Smart E-Bike Charging Lockers Head for the UK as Fire Fears Mount

London bike startup Tyred has signed on as the exclusive UK distributor of PowerShelter’s ‘SmartShelters’ — modular charging lockers built to take e-bike batteries out of bedrooms, corridors and office desks.

The deal, confirmed this week, sets up a nationwide rollout covering distribution, installation and servicing. Property owners, facility managers and fleet operators are the target customers, and the timing is not accidental.

Why a locker, and why now

UK building managers are tightening the rules on e-bike charging at a fair clip. The Gherkin, Canary Wharf and Savills’ residential portfolio have all banned batteries from being charged on site. For commuters who bought an e-bike precisely to ride to work, that leaves an awkward gap.

London Fire Brigade numbers put the problem in sharp relief: 206 e-bike and e-scooter fires last year, 171 of them involving e-bikes. Battery failure, DIY conversion kits and mismatched chargers keep turning up as the common threads.

“The UK is restricting e-bikes faster than it’s building places to charge them.” — Jake De Wulf, Co-Founder, PowerShelter

De Wulf argues that bans on their own achieve very little. “Restrictions alone won’t make e-bikes safer, they’ll just make them rarer,” he said, pointing to managed charging infrastructure as the real fix.

What’s inside a SmartShelter

Amsterdam-based PowerShelter has been building these units for a while, and the spec sheet reads like a fire officer’s wish list:

• Individual compartments so each battery sits in its own sealed bay
• Temperature and gas sensors watching for the early signs of trouble
• Automatic power shut-off when something reads wrong
• Extraction systems to pull smoke and fumes out of the unit
• Fire-suppression hardware inside each bay
• Thermal runaway containment, designed to stop a single failure spreading into the wider building

The lockers are pitched at workplaces, apartment blocks, mobility hubs and fleet depots. PowerShelter claims compatibility with nearly all e-bike batteries on the market, covering both consumer bikes and commercial fleets.

From mobile repairs to a full ownership platform

Tyred, founded in 2023, started life as a mobile bike repair outfit — it has serviced more than 150,000 bikes in the past year — and raised £2.5 million earlier this year to broaden into insurance, warranty and finance.

Adding charging infrastructure closes a loop that co-founder Nikita Baranov says customers keep asking about. “The question we increasingly hear is very simple: where do the batteries go?” he said. Cycle parking and bike lanes only go so far if a rider is turned away at the office door.

Europe is already familiar with the hardware. PowerShelter’s shelters sit in office buildings across the continent, including Google’s Amsterdam HQ, and the company launched Amsterdam’s first public e-bike charging network last year. It has since opened a North American partner programme and, this summer, a battery-swapping network in Berlin with leasing platform Zoomo.

Neither firm has named the first UK sites. For now, the plan is national in scope — and the pressure driving it shows no sign of easing.