The Real Solution to the Crisis of E-Bike and E-Motorcycle Accidents

Ed Ashman survived the Vietnam War. He returned home and spent decades serving Orange County students as a teacher. One day, as he was walking in his own neighborhood, he was struck and killed by a 14-year-old boy riding an illegal electric motorcycle while doing a wheelie.

The boy’s mother had been warned multiple times by law enforcement about the illegal vehicle. She is now facing charges of involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment. This tragic death was entirely preventable.

This is not an isolated story from my hometown in southern California. Just a month after Ashman’s death, a teenager in Garden Grove died after losing control of an e-motorcycle while riding at about 35 miles per hour. This September, a 14-year-old was killed after running a red traffic signal.

We are seeing different circumstances with the same outcome. Children operating powerful vehicles without proper supervision or training are paying with their lives.

These are not freak accidents but a repeated pattern. Orange County is a prime example of what happens when technology moves faster than parents, communities, and local institutions adapt. These vehicles are becoming more accessible to younger riders, while many adults still underestimate the risks.

Although I no longer live in Orange County, my family and many of my closest friends still do. They regularly describe teenagers weaving through intersections, ignoring traffic signals, and treating neighborhood streets as racetracks. People in my hometown worry that a preventable accident could change their lives forever.

The issue has become impossible to ignore. Residents can see it on neighborhood streets every day, and the data now confirms what they have been experiencing.

At Children’s Hospital of Orange County, pediatric e-bike injuries rose from seven cases in 2019 to 116 in 2024, with children ages 14 to 16 accounting for most of those injuries. According to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, injuries involving e-bikes and e-motorcycles have risen by 430% over four years in Southern California, and more than 100 deaths nationwide have now been linked to these vehicles.

Even more alarming, California’s Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System found that children aged 11 to 14 accounted for nearly 61.7% of e-motorcycle crashes, despite state law prohibiting anyone under 16 from operating them.

The problem is overwhelmingly concentrated among young riders who are not legally permitted to ride these vehicles in the first place. This is not a primary failure of regulation, as the state of California already has age restrictions, traffic laws, and operational requirements. The responsibility ultimately lies with the parents who chose to ignore them.

Adults give these vehicles to their kids, treating them as toys rather than machines capable of causing irreversible harm. They demand maturity, judgment, and training, yet many riders are years away from possessing those qualities.

When something goes wrong, people look first to schools, regulators, or lawmakers for a solution. Yet the primary responsibility has always belonged to parents.

The growing e-bike and e-motorcycle crisis exposes something larger: a breakdown in parental responsibility. Too many adults are willing to outsource supervision and discipline while expecting schools, police officers, and prosecutors to clean up the consequences.

Communities across the country are grappling with the reality that powerful and dangerous technology is being placed in the hands of young children. E-bikes may be the current example, but the underlying issue is much broader. Too many parents have come to treat supervision as optional while expecting institutions to absorb the problem when things go wrong.

No reasonable parent would hand a middle schooler the keys to a pickup truck and send him onto public roads unsupervised. Yet many are willing to give children e-motorcycles capable of reaching dangerous speeds, only to act surprised when tragedy follows. Technology may have changed, but parental responsibility has not.

The answer is not a new federal mandate from Washington, D.C., but rather ensuring that local law enforcement has the resources needed to enforce the laws already on the books. Parents who knowingly purchase illegal vehicles, ignore warning labels, or modify bikes to exceed legal speeds should be held accountable when their negligence causes harm.

Not all the challenges facing Orange County are the same as those in other communities, which is why states and local governments should retain the flexibility to develop solutions that fit their needs.

Orange County officials have begun to act on this issue. Earlier this year, the District Attorney’s Office launched a RIDE SAFELY unit dedicated to prosecuting people who knowingly hand their kids illegal, modified, or age-inappropriate vehicles. Parents are finally being held accountable, but the fact that this is required in the first place shows that many parents have been negligent of their duties.

Ed Ashman survived a war only to lose his life on a quiet street in his neighborhood. He deserved better than becoming a case study.

Orange County is showing the first steps to what accountability looks like. The question is whether other communities will learn from its example before similar accidents unfold in their own backyards.

E-bikes and e-motorcycles did not create the problem; they have exposed it. When parents hand powerful vehicles to children without accountability, tragedy should not surprise us. If we fail to address that reality, Orange County’s story will not remain isolated. It will become America’s.

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