The cyclist can be sold a radio; the pedestrian only has a phone

At Eurobike 2026, a bike brand did something the car industry has been arguing about for a decade, and did it without much drama. It put vehicle-to-everything radio into a bicycle and called it ready to sell. Canyon’s Roadlite:ON V2X transmits the rider’s position to nearby equipped cars, and buzzes the handlebar when one is closing in from a blind angle. “Mobility is only as safe as the most vulnerable user,” the engineer behind it said. “With the Roadlite:ON V2X, we approached V2X from the cyclist’s perspective.”

The technology is not the story; the automotive world has demonstrated the same connected-safety idea a hundred times. What is new is that a vulnerable road user finally got a product. And it quietly reveals that the category of protecting people outside cars is splitting into two markets, only one of which has any idea how it gets paid for.

The bike is a device; the person is not

The reason a cyclist is the easy half is mundane. A cyclist rides a machine, and a premium e-bike is a serious machine, a carbon frame with a battery, a controller, a display, and thousands of euros of price to hide a bill of materials inside. Canyon’s pitch is exactly that, a frame that can “house active safety systems without added bulk or aesthetic compromise.” There is room for a real antenna, a real satellite receiver, real power, and somewhere to put the haptic buzz. The bike is a device you can sell the safety function inside.

A pedestrian is not a device. A pedestrian has a phone, and a phone is a bad place to run this. 5GAA’s 2026 field work measured smartphone satellite accuracy swinging from about a metre to nearly four between handset models in open sky, and sliding to twenty metres in dense urban streets once the phone went into a back pocket. At fifty kilometres an hour that twenty metres forces the warning about one and a half seconds early, against the four or five seconds a pedestrian needs to clear two lanes. That degrades the timing of the alert, and it is enough to make the driver learn to ignore it. A safety alert that cries wolf is an alert drivers learn to ignore.

So the same function lands completely differently depending on who wears it. On a bike it is a feature with a price tag. On a pedestrian it is a research problem.

Two halves, one with a business model

	Cyclist	Pedestrian
Carries	a bike	a phone
Positioning	dedicated receiver	phone, poor and pocket-dependent
Who pays	the bike buyer	nobody obvious
NCAP pull	cyclist scenarios in scope	out of scope in 2026
Status	production-ready bike shown	dedicated work item to find a model

The right-hand column is where the market is stuck. Euro NCAP 2026 leans harder into cyclists but keeps connected and infrastructure-based road users out of the tested scope, so there is no rating pressure to force pedestrian protection into cars. And 5GAA is candid in its dynamic use-case report that the path to market for pedestrian awareness is the least clear of any case it examined, and does not appear in NCAP plans at all. The industry response was to open a work item with the most honest title in the field, “VRU Awareness and Protection: Value Creation and Capture,” due late in 2026, whose entire job is to work out who could possibly pay.

The receiving side already exists

None of this is blocked on the cars. By Canyon’s own count there are already something like two to three million V2X-equipped vehicles on European roads, a rounding error against the size of the European parc but a fleet big enough that a broadcast from a bike lands on real receivers. The gap has never been the listener. It is the talker, and the work is getting a radio onto the person who needs to be heard and finding someone willing to pay for it.

The premium bike solves the talker problem by being expensive enough to carry the cost. That is clever, and it is also the narrow version of the idea. A carbon bike priced in the thousands reaches the people who buy carbon bikes priced in the thousands, which is not most cyclists and certainly not most vulnerable road users.

The scale vector is the shared fleet

The broad version of the same idea is shared micromobility, sitting in every city already with almost nobody pitching it. A dockless bike or e-scooter from a rental fleet is a device an operator owns, and it is a much better home for a radio than a private bike is. It is already connected over cellular, already carries a satellite receiver, already reports its position continuously for fleet management, geofencing and billing. Adding V2X to a machine like that is a module and a firmware load on a product line that already exists, and the cost amortises over thousands of rides.

The chip vendors can already see this. The bolt-on handlebar modules coming to market, such as Autotalks’ ZooZ3 on its bicycle chipset, are pitched explicitly as reference platforms for micromobility fleets and large-scale pilots. The unit they are chasing is the fleet.

The economics point the same way. A city that wants safer intersections does not have to convince a million residents to buy anything. It already licenses the handful of operators running scooters and bikes on its streets, and it can make a V2X beacon a condition of the permit the way it already dictates speed caps and parking rules. The operator pays a marginal hardware cost on a device it was buying anyway, and the city gets fleet-scale rider presence in exactly the dense junctions where the collisions happen. Nobody has shipped this at scale yet, but every piece of it already exists and is already in municipal hands.

Every path runs through a machine

Every path so far runs through a machine. The premium bike, the shared scooter and the fleet e-bike all work because there is a device to bolt the radio onto and an owner to bill. The pedestrian has neither. Across European road deaths the pedestrian is the most exposed of the vulnerable users, and the one option that covers a person on foot is the phone in their pocket, which is the option 5GAA measured and found wanting. The societal case and the commercial case are pointing at different people, and the product that ships is going to follow the commercial one.

All of this has a limit. Canyon calls its bike production-ready, some coverage calls it a concept, and no connected micromobility is on the road at volume yet. The rider half has a plausible model that is still unfinished. The pedestrian half does not have even that.

For the beacon a connected cyclist or pedestrian broadcasts, the VAM, see the C-ITS message set tour. For why this whole category is turning into product at all, and the crash-test protocols pulling it, see the business model V2X was missing.