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Fat bikes, mopeds in disguise

Fat bikes, mopeds in disguise

What bike dealers in Bologna say about tuned fat bikes

Tuned electric fat bikes travel at sixty kilometers an hour along cycle lanes, and the people saying so are the shopkeepers who sell those machines every day. Corriere di Bologna collected the accounts of three retailers in the city, and the picture leaves no alibi to anyone who still treats the phenomenon as an urban legend.

Paolo reports fielding requests to derestrict pedal-assist bicycles on an almost daily basis. Plenty of the units rolling through town arrive from outside Europe already unlocked, which is why he stopped stocking them. The favorite model remains the fat bike, recognizable by tires nearly twice as wide as usual: before 2024 it barely existed on the Italian market, while now it sells hard precisely because altering it takes so little. Boost the motor, fit a throttle, tamper with the pedal sensor, and from that moment the rider is steering an unapproved moped down lanes reserved for cycling.

Aldo, whose store carries these models too, adds a telling detail. After the crackdown on e-scooters, sales of that product collapsed, while demand for electric two-wheelers climbed, because they deliver comparable performance with lower costs and lighter legal duties. He gets calls about modifications as well, and turns them down. Alessandra, the third voice in the piece, notes that the tampered machines mostly carry delivery couriers, squeezing as many drops as possible out of a shift.

Two hundred fifty watts separate a bicycle from a moped

The technical threshold is public knowledge and fairly simple. A pedal-assist bicycle carries a motor rated at 250 watts maximum, the electric help has to taper off until it stops at 25 km/h, and the unit only engages while the legs are turning. Past those figures the vehicle changes legal nature and becomes a moped, which means type approval, a plate, insurance coverage, a helmet and an AM license.

This is where my doubts begin, as a pedestrian who walks the sidewalks of Milan every day. A compliant electric bicycle calls for no head protection, no insurance duty, no identification mark. A slower e-scooter, by contrast, has required a helmet for everyone since December 2024, along with a 20 km/h ceiling, an identifying tag and a policy. The gap in treatment between two closely related categories explains on its own the shift in demand described by the retailers in Bologna.

Penalties have existed since 2022, enforcement much less so

Contrary to common belief, lawmakers did put something on paper. The June 2022 infrastructure decree amended article 50 of the Italian highway code, setting fines from 1,084 to 4,339 euros for anyone manufacturing or selling non-compliant units, and from 845 to 3,382 euros for anyone who physically carries out the power upgrade. Whoever then climbs aboard an altered machine racks up the violations typical of a moped: no registration, no plate, no policy, riding without a license.

The sums become unbearable in a hurry. Union representative Utibe Joseph of Nidil Cgil told Corriere about two couriers in Bologna hit with tickets between five and ten thousand euros, frequently unaware that the vehicle had been manipulated before purchase. A bill filed in the Chamber of Deputies in February 2026, signed by Democratic Party members together with the cycling federation FIAB, would raise the stakes to one or two years of imprisonment, a penalty between fifteen and thirty thousand euros, and forfeiture of the machine. It has yet to reach the floor calendar.

On the enforcement side, an operation run by the Bologna traffic police on June 10, 2026 produced a result worth more than plenty of statistics: of nine vehicles stopped, exactly one met every requirement, with seventeen violations recorded, four administrative seizures and three impoundments.

Crash figures point to a rising curve

The ACI-Istat report released in July 2026 portrays a country improving overall and a niche going the other way. Road deaths in 2025 numbered 2,868, down 5.3% and below three thousand for the first time since 2020. People moving on pedals, however, ran counter to the trend: 198 cyclists killed, a rise of 20%, thirty fatalities among electric bicycle users, half again as many as the previous year, twenty-five on e-scooters. Taken together, 253 lives lost, up 21.6%.

Thirty deaths on e-bikes sound modest until the progression comes into view. And the tables never record the group I think about most, meaning whoever is walking and gets passed at half a meter by a silent object launched at scooter speed. The issue connects to working conditions in the gig economy and to the supply chain feeding in from Chinese marketplaces, where a derestriction kit costs a few dozen euros.

The legitimate market pays a price too

Confindustria ANCMA closed 2025 with 1.303 million units sold in Italy across muscle-powered and electric models, 4% fewer than the year before. The electric segment stalled at 256 thousand pieces, off by 7%. President Mariano Roman tied the sector’s trouble directly to the presence of vehicles improperly classified as bicycles, asking for regulatory clarity and steady checks. Businesses that respect type approval therefore compete against goods promising more push at half the price and with no obligations attached.

At home I would rather see a license and a quadricycle

My position here is firm, and I have no wish to hide it. A fat bike for my son is out of the question. I would have him earn the AM license instead, theory exam and practical test included, and then hand over my light quadricycle without hesitation: plate, insurance, inspection, a top speed of forty-five kilometers an hour, bodywork all around and a clear legal identity. It travels in orthodox fashion, to use a stiff but accurate word.

There is a practical upside as well, given how little and how badly I drive: my Citroën Ami shows barely three hundred kilometers on the odometer and spends most of its life parked. It may as well go to someone who will actually use it, knowing that this someone has studied road signs and carries a policy.

What remains is the cultural knot, the same one I ran into while writing about teenagers and their fifty-cc scooters. The old moped demanded a process, a minimum of preparation and a certain amount of family responsibility. A modified fat bike skips every one of those steps and arrives in a box labeled “bicycle.” On the cycle lane, nobody registers the difference between the two objects until something happens.

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Chiara Bonifazi