“You don’t understand the power of an ebike until you get on one,” Dr Tony Grabs warned.
Grabs, the director of trauma at St Vincent’s hospital in Sydney, was citing a patient who had jumped on a rental ebike after a night of drinking with friends – the first time she had ever been on one.
She was “seriously injured”, and only recovered after “weeks and weeks in hospital,” Grabs said. “It was an awful lesson for her.”
It is 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 in Sydney on Wednesday, showed the presentations in 2025 had doubled compared to the 103 in 2024 and jumped 350% from the 45 in 2023.
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The hospital in Sydney’s inner-eastern suburbs saw 200 ebike related presentations last year that were serious enough to trigger a response from the hospital’s trauma team.
Grabs said 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 said.
“We have to wait and see whether they come out of having a serious head injury.”
Grabs said these injuries were often more severe than those which occurred on traditional bikes, because people riding at higher speeds who hit something stationary like a car or a wall underwent a “de-acceleration”.
“That’s where the handlebars can go into the stomach or chest,” he said.
“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.”
The injuries at St Vincent’s are part of a surge happening in hospitals across the country, which the federal health minister, Mark Butler, 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 said.
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 to the Sydney children’s hospital network which has reported a similar surge in presentations related to the mode of transportation.
Grabs said the patients in their data were predominantly people in their 30s, although anecdotally, patients are getting younger.
More than half of the cases presenting to the St Vincent’s emergency department had self-reported speeds of more than 25km/h.
The data also showed more than half of injuries occurred at night, often with alcohol and other drugs as a factor.
Grabs said the hospital was planning to collect more precise data, including the kinds of ebikes involved in hospital presentations, but, anecdotally, a larger proportion of the accidents occurred on rental bikes or illegally modified bikes.
Grabs said because they didn’t know how many people were riding ebikes, they couldn’t know whether the growing number of presentations was a steady percentage of people who have been injured, or whether it is a higher incidence of accidents occurring.
He also reflected that as St Vincent’s was located in the inner east, near the CBD, it could lead to a higher than normal incidence of presentations than at 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 in late 2025, meaning road-legal ebikes would 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.
