IN BRIEF
The UK is stepping up operations against tampered e-bikes and unapproved electric motorcycles, but its Department for Transport acknowledges that its crash statistics remain blind to these machines. “Unfortunately, these vehicles cannot be identified in the statistics at present,” a Department for Transport spokesperson told British site ebiketips. Legal e-bikes are counted as pedal cycles; the rest are “likely” classed as electric motorcycles, but the sorting varies from one police force to another and with the officer writing up the report. The final 2025 report, published on 30 July, nonetheless records 4,390 cyclists killed or seriously injured, up 14% year on year.
The admission comes at an awkward moment. For weeks, the British press has run story after story about crackdowns on electric motorcycles and derestricted electrically assisted bikes, the machines that travel along cycle lanes at scooter speeds. In late July, the Department for Transport published its final road casualty figures for 2025. The two subjects collided — and the obvious question followed: how many crashes involve these machines?
The department’s answer, sent to British specialist site ebiketips: the figure is out of reach. “Unfortunately, these vehicles cannot be identified in the statistics at present,” a DfT spokesperson replied.
Illegal e-bikes filed by guesswork
The spokesperson spelled out how the classification works, and that is where it breaks down. “Legal e-bikes would be included within the pedal cycle category,” the spokesperson explains first — logically enough, since British regulations treat them as bicycles under the EAPC regime (Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycle). For the rest, the wording becomes distinctly vaguer: illegal e-bikes, “if their power exceeds the limit to be considered an EAPC, would likely be classed as electric motorcycles”.
Likely. The conditional is not a flourish: the spokesperson goes on to say that the classification “may vary by police force or by the officer writing up the report”. In other words, the same tampered machine can end up in the “pedal cycle” column with one police force and among the “electric motorcycles” with another, depending on the officer’s judgement at the roadside.
What the DfT figures do say
According to the final report published on 30 July, 1,538 people were killed on Great Britain’s roads in 2025, and 29,918 killed or seriously injured, across all categories of road user. For cyclists, the picture is mixed: the DfT’s detailed count gives 79 deaths — a fifth consecutive annual fall — but 4,390 killed or seriously injured, up 14% year on year, even if that remains 2% below the 2015 figure. The same count records 16,042 cyclists injured in a collision, or 13% of all road casualties.
That 14% rise is precisely the kind of curve a public debate rushes to pin on a cause. Yet as things stand it cannot settle the question: since derestricted machines are not isolated in the data, there is no way to establish their share of the casualty figures. ebiketips notes, for that matter, that “the proliferation of e-bikes outside the EAPC category in recent years does not appear to have contributed to an abnormally high number of deaths and serious injuries” when the series is read over a long period — while stressing that the data is still missing to state it outright.
Legislating without counting
The problem goes beyond statistics. A country that mounts police operations, considers tighter regulation and fuels an entire public debate about a type of machine ought, in principle, to know how many crashes that machine causes. Here, the measuring tool was designed before the category existed: collision report forms provide for bicycles and for motorcycles, not for this electric in-between that has proliferated in the space of a few years on roads and cycle paths.
The issue reaches well beyond the British case. In France, the distinction between a compliant e-bike, a derestricted e-bike and an unapproved electric moped rests on the same dividing lines — power, assistance speed, type approval — and on the same reporting chain. As long as the box does not exist on the form, the machine will stay invisible in the data, whatever its visibility on the street.
