By Erik Noonan
By now, a lot of Minnesotans know Janet Stotko’s story. On August 12, 2024, she went for an evening walk near 15th Street West in Hastings and was struck from behind by a 14-year-old boy traveling at 25 miles per hour. She suffered a traumatic brain injury, a blown eardrum, broken bones in her face and skull, severed nerves, and a brain bleed. She was on a ventilator for two days. She spent three weeks in the hospital. She will never taste or smell again.
It is an awful story. It deserves to be told accurately. It still isn’t.
What the AP Got Wrong — and How It Spread
Last week, the Associated Press published a piece on e-bike safety that opened with Janet Stotko’s crash and described the device that hit her as an “electric bicycle.” That story ran in NBC News, the Mankato Free Press, papers in Florida, Indiana, South Dakota, and dozens of other outlets across the country. The framing is the same everywhere, because it’s the same wire story: a teenager on an e-bike nearly killed a woman in Minnesota.
The device was not an e-bike.
It was a Movcan V60 — an electric motorcycle with a 1,500-watt peak motor, a top speed of 30+ miles per hour, and full throttle capability at any speed. Under Minnesota law, and under the federal definition that more than 36 states have written into their own statutes, an e-bike must have a motor of no more than 750 watts and cannot exceed 28 mph under motor assistance. The Movcan V60 fails both tests by a wide margin. This device was illegal to operate on any public road, sidewalk, or trail in Minnesota before it ever left the store. The rider was 14 — below the minimum age to operate even a legal e-bike. He had no license. Every part of what happened in Hastings was already against the law.
The confusion started with an initial police report that called it an “ebike.” Officers saw pedals and made a reasonable but wrong assumption. It was BikeMN’s own Ted Duepner who flagged it to our policy team — he caught the bodycam footage in Fox 9’s news segment and immediately recognized that what was on screen didn’t match the label in the report. A quick search confirmed the make and model, and the manufacturer’s own spec sheet confirmed the device was illegal under Minnesota law on multiple counts. We raised it with the Hastings Police Department, who clarified the record. The Star Tribune corrected course, and we’re genuinely grateful for their commitment to getting it right — including publishing my recent piece on this exact problem.
The AP takes linguistic precision seriously, and we are already in conversation with them about correcting their characterization of what hit Janet Stotko. WCCO initially carried the AP story but pulled it after we flagged the error — getting it right matters more than getting it first.
Why This Keeps Happening
Here’s the honest version: there is no nationally standardized legal definition of an e-moto. By comparison, there is one for e-bikes. The three-class e-bike framework — capping motors at 750 watts and top assisted speeds at 28 mph — has been written into law in more than 36 states and recognized by the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission. What an e-bike is has been clearly established. It is our hope that Minnesota will soon have an equally clear statutory category for what an e-bike isn’t.
Manufacturers exploit that gap. They put pedals on electric motorcycles, call them e-bikes in their marketing, sell them on Amazon, and they end up in the hands of 14-year-olds. The absence of a formal “e-moto” category in statute doesn’t excuse calling a Movcan V60 an e-bike. The definition of what an e-bike is exists and this device clearly isn’t one. “We don’t have a word for what it is” is not the same as “it must be what the police report said.”
Why E-Motos Are Dangerous — and E-Bikes Aren’t
At this point, when a report comes across our desks about an “e-bike crash,” there’s an informal competition among BikeMN staff to see who can be the first to confirm it was actually an e-moto. It’s a dark joke, born out of how routine this has become. We’re almost never wrong.
The physical difference matters. 750 watts — the legal ceiling for an e-bike motor — is roughly equal to one horsepower. A healthy adult cyclist at peak effort can produce close to one horsepower for a short burst. A legal e-bike motor, at its maximum, is in the same ballpark as what your legs can do. The design intent is a bike that assists human power, not one that replaces it with something categorically more powerful.
The Movcan V60 has a 1,500-watt peak motor. Other e-motos push 2,000, 3,000 watts and beyond. In a crash, force is a function of mass and acceleration — and it’s the acceleration that makes e-motos so dangerous. Overpowered motors launch these devices to high speeds almost instantly, with no physical feedback telling the rider how fast they’re going and no natural governor built into the act of pedaling. That is a categorically different machine than an e-bike, and a categorically different threat to anyone in its path.
