NJ Teens Dying on E-Bikes as Demand Soars, Critics Say New Laws Backfire

A Tragic Loss and the Rising Concerns Around E-Bikes

“Chase is dead.”
Tony Sudano glanced at the text message he received from his wife, Tina, and thought little of it. He assumed it meant she and their 16-year-old son had been bickering again — their personalities were so similar that they clashed from time to time.

Also, Sudano was busy, serving shaved ice from his Kona Ice truck at a school in Pemberton. He remembers the sunshine that June day, the kids clamoring for scoops of blue raspberry and groovy grape. It wasn’t until Sudano called Tina later that he realized something was gravely wrong.

“I could tell in her voice right away,” Sudano recalled. It was no normal disagreement between mom and son.

Chase Sudano almost never rode his brother’s e-bike. His parents were wary of it, they said, and the high school sophomore spent a lot of time at practices and matches – he was a champion wrestler at St. Augustine Prep, and longed to one day be a Division I athlete.

But that Tuesday morning he’d been playing video games, and left the house for some fresh air. He decided to take a ride through his Southampton neighborhood.

State police said Chase was riding east on North Firelane Road when the front of the e-moto — or electric motorcycle, an increasingly common vehicle on New Jersey roadways, often confused with an electric bicycle — collided with the right rear of a UPS truck. He was ejected from the bike and died on the roadway just over a mile from his house.

Chase’s parents and younger brother Justin buried him a month ago. And they are far from the only New Jersey family suffering the loss of a child in an e-bike crash.

The same week Chase was killed, Gustavo Rocha, a 15 year old from Lincroft, died from injuries he suffered in an earlier e-bike crash. Similar wrecks killed a 12-year-old in Princeton in April, a 13-year-old in Scotch Plains last September and a 14-year-old in Somers Point last summer.

Dozens more have been injured as the popularity of e-bikes soars. And those using e-bikes are getting younger and younger – a 9-year-old riding an e-moto was injured in Margate earlier this year and police say most of the kids on e-bikes and e-motos they encounter are between 10 to 14 years old.

Even more alarming is that the American College of Surgeons say injuries associated with e-bikes are widely underreported. Law enforcement agencies don’t yet keep a specific count of e-bike injuries and deaths in the state, but the rash of recent casualties prompted New Jersey lawmakers to roll out a new set of laws that went into effect earlier this week. Though advocates for the e-bike laws tout them as some of the strictest in the nation, activists and even some of the parents of kids who have been killed say the new laws – which establish age restrictions and require e-bikes to be registered and insured – will do little to protect other young riders.

Insurance will be difficult and expensive to find, and the rules unfairly restrict use for some riders, including immigrant workers, critics say. And the new requirements don’t address the root causes of the issues, they argue, noting that parents and kids need to be more educated about the types of e-bikes available online, which are safe to ride and operate, and which are not.

Experts say part of the issue is that unwitting parents often purchase cheaper, sleeker and more powerful e-motos online for their kids without fully understanding what they’re buying. And regulators aren’t doing much to educate them, or curb those sales.

“I’m not quite sure what that has to do with safety,” Greg Bently, owner of bike shop Island Scooters in Monmouth County, said about new registration and licensing laws.

“There’s no inspection involved, so I’m not sure what that has anything to do with safety. It sours a lot of people because they feel like it’s just New Jersey trying to grab more money, which it does come across that way.”

The Role of Peer Pressure and Parental Influence

The Sudanos never liked e-bikes. They constantly showed their two boys headlines about crashes and deaths to warn them about the risks. One of their kids’ friends had even been involved in a serious crash, and they decided never to allow their sons to have an e-bike.

“I was very against it; did not want it,” Tony Sudano told [SOURCE]. “But every other kid had one.”

Eventually they broke down and bought Justin an e-bicycle for Christmas. But it was one the parents were comfortable with, not the one Justin really wanted. Justin tinkered with the bike here and there to bypass speed limiters. Easily searchable YouTube videos and online tutorials have made it easy.

He eventually discovered a recall on the bike and used the opportunity to trade it in for cash and purchase an e-moto, capable of reaching much more alarming speeds.

