As much as I like ebikes, I feel the only innovation this one provides would be in exploiting some aspects unique to the particular market - not to say that's a bad thing, far from it but rather that I think they've seen an opportunity to fill a demand, at least presenting a product in a reasonable price range for a reasonable amount...
...admittedly "reasonable" is a highly comparative term, subject to bias & whim - perhaps "competitive" would be less personal, but that infers uniformity in a product group that really has little to none, which is part of the problem.
Even aside from clearly inflated mark-up rates associated with fashionable branding, many of the commercially available ebikes carry a large overhead in R&D, each claiming innovations & design uniquely their own, each having just enough customizations to task that makes that true, for the most part.
Thing is, we're not being presented with innovative new technology for the most part - the basics of electric transportation, it's strengths & weakness have been long understood with the stumbling point being batteries, specifically range, weight & reserve. What's being offered by the ebike market by in large is endless recombinations of existing tech with whatever lithium battery variation they can fit in a spiffy, unobtrusive case.
If we remove the brand variations, this company's proprietary mid-drive upper mount from that one's mid-drive lower mount vs this other retailer's integral crankset drive - if we subtract the dizzying array of slightly different hub drive housings we're left with a plainly similar preformance envelope that's stunningly predictable. One of electric's charms would be the ease in which possible preformance can be determined, it's volts watts & amp hours regardless of what brand offers it.
So why then the pricing? If any one of us can slap together a 30/30 ebike for about a grand (30mph for 30mi/aprox 1000w/48v/15ah LiFePO4) including the bike - why do so many commercially offered ebikes cost so much more? We're not manufacturers, we don't get bulk discounts, volume pricing or benefit from an assembly line & while yes all of that costs to start up the larger brands absorb those start up costs until the product is profitable, the smaller ones through kickstarter campaigns like the above.
What we're left with seems to me a market dominated by fashion, it's not what the ebike can actually do or what it may be worth practically - but that you can say you have the latest technology in ebike, that yours has the latest almost-inconsequential doodad that makes it special, that having an electric bike is worth any price but actually needing one isn't a consideration.
Essentially it's being treated as a fad market by the majority of retailers with it's correspondingly disproportionate price mark up, with similar results as any other... a bunch of slightly different shiny toys that cost far more then they return, likely to become obsolete & disappear as quickly as they appeared. Electric vehicles with their Achilles heel of range/reserve have been subject to this marketing technique for almost the past hundred years with surprisingly little variation considering.
So what so different about the 'Storm'? The first, not so different but worth mention - the highly effective advertising technique of offering product at a seeming loss (likely at cost) to get started, then (& this the unique bit) offering a "reasonable" mark up on a not particularly special product.
At a stated MSRP of $1299 for "36v/10ah" lithium hub drive on a basic fat bike it is pretty much the essential "generic" ebike any one of us could build & profitably mark up for retail at that price - which makes it not innovative or a great deal, but it's not a rip off either.
It's "just" a decent entry level ebike at a practical cost, which with some exception unheard of in the market. This I think is the root cause of it's popularity and a noteworthy change, that even if many folks are signing up just so they can say they've got an ebike - they're finally doing so because they can afford it without getting their hands dirty.