to use their own connector and remain the sole supplier of replacement batteries; they are merely required to offer them. Safety and profit margins just happen to point in the same direction, which makes the decision easy for individual brands. This is a source of frustration for many e-bike riders, who have to dig deeper into their wallets for a new battery. When it comes to the charging connector, this repeats a pattern that extends far beyond e-bikes.

The Invisible Power of a Cable

In 1998, legal scholar Michael Heller investigated why, after the end of the Soviet Union, countless storefronts in Moscow stood empty while the kiosks right in front of them on the street were thriving. Several government agencies and rights holders each had to give their approval before a store could even be rented out. If even one agency said no, the store remained empty, regardless of how many others had agreed. Heller called this the “tragedy of the anti-commons,” the counterpart to the better-known “tragedy of the commons,” in which too many users overexploit a resource. While there is no law governing e-bikes, a very similar pattern exists: Each e-bike manufacturer can decide for itself whether to keep or abandon its own connector. For every e-bike to truly be able to charge with the same plug, all major manufacturers would have to come on board at the same time. If just one refuses to participate, the shared solution reverts to a standalone solution for each brand. A universal charging station for all brands will therefore not emerge on its own. It requires a separate adapter for each brand.

Second, switching brands costs riders money—not just frustration. Economists Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian described how sharply such switching costs can rise in networked systems. Anyone who has already invested in a charger, a spare battery, and perhaps a relationship with a repair shop tied to a particular brand cannot take those investments with them when switching brands: the charger and spare battery simply won’t fit with the new provider, and the investment is lost. This lock-in keeps customers loyal, without a manufacturer even having to design it intentionally. A welcome side effect of brand-specific connectors.

The third perspective comes from the law—or rather, from its absence. A speed bump forces cars to brake more reliably than a speed limit sign: its presence in the middle of the road dictates the behavior. The American law professor Lawrence Lessig had something similar in mind when, in the late 1990s, he coined the idea that the architecture of a technical system regulates user behavior in a similarly binding way as a law does—through design rather than regulations. With e-bikes, it’s not software but a plug that fits exactly one device. Whoever designs this plug decides—without a law—what is ultimately possible and what isn’t. That is power that no parliament has enacted, yet it still takes effect with every single charging process.

An e-bike ends up as scrap because of a cable

In its position paper, Deutsche Umwelthilfe documents cases in which entire e-bikes were disposed of even though only a single part was broken: the charger. Without the right charger, the battery can no longer be charged; without a charged battery, the e-bike is useless—even though the frame and the battery itself remain technically sound. An entire bike becomes electronic waste because the manufacturer no longer supplies a replacement part for a single cable. It is precisely this one component that isn’t covered even by the repair obligation under the EU directive—which, as mentioned earlier, helped with the battery: the charger does not appear on the list of covered parts. The component at the heart of this entire dispute remains unregulated. This is one of the downsides of the environmental footprint that e-bikes otherwise tout in their advertising.

The EU has solved this problem for cell phones. The Commission estimated that the mandatory USB-C standard for cell phones and tablets would result in 11,000 metric tons of electronic waste saved and 250 million euros in reduced consumer spending each year. E-bikes are not covered by this regulation. Legally, they are classified as machinery, not as radio equipment. For high-performance drives, such as those installed in e-mountain bikes, the required charging power exceeds what the USB-C standard can handle anyway.

That is why there is still no mandatory charging standard today. Seventeen associations, led by Deutsche Umwelthilfe, now want to close this loophole: In December 2025, they called for an EU-wide mandate for a standardized charging port in an open letter to EU Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall. No public response from the Commission has been reported so far.

While the EU has enforced legislation for cell phones, it has so far turned a blind eye to e-bikes. This time, the industry is even developing its own standard—entirely voluntarily—with Charge2Bike. What looks like resistance is actually a very carefully calculated compromise. They’re giving in on the charging station—where political pressure is greatest and costs are lowest—while holding firm on the battery, where the real money lies. A truce that ends where a standardized plug would cost manufacturers money. Until then, riders remain trapped in the system of the brand they chose when they made their purchase.

In the end, the charging plug is just a small component. But almost everyone is familiar with the same principle—sharing where it costs nothing, holding on where the money is—from their own printer, which only accepts its own brand’s ink cartridges. The e-bike plug is just the latest example of a very old business model.