“This is the problem. There’s the demand for the product,” said Matt Moore, Policy and General Counsel for the national retailer advocacy group PeopleForBikes.

“The parents go along with it.”

The Surge in E-Bike Sales and the Need for Regulation

Popularity has surged. In 2019, e-bike sales in the U.S. barely eclipsed 250,000, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. By 2024, an estimated 1.7 million e-bikes were sold in the U.S. E-bike sales even outpaced electric vehicles nationally by 20% in 2022 as some states implemented financial incentives for e-bikes and prices for some models of electric bikes decreased.

It’s difficult to track exactly how many e-bikes are sold online, given the fractured marketplace of foreign and domestic companies that sell directly to consumers through their own websites or Amazon. But one estimate from PeopleForBikes calculated the online market for e-bikes sold directly to consumers from company websites in 2024 as almost doubling traditional sales.

The rapid increase in popularity and subsequent spike in injuries sparked federal legislators to respond.

U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-NJ, introduced the SAFE Ride Act in September 2025, aimed at getting states to develop safety plans for e-bikes. A second bill, the Safe SPEEDS Act, was introduced by Congressman Dave Min of California to establish tighter regulations on e-bikes and other types of off-road electric devices.

But it’s not always easy to know exactly what you’re buying, especially online, bike advocates warn.

Thirty-six states classify e-bikes into three categories from low to high speed. New Jersey’s new laws reclassify bikes into two different types, low-speed and high-speed.

Low-speed e-bicycles are pedal-assisted, do not have a throttle and the motor cuts off at 20 mph. Electric motorcycles, or e-motos, are throttle-powered and can go much faster - sometimes they don’t even have pedals. They are closer to motorcycles, with some advertised as being able to reach 45 mph or faster.

E-motos that have the capacity to exceed 20 mph and are designed for use on public roadways must comply with National High Traffic Safety Administration guidelines, including safety testing and registration. They must also be sold by registered motor vehicle dealers, Moore said.

But that’s not what is happening.

“That should be the starting point here,” Moore added, explaining that high-speed e-motos sold online bypass NHTSA’s rule against sales from unauthorized dealers. As much as 98% of online bike sales were of high-speed throttle-powered bikes, PeopleForBikes found.

In California, Amazon pulled higher speed e-bikes from their marketplace after the state’s Attorney General issued an advisory in April warning companies and parents about distinctions between legal e-bikes and e-motos and how they can be marketed online.

New Jersey’s new laws take a different approach.

The Impact of New Laws and Challenges Ahead

Nico Lombardi, a 13-year-old middle school student from Scotch Plains, was on his second e-bike - an e-moto - when he was killed last September in a crash with a landscaping truck making a wide right turn, his parents Jennifer and Elio said. His first bike was a pedal-assist bike and he had been using the e-bike practically every day for about two years.

“He never leaves our thoughts,” Jennifer Lombardi said of losing her son, echoing comments the Sudanos made about their boy. “You learn to live with the grief, but it never goes away.”

One month after his death, New Jersey lawmakers visited Scotch Plains to pitch new e-bike laws that moved quickly through the state Senate and Assembly and were signed by then-Gov. Phil Murphy on Jan. 19, the day before his second and final term expired.

“The dramatic increase in the use of e-bikes has created greater dangers for their operators, other motorists and pedestrians,” state Senate President Nick Scutari, D-Union, said last year. “We are in a new era of e-bike use that requires updated safety standards to help prevent accidents, injuries and fatalities.”

In New Jersey, e-bikes will now be regulated similarly to mopeds. Riders must comply with the new mandates or face fines of up to $50 per offense and risk having their e-bikes impounded.

Low-speed e-bikes will not require insurance but must be registered and riders must be at least 15 years old and pass a licensing process.

E-moto users must be at least 17 years old, pass a licensing test, and register and insure the bikes. Helmets are also mandatory for all e-bike operators on New Jersey roadways, regardless of the rider’s age. For now, e-scooters are excluded from the new regulations.

Bike advocates say the laws unfairly penalize riders searching for cheap and efficient modes of micro mobility. Some parents argue the laws will prohibit their children from using the devices to commute to schools.

