“You don’t understand the power of an ebike until you get on one,” Dr Tony Grabs warns.
Grabs, the director of trauma at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, cites a patient who jumped on a rental ebike after a night of drinking with friends – the first time she’d ever been on one.
The woman, who presented to hospital with her injuries, was treated and recovered.
It’s just one example of an increasing number of injuries the hospital has seen amid the rising popularity of ebikes on Australian streets.
The new data, released by St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney on Wednesday, shows the presentations in 2025 had doubled compared to the 103 in 2024 and jumped 350% from the 45 in 2023.
The hospital in Sydney’s CBD saw 200 ebike related presentations last year that were serious enough to trigger a response from the hospital’s trauma team.
Grabs says about half required operations.
“You can break ribs. You can have air leaking out of your lung. You can have a rupture of your bowel because something’s hit it – you might require a big operation on the stomach or you might need tubes placed into your chest.”
Operations to the chest and stomach are the ones he can help – “the one we can’t really control much is the head injury,” he says.
“We have to wait and see whether they come out of having a serious head injury.”
Grabs says these injuries are often more severe than those which occur on traditional bikes because people riding at higher speeds who hit something stationary like a car or a wall undergo a “de-acceleration.”
“That’s where the handlebars can go into the stomach or chest,” he explains.
“Or they get thrown off a bike and then hit something else – almost airborne – and this is sometimes when you can get a bad head injury,” Grabs says.
The injuries at St Vincent’s are part of a surge happening in hospitals across the country, which the health minister last week called “absolutely devastating.”
“Ebikes are heavier and faster than regular bikes and many have been illegally modified to go even faster, which only increases the severity of the injuries,” he says.
More than half of 2025’s patients had to be admitted to hospital, and of these, almost 10% required admission to intensive care.
The total ebike related presentations at St Vincent’s only captures those aged 15 and older.
Those younger go the Sydney Children’s hospital network which has also reported a similar surge in presentations related to the mode of transportation.
Grabs said the patients in their data are predominantly people in their 30s, though anecdotally patients are getting younger.
More than half of the cases presenting to the St Vincent’s ED had self-reported speeds of more than 25km/ph.
The data also showed more than half of injuries occurred at night, often with alcohol and other drugs a factor.
Grabs said the hospital is looking in future to collect more precise data including what kinds of ebikes have been involved in hospital presentations, but anecdotally a larger proportion of the accidents were occurring on rental bikes or illegally modified bikes.
Grabs said because they don’t know how many people are riding ebikes they can’t know whether the growing number of presentations is a steady percentage of people who have been injured, or if it is a higher incidence of accidents occurring.
He also reflected St Vincent’s being a hospital in the CBD might lead to a higher than normal incidence of presentations than other hospitals.
The state of New South Wales recorded 226 injuries related to ebikes in 2024. In just the first seven months of 2025, that had already to surged to 233 injuries and four deaths.
The rest of Australia has faced a similar issue, with legal ebikes involved in 239 crashes in 2025 in Queensland, four of which were fatal, according to preliminary police data.
The federal government relaxed import standards in 2021, but those standards were tightened again in late 2025, meaning road-legal ebikes will be required to have motors that only activate when the rider is pedalling and are restricted to speeds of 25km/h and power of 250 watts.
NSW, which had permitted power as high as 500 watts, has cut that back to 250 watts.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