The hardware makes it worse. E-motos are built to a price point, not a safety standard. Brakes, tires, and suspension are typically sized for something much lighter and slower — because the manufacturer called it a bicycle. Many can’t be serviced through any legitimate channel. And right now, nothing stops a 14-year-old with a credit card from having one delivered to their door tomorrow afternoon, 90% assembled and ready to ride.
That is the problem. It will not be fixed by banning legal e-bikes from bike paths.
What This Misreporting Actually Costs
This isn’t an academic dispute about taxonomy. Every time a story calls a 30+ mph electric motorcycle an “e-bike,” it hands ammunition to people who want to restrict or eliminate bike infrastructure. Cities that have never had a significant e-bike incident are fielding calls demanding bans. Legislators are introducing bills targeting legal e-bikes based on constituent concerns rooted in incidents that had nothing to do with legal e-bikes. The backlash to the AP story will fuel that in states far beyond Minnesota.
This matters because e-bikes are genuinely valuable — not as a niche product, but as transportation infrastructure. They get teenagers to school without a car, older adults who’ve stopped driving to the grocery store, and working parents through errands without gas or parking. Minnesota’s own 2026 Youth E-Bike Study found that as ridership increases, per-rider crash rates tend to decrease. The people harmed most by e-bike restrictions are almost never the people causing the problems — they’re the kid with a legal Class 1 bike, the 68-year-old whose knees won’t carry him on a conventional bicycle. Restrict e-bikes and you restrict them. The e-motos keep rolling regardless.
We’re also living in a media environment increasingly reliant on AI tools that scrape from trusted sources like wire services. When the AP calls a device an “electric bicycle,” that label gets ingested and treated as settled fact by every AI summary and automated aggregator that follows. Misinformation calcifies faster than it used to. A correction struggles to fully undo a wrong label in a wire story. Getting it right the first time matters more now than it ever has.
BikeMN Is Here to Help
On the legislative front, we’re working on two bipartisan bills in the 2026 session: HF 3785 (Rep. Tom Dippel, R-41B, with cosponsor Rep. Lucy Rehm, DFL-48B) and SF 4186 (Sen. Julia Coleman, R-48, with co-author Sen. Jim Abeler, R-35). When these pass, e-motos will formally be classified under Minnesota’s existing off-highway motorcycle framework — a well-established category with real licensing and enforcement infrastructure. This isn’t new bureaucracy. It’s slotting a device that was always a motorcycle into the category where it belongs.
More broadly, organizations like BikeMN exist precisely as a resource for these kinds of questions — for journalists, elected officials, law enforcement, and the public. We are not here to make anyone’s job harder. We are here to help. If you’re covering an incident involving a two-or-three-wheeled electric device and you’re not sure what you’re looking at, call us. Email us at info@bikemn.org. We’ll turn it around fast and give you a straight answer. That offer stands for local TV reporters, wire journalists, city council members, and anyone else who wants to understand what’s actually happening on our streets.
Anna Zivarts puts plainly who gets left behind when bad reporting drives bad policy: read her piece E-Bikes Mean Freedom for Low-Vision Bicyclists in Streets.mn. For people who can’t drive, an e-bike isn’t a convenience. It’s access. Restricting e-bikes in response to e-moto incidents doesn’t make those people safer. It just takes away their way of getting around.
Janet Stotko’s injuries are real and permanent. Her advocacy comes from a place of genuine pain and we respect it. She deserved better than a teenager on an illegal electric motorcycle blowing through a residential sidewalk. She also deserves to have her story told in a way that leads to policy that might actually prevent the next one — which means correctly identifying what hit her, and fixing the category of problem that actually caused it.
Minnesota is a national leader in forward-thinking transportation policy — and that didn’t happen by chance. For over 17 years, BikeMN has been at the table, fight after fight, shaping a future where biking, walking, and rolling is safe, accessible, and valued. That work is funded by members like you. Join as a sustaining supporter today at bikemn.org/join — $5 or $10 a month helps ensure Minnesota stays ahead. We all move forward together.