Google's bicycles -- 1,100 multi-colored Gbikes its employees use to get around the California campus -- regularly go missing, so the search company is resorting to technology to "recycle" its rolling stock.
Google maintains the fleet of Gbikes for employees to use for free on the spawling campus but, according to The Wall Street Journal, 100 to 250 of them go missing each week.
The culprits? Mostly residents of Mountain View, which Google has adopted as its home base.
Sharon Veach, a 68-year-old resident, admits she borrows a bike several times a week to ride home from her job at Google’s rival, Oracle Corp.
In fact, even Mountain View’s mayor, Ken Rosenberg, has admitted to borrowing a Gbike to go see a movie once.
Google now is trying to keep track of its bikes by adding GPS devices and looking into fitting smart locks that can only be opened via employee’s phones, according to EnGadget.
About a third of the company’s fleet of Gbikes have been installed with trackers and Google has been astounded to discover that some of the bicycles have made it as far away as Alaska and Mexico.
The company has established a team of 30 Google contractors who use five vans to retrieve Gbikes across the region, The Wall Street Journal said.
According to Wired, Google takes cycling very seriously and there’s a noticeable bike culture at Google headquarters. More than seven percent of employees ride bikes to work each day.
Colin Heyne, deputy director of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, said Google was “certainly unique in their commitment to bicycling.”
Brendon Harrington, Google’s transportation operations manager, said per the Wire that the corporation was “spread out in a number of different buildings, and so to foster that collaboration in the most efficient way possible, the bikes really became a way to do that.”
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.