Super73's LeGrand Crewse Wants You to Join the E-Bike Revolution

We’re barreling toward a transit revolution in the U.S., but not the one you think.

While electric vehicles have been touted as the sustainable transit of the future, LeGrand Crewse says technological upgrades, increased financial incentives, and rising e-bike fervor could herald in a new micro-mobility reality. Meaning that if the 43-year-old co-founder and CEO of the California-based electric bike company Super73 gets his way, millions of Americans could make their way around town on bikes to avoid congestion and the high costs of car ownership.

“We’ve actually created, from scratch, an entirely new category of bicycle.”

It’s hard to argue with Crewse’s optimism. Super73 has wooed 20- and 30-somethings with its sleek, retro-futuristic bikes, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and earning celebrity endorsements from the likes of Chris Hemsworth, Sofia Richie, and Snoop Dogg. It even landed a product placement in Barbie (a bike is seen inside Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, of course).

“We’re enabling an entire generation of people in this country that are starting to think about transportation very differently and starting to challenge the status quo that owning a car is necessary to survive,” Crewse says.

Ultimately, it may be up to stylish brands like Super73 to convince us to go all-in on e-bikes, and Crewse has already made inroads by shaking up the cycling industry and blurring the lines between bike and motorcycle.

Disrupting the Industry

Crewse got his first bike when he was 5 years old, and as a teenager growing up in Arizona, biking became his main form of transportation.

That experience “gave me a lot of joy and a lot of freedom, something that I’ve always pursued ever since then,” he says.

But as an adult, Crewse’s lengthy journey to and from work took over an hour in each direction by bike. He wasn’t interested in driving to the office, but he realized he’d need some power to get there in a reasonable amount of time.

So he started to experiment with adding a motor to the bike, and this pet project turned into a full-blown business officially launched in 2012 called Lectric Cycles. Crewse developed a drive system and technique to electrify regular-old bikes by replacing the pedals and bottom bracket with an electric motor to drive the chain and aid the rider. During a trip to China with a friend, he learned the tools of the electric motor trade and met Michael Cannavo and Aaron Wong, who would later become the co-founders of Super73.

The earliest Super73 employees, who were mostly in their 20s and 30s, set out to jump-start the e-bike world when they started the company in 2016. At the time, these rides were primarily marketed toward older demographics and tended to lack variety. Bike makers relied on a handful of part suppliers and incorporated relatively similar designs.

To add unique flair, Crewse and his colleagues decided to revamp a model reminiscent of 1960s Southern California: the iconic Taco minibike frame introduced by off-road racer John Steen that later fell out of popularity when Honda and Kawasaki minibikes came to dominate the market. The team loved the vintage look and decided to give it a new life. (The name Super73 stemmed from the founders’ tendencies to call the prototypes “super rad,” in typical SoCal fashion.)

“There’s this familiarity with the form factor, but we’re bringing something brand new in terms of the way it actually works,” Crewse says.

Most importantly, Crewse and co. incorporated a thumb-controlled throttle in their bikes, meaning that riders can rely solely on motor power without any peddling (though all of the adult bikes come with pedal-assist modes). They also decided to ensure user comfort with roomy bench seats to accommodate longer rides, along with some fat tires reminiscent of motorcycles. With this unique combination, Super73 rocked an industry that Crewse views as “very stagnant.”

Bike or Motorcycle?

Super73’s signature design begs the question: Where does the line fall between e-bike and e-motorcycle? Some bike retailers even rejected his product when it first launched in 2017 because they claimed it wasn’t, well, a bike.

Federal and state laws tend to group bikes and e-bikes together if the latter doesn’t surpass certain speed limits (which vary by state and type of e-bike, such as those with a throttle and those that are pedal-assist only). These legal differences can impact whether riders need to obtain a license, registration, and insurance, along with where they’re allowed to be used and whether a helmet is required.

“When you put a human being on anything with two wheels, it dramatically decreases the volume of space that you need on the road.”

Riders can adjust mobile app settings for all Super73 models designed for adults to operate up to 28 mph (a speed restricted to riders aged 16 and older in many states), prompting safety concerns from experts who worry thrill-seeking teens may opt to turn things up a notch. But adventure plays a key role in Crewse’s business model, and he says the throttle-forward concept has made ripples throughout the industry.

