The Department for Transport has told ebiketips that there is no way of finding out how many collisions and incidents on British roads involve electric motorbikes and illegally modified e-bikes from its own recently published annual road casualty statistics. 

The release of the Department for Transport’s latest reported road casualties in Great Britain at the end of last month coincided with numerous stories in the media about crackdowns on electric motorbikes and illegally modified e-bikes. With confusion rife amongst the public and even the police about the differences between compliant e-bikes (EAPCs) and pedal assist bikes that fall foul of the rules, we wanted to know if officers tasked with recording road collisions and incidents have a method of categorising electric bikes that are not EAPCs – bikes able to assist the rider beyond speeds of 25km/h (15.5mph) and offer more that 250 watts of power.

> How a bike shop turned detectives to track down a cargo bike wrongly seized and destroyed by the police

As suspected, the DfT confirm that although there is guidance available for the reporting of vehicles when making collision reports, there is currently no category for unregistered electric pedal cycles.

“Unfortunately these vehicles cannot currently be identified in the statistics”, a DfT spokesperson told ebiketips.

“Legal e-bikes would be included within the pedal cycle category. Illegal e-bikes – if their power is above the limit to be considered as an EAPC – would probably be classed as electric motorcycles, but… it can vary by force/reporting officer (sometimes they can be entered as pedal cycles, sometimes as other vehicles and it is not possible to identify them within any of the categories very easily).”

DfT collision stats 2025 - FSCs per billion miles travelled since 2009
DfT collision stats 2025 – FSCs per billion miles travelled since 2009 (Image Credit: Department for Transport)

The final 2025 reported road casualty stats shown that while cyclist deaths dropped again, the number seriously injured increased sharply by 14%. Motorcyclists are by far the most likely to be involved in a fatal or serious collision per billion miles travelled compared to other road user types, and there was a near 13% increase in motorcyclist deaths and a 7% increase in those killed or seriously injured versus 2024 – however, while KSIs involving motorcyclists have been steadily rising since for the last three years (a total of 6,096 KSIs in 2025) this number is still lower than any year between 2015-2018.

Therefore, the proliferation of electric bikes on roads and paths that fall outside of the EAPC category in recent years does not appear to have contributed to a highly unusual number of KSIs looking at the data over a longer period of time – although there is arguably not yet enough data to demonstrate that these vehicles are or are not contributing to an increase in serious collisions, especially as there is no way of identifying them in the DfT’s statistics.