Immigrant advocates say the laws unfairly target food delivery riders and other immigrant workers to check their legal status while also forcing higher operating costs. And many question the insurance requirements, which critics say were a rushed component of the law.

“People aren’t just going to be able to call any insurance company and get e-bike insurance,” said Christine O’Brian, president of the Insurance Council of New Jersey. “This is a very specific type of product that is difficult to understand at the moment.”

Insurance companies were not given much time to study the risks and submit a product to the state Division of Banking and Insurance for approval, O’Brian said. The result is few carriers have been able to offer insurance, and the few that have, offer policies that can be expensive.

Low-speed e-bikes are now covered under automobile policies, a decision that could have ripple effects on automobile insurance premiums a year from now, according to O’Brian.

“There’s no doubt the legislature responded to a growing problem nationally of the use and abuse of these bikes,” O’Brian explained. “But I don’t think this is an insurance problem. This is more about education and enforcement. Just because you have insurance doesn’t make you more responsible.”

The Road Ahead

Now, the MVC is involved. Some critics argue the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission, already over burdened, lacks the capacity to process the additional paperwork and create a confusing maze of regulations for parents, gig-workers and riders.

Almost 2,000 appointments to register e-bikes across the Garden State were made during the first week of open availability starting June 23, a spokesperson for the MVC said. Another 140 appointments to begin the permitting process for riders were also registered that week, according to the MVC.

By July 17, the MVC had processed more than 6,200 e-bike registrations and issued 320 e-bike license permits. The MVC had 570 registration appointments on Friday, June 26, the first day the agency began processing paperwork, officials said. But the agency must also process tourists’ registration and licensing requests if they bring their e-bikes to New Jersey for vacation.

And there have been reports of confusion about bike classifications, registration fees and taxes at MVC locations.

The MVC has published infographics, charts and guides to help people understand how to comply with the new e-bike laws. Meanwhile, dozens of New Jersey police departments have posted similar guides to social media, while also holding public seminars and visiting classrooms.

“A lot of the early efforts will be education based,” said Captain Thomas Lagomarsino of the Princeton Police Department about how the department plans to respond to the new laws. “The whole industry wasn’t really prepared for this so a lot of this is going to be educating people on the new laws.”

And besides new state laws, some towns have passed their own regulations.

In 2025, local ordinances in Florham Park and Woodbridge limited e-bike and e-scooter use to roads, mandated that riders wear helmets and follow traffic laws, increased fines and promoted increased enforcement. It has helped, the towns’ police departments said, and went hand-in-hand with education initiatives.

In Florham Park, police have seen fewer e-bikes in the central business district, Captain Brian Ford said. In a recent incident, a young rider’s parents were issued citations after their kid hit the side of a car that was pulling into a driveway while riding an e-bike, Ford said.

Since Woodbridge adopted regulations to control where and how e-bikes are operated, it has impounded 61 e-bikes and issued 258 citations, Sergeant Joseph A. Angelo said.

“Our unit is going to be heavily focused on the new guidelines for e-bikes,” Angelo said about the new state laws. The department’s traffic unit has been focused on education, visiting local middle and elementary schools as well as bike shops, Angelo explained.

But educating kids and parents about the risks is going to be a long road, according to Angelo.

“Two teenagers on e-bikes were involved in a crash at an intersection in town the same day we were in the school discussing safety,” said Angelo.

Some families of older e-bike riders killed in crashes say the new laws might have made a difference for their loved ones.

“He had terrible peripheral vision and couldn’t see right or left,” Denise Phillips said of her ex-husband, Henry Phillips Jr. The 73-year-old died last fall after the e-bike he was riding hit a police car making a right turn in Atlantic Highlands.

The new laws may have forced Henry to prove his vision was adequate enough to drive.

“My last conversation was telling him he shouldn’t be on the e-bike,” she said.

But for parents of children killed on e-bikes, their reality is more complicated.

The Sudanos and the Lombardis both said they are skeptical that the new state laws would have done anything to stop what happened to their sons. Chase was just a few weeks shy of getting his driver’s license, his parents said.

Instead, they are left with grief and regret.

“I lay in his bed most nights just like, full of guilt,” Tony Sudano said.

“Why did I give in?”

staff writer Larry Higgs contributed reporting for this article.

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