E-bikes are outselling EVs. Automologist, MAC, has the details.
There is a joke about owners of electric bikes: How do you know if someone has an electric bike? They’ll tell you! Truth be told, the early adopters of e-bikes tend to wax lyrical about the lifestyle choice they had made and the truth is they may be right. E-bikes are outselling EVs at a rate of two-to-one in Americaland, and in doing so, are starting to transform urban transportation.
A report I read in the New York Times says that about half a million e-bikes were purchased in 2020 compared to less than half that number of EVs purchased in the same period. This is of course quite a game-changer when it comes to urban infrastructure, particularly when town planners are wrestling with the requirements of future sustainable transportation.
In the US, e-bikes have already been incorporated into infrastructure projects, particularly in New York, which was an early adopter of bike-sharing schemes (rent-a-bike) that became possible as the Li-ion batteries used in the bikes became small enough and cheap enough. These schemes allowed riders to experience an e-bike without having to commit and are seen to have caused a lot of people to get the ‘cycling bug’. The US Senate is also mulling an idea to give a tax credit for anyone who buys an e-bike, which will probably spur sales on even more.
Year on year, sales of e-bikes shot up by more than 145%, no doubt spurred on by that pesky virus from Wuhan (aka Covid-19). For the same period, normal bikes had less than half of the sales growth. Now, here is the thing: Deloitte is projecting that between 2020 and 2023, there will be total sales of 130 million e-bikes worldwide.
It is not all plain sailing in the world of e-bikes, though. Lyft, a competitor to Uber, can’t seem to keep their e-bikes on the roads. Back in April in San Francisco, they were forced to take their bikes off the road when the overly sensitive braking systems were throwing riders over the handlebars. Now, after just a few short weeks of having the bikes back on the streets, they are again being pulled due to the numerous bikes having spontaneously combusting. Oops.
