HOW TO BUY AN ELECTRIC BIKE
we here at The Verge love electric rideables. Hoverboards, skateboards, scooters, motorcycles, mopeds, unicycles, tricycles… you name it, we’ve ridden it. But electric bikes belong in a category of their own because they’re more than just a fun tech fad. They could actually be the future of transportation.To get more news about
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Of course, e-bikes aren’t new or without controversy. Some feel threatened by the rising popularity of e-bikes, as though standard bikes will suddenly vanish like the penny-farthing once everyone goes electric. Rest assured: e-bikes won’t make human-powered mobility obsolete. They may actually enhance it.
That said, there’s really no better time than right now to start shopping for an electric bike. The market is flooded with battery-powered bikes of all shapes and sizes. Boutique upstarts are jockeying for funding on Indiegogo and Kickstarter, while a handful of European companies are pushing the envelope with a variety of high-tech designs. Meanwhile, major bike manufacturers are finally waking up to the profit potential of e-bikes and are introducing their own lineups. Prices are fluctuating, but you can get a solidly built, reliable e-bike for less than $1,000.
As I said, e-bikes aren’t new; they’ve been around for decades. And if you live in China or Europe, e-bikes are probably already a way of life for you. But it wasn’t always that way.
For years, European e-bikes were used primarily by people 65 and over. For seniors who were already dependent on their bikes in places like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Berlin, e-bikes offered a way to continue riding for many more years. As such, e-bikes had the unfortunate reputation of being just for old people. E-bike manufacturers have been laboring to tamp down this perception, and it seems like it’s working. Young urban commuters in Europe are finally giving e-bikes their attention.
The US doesn’t have this perception problem, but it does have a car and infrastructure problem. As such, electric bikes are still pretty niche here: they only account for 4 percent of total bicycle sales. Compare that to more bike-friendly countries like the Netherlands where, last year, there were more e-bikes sold than regular bikes. Overall, experts predict that worldwide sales will hit $23.8 billion by 2025.
E-bikes represent a small portion of the overall bike market in the US, but bike riders are slowly starting to come around. Electric bike sales jumped by an incredible 91 percent from 2016 to 2017 and then another 72 percent from 2017 to 2018 to reach an impressive $143.4 million, according to the market research firm NPD Group. Sales of electric bikes in the US have grown more than eightfold since 2014.
The major brands are noticing. Waterloo, Wisconsin-based Trek introduced its first electric bike in 1997, but no one bought it. Now, the company is gearing up to introduce a whole lineup of high-tech powerful e-bikes.
“Where will e-bikes be in ten years if I had to wave my wand right now?” asked John Burke, CEO of Trek, in a recent interview with The Verge. “I’d say e-bikes would be at 35 percent. It’s going to be massive, because it’s such an amazing product.”
It took a long time to get to this point. One of the first patents for a battery-powered bicycle was registered in 1895 by an inventor named Ogden Bolton Jr. His idea was simple but quite interesting: a DC electric motor installed on a bike’s rear wheel hub. That motor could take up to 100 amps from a 10-volt battery, which was placed under the horizontal tube of the frame. There was no gearing system or pedals.
