1,103 Cyclists Died Last Year. Nobody Can Tell You How Many Were on E-Bikes.

I ran the numbers on the 2024 FARS data. Then I went looking for the e-bike column, and there isn't one.

In 2022, NHTSA made a quiet methodological change: motorized bicycles were reclassified from motor vehicles to pedalcyclists, and single-vehicle e-bike crashes were dropped from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System entirely.^[1] The timing could not have been worse. Between 2017 and 2024, annual e-bike deaths tracked by the Consumer Product Safety Commission rose from zero to 97, emergency department visits from e-bike crashes climbed from 751 to north of 23,000 per year, and head trauma incidents increased forty-nine-fold.^[2][3] NHTSA's database can't see any of it.

What the 2024 FARS data does show is a paradox hiding in plain sight: pedalcyclist fatalities dropped 6.0 percent while pedalcyclist injuries surged 5.8 percent.^[4] Deaths going one direction and injuries going the opposite is the statistical fingerprint of two populations being averaged together, one that is getting safer and one that is getting more dangerous, their divergent trendlines canceling each other out in the aggregate to produce a number that means almost nothing. New York City's data confirms the split: 23 of 30 cyclist fatalities in 2023 involved e-bikes, while traditional bicycle deaths had fallen 60 percent since 2017.^[5] Traditional cycling is safer than it has been in decades. E-bikes are killing people at a rate that doubles every few years.

The scale of what FARS is missing extends beyond deaths. E-bicycle fractures in the United States increased 2,371 percent from 2019 to 2023, with hospital admissions from those fractures up 3,146 percent.^[6] In California, e-bike collision reports jumped 18.6-fold across five years.^[5] The American College of Surgeons has called it an emerging public health hazard, noting that injured e-bike riders skew younger and sustain more severe injuries than traditional cyclists.^[5]

Strongest counterargument: NHTSA's reclassification was jurisdictionally defensible. E-bikes require no registration, no license, and no insurance, and product-safety authority falls to the CPSC, not NHTSA. Removing them from a motor-vehicle database is a reasonable boundary call. But the CPSC has no crash database comparable to FARS, the NTSB recommended improved e-bike data collection back in November 2022, and Congress only introduced its first federal e-bike safety bill, the Safe SPEEDS Act, in March 2026.^[7] Nobody stepped into the gap.

Limitations: CPSC micromobility death counts and FARS pedalcyclist counts use different collection methods; direct comparison is approximate. NYC's 77-percent e-bike share of cyclist deaths may not hold nationally. The FARS reclassification note references "motorized bicycles," a category that maps imperfectly onto the consumer market's Class 1/2/3 e-bike taxonomy.

If you ride an e-bike or your kid does, none of these agencies are tracking your risk in a way that will produce federal safety standards anytime soon. Wear a helmet, don't let anyone disable the speed limiter, and understand that the federal government reclassified your vehicle out of its crash database three years ago and hasn't looked back.