Electric bikes capped at 25 km/h: what the law actually says

1. What the law says, in one sentence

France’s Highway Code never mentions an “electric bike”. It talks about a pedal-assist cycle, and defines it in point 6.11 of Article R311-1, in a single sentence.

Three conditions, and they hold together. A motor rated at no more than 250 watts. Assistance that fades out at 25 km/h. Assistance that also fades out when the legs stop. Let a single one fall, and the machine is no longer a pedal-assist cycle within the meaning of the Code. That does not make it “illegal”: it makes it something else. That is the whole difference, and that is where the trouble starts.

2. The line was not drawn in Paris

It is assumed to be French; it is European, and it is written the other way round from what one imagines. Regulation (EU) No 168/2013 sets the type-approval rules for powered two- and three-wheelers, then lists what it does not apply to.

So the electric bike is not authorised up to 25 km/h. It is taken out of the scope of motor-vehicle law below 25 km/h. The nuance sounds academic; it explains everything else. A pedal-assist cycle does not need to be type-approved, registered, insured like a vehicle or ridden with a licence — not because a text exempts it, but because none of those texts is looking at it.

The same regulation also shows what sits just above. Its L1e category covers vehicles whose maximum design speed does not exceed 45 km/h and whose continuous rated power does not exceed 4,000 watts. It splits in two: L1e-B, the “two-wheel mopeds”, and L1e-A, which the regulation calls the “powered cycle” — a pedal cycle whose assistance cuts out at 25 km/h but whose power may reach 1,000 watts. In other words, Europe did make room for a 1,000-watt assisted bike. It made it a moped.

3. “Capped” does not mean “limited”

It is the most widespread misunderstanding, and it comes down to a badly chosen word. The law does not cap the speed of the bike: it caps the speed of the assistance. Past 25 km/h the motor steps aside and the bike carries on. Descending a mountain pass at 55 km/h on a pedal-assist bike breaks no rule at all — only the road’s speed limits apply, as for any cyclist. An electric bike is not a machine capped at 25 km/h. It is a bike whose motor stops at 25 km/h.

The second misunderstanding is about watts. The French and European texts alike refer to continuous rated power, meaning what the motor can sustain without flagging, not the peak it delivers for three seconds off the line. A motor sold as “250 W rated” can advertise 600 or 800 watts of peak power and stay within the definition. That is not a loophole: it is the exact wording of the text. Hence the gap, baffling for buyers, between two perfectly legal bikes, one of which visibly pushes harder than the other.

4. On the other side: the speed pedelec

The bike that assists up to 45 km/h exists, it is sold in France, and it is not a bicycle. The Highway Code defines the moped, in point 4.8 of the same Article R311-1, as a “vehicle of category L1e or L2e” — so, for a fast two-wheeler with pedals, an L1e-B. The shift in vocabulary is complete: on the product sheet it is a bike, on the registration certificate it is a moped.

The instructions no buyer can find anywhere

• A registration certificate and a number plate. Putting a vehicle on the road without having obtained its registration certificate is punished with a fourth-class fine (Article R322-1).
• A licence. Riding a moped requires category AM of the driving licence: Article R211-2 of the Highway Code only imposes it on people born after 31 December 1987; those born before 1^st January 1988 are exempt.
• Motor-vehicle insurance. It is compulsory, and riding without it is not a fine but a criminal offence: €3,750, reduced in practice to a fixed penalty of €500 (Article L324-2).
• A type-approved helmet, fastened. Article R431-1 requires it of every moped rider and passenger, on pain of a fourth-class fine and three points off the licence for those who hold one.
• Gloves. Article R431-1-2 requires gloves that meet personal-protective-equipment rules of every moped rider or passenger — a third-class fine, one point.
• No cycle paths. Article R431-9 provides that riders of two-wheel mopeds “may be authorised to use cycle lanes and cycle paths by decision of the authority holding police powers”. May be authorised: without a local decision, the answer is no.

That last point is the hardest to accept, and the most logical. People buy a fast bike to move quickly around town, and the town closes to it precisely the lanes where one can go fast without danger. The speed pedelec spends its life in motor traffic.

5. Derestricting: what the Code says, and to whom

A search on derestricting returns the same sentence everywhere: one year in prison, a €30,000 fine, three years’ licence suspension. Those penalties exist. They appear in two articles of the Highway Code, and it is worth reading whom they name.

Neither of those two articles names the private individual who derestricts their own bike for their own use. That does not mean they risk nothing: what catches them takes another route, that of the change of category. Their bike no longer meets the definition in point 6.11; it now falls under moped rules, without the type-approval, the registration, the insurance or the helmet. Each of those absences has its own article, and they have just been listed. Added to them is a text aimed at the machine itself once it has become a moped: Article R317-23-1 punishes with a fourth-class fine “the use of a moped […] fitted with a device whose effect is to allow it to exceed the regulatory limits set in Article R. 311-1 […] or which has been modified to that end”, and provides for immobilisation, impounding and confiscation as an additional penalty.

The costliest part remains, and it is the silence of the texts that puts it there. The Insurance Code requires every keeper of a motor land vehicle to hold third-party liability insurance (Article L211-1), and defines such a vehicle as “any self-propelled vehicle intended to travel on the ground and which can be driven by mechanical force without being bound to a railway track”. As long as the machine is a pedal-assist cycle, the liability cover of a home-insurance policy treats it as a bicycle. The moment it no longer is one, that cover no longer applies — and an accident is then settled out of the assets of whoever modified the machine. The criminal penalty is uncertain; the civil bill is not.

7. Why the line will not move

One may find 25 km/h too slow. The argument comes back with every rise in speed-pedelec sales. It runs into the nature of the threshold: this is not a road-safety setting that France could raise on its own, it is the exclusion limit of a European regulation. Moving it would not make bikes faster — it would tip, in one go, into bicycle law machines that the same regulation classes today as mopeds, with their plates and their insurance.

Until then, the only thing to remember fits on one line: what separates a bicycle from a moped is neither its speed, nor its weight, nor its price. It is one sentence, at point 6.11 of an article of the Highway Code.