“We’ve actually created, from scratch, an entirely new category of bicycle product,” he says. “It has inspired a lot of other people, and virtually every other bicycle company now makes some form of bike that uses a similar formula to ours.”

Today, Super73 offers models for a range of uses. There’s the sleek S-Series and Z-Series designed for city slickers (which begin at around $2,000), or the slightly bulkier R-Series (starting at $3,695) that comes equipped for off-road “rugged rides” with a full suspension system and the ability to reach speeds above 28 mph — the legal road limit for e-bikes.

In 2022, Super73 announced it was delving into the kids’ market. Today, parents can drop $995 for the Super73-K1D, an electric training bike that’s peddle-free and reaches speeds of up to 15 mph — a far cry from the dinky tricycles we all grew up with.

The company’s latest venture is an electric motorcycle called the Super73-C1X, which it says will reach speeds of over 85 mph and offer a range of over 100 miles. Super73 has boasted how the bike will offer two variants, the El Jefe Scrambler Dual Sport and the Super Le Pew “Café” Super Sport, and can charge up to 80 percent in less than 15 minutes.

While initial production of Super73-C1X was slated to kick off in late 2023, it hit multiple delays. Super73 aims to update buyers on the production timeline by the end of the year, according to a company spokesperson.

“We could solve the traffic problem tomorrow.”

Beyond plans for these electric motorcycle models, Crewse is tight-lipped on the company’s future plans. He does hint, though, that Super73 has more in store for personal mobility tech.

“When you put a human being on anything with two wheels, it dramatically decreases the volume of space that you need on the road,” he says. “So this is something we’re very focused on.”

And to attract a relatively wide swath of people to e-bikes, Super73 leads with the appeal of aesthetics and a good time. That’s because people hold mixed attitudes toward electric vehicles in the U.S. People who identify as Republican or Republican-leaning, for example, tend to be far less open to buying EVs than Democrats or Democrat-leaning individuals.

“If you create — like I believe that we have — something that is fun, easy to use, and gives you a lot of joy and looks cool, then I think it’s a way to bring those barriers down,” he says.

The Future of Transportation

Regardless of what comes next, Crewse hopes policy can move in favor of e-bike adoption as the younger generation that Super73 targets moves into positions of power. He thinks, for example, that this form of transportation can become more affordable if lawmakers introduce more financial incentives for e-bikes to catch up with the credits currently available at both the federal and state levels to help drivers buy electric vehicles. Right now, e-bike owners tend to be relatively wealthy. Nearly a third of them live in households earning over $100,000 each year, and commuter models like Super73’s cost thousands of dollars on average.

The high costs associated with e-bikes could explain why many riders are purchasing cheaper models (and batteries) overseas that lack rigorous safety testing — these low-quality products have sparked deadly apartment fires in cities like New York.

Companies can also adjust e-bike manufacturing processes to make production (and final price tags for consumers) less expensive. Some electric car makers, for instance, now use or are looking into massive casting machines to simplify assembly. Crewse thinks similar innovations could work in the e-bike industry, but that all rests on manufacturers treating bikes as a “legitimate form of transportation,” according to Crewse, and massively scaling up manufacturing to drive costs down.

And, as Crewse points out, e-bikes could help us reach a green transit revolution more quickly than electric cars. For one, car batteries require larger amounts of critical minerals and could put a strain on the supply chain as more people buy EVs. But e-bikes run on batteries that are far smaller than those in electric cars (merely a few pounds versus thousands of pounds).

Plus, electric bikes get around 30 to 100 times more miles per pound of battery than an electric car and emit 21 times less carbon dioxide per mile than EVs on average (based on electricity generation required for charging). They also don’t require the extensive charging infrastructure relied on by EV owners that’s slowly growing across the country.

Even in the short term, embracing personal mobility could reduce a problem Crewse often faces living in Southern California: unbearable gridlock traffic. E-bikes have even been shown to reduce road congestion, along with injury and death rates.

“If you took all the cars off the road and you put everybody on some form of personal mobility, we could solve the traffic problem tomorrow,” he says.