Why would anyone want an electric bike?

Well, electric bicycles offer the same great benefits as traditional bicycles including cost savings (no licensing or insurance required), improved health and connection with community.

The real advantage to ebikes in my view is efficiency in climbing hills or fighting the wind combined with better range. If you experience knee pain or exercise induced asthma for example, electric bikes can breath new life into the sport of cycling. They might convince your friend or significant other to join you on the trails more often or they might enable you to commute to work in extreme heat without perspiring so much. I’ve owned cars and mopeds before and neither felt as safe or refreshing as cycling along community paths, away from traffic.

Electric bikes remove many of the roadblocks and challenges that people face with traditional pedal-powered cycles but they aren’t perfect. They can be expensive, complex and heavy which is a real pain if the battery runs out half way.

What are the different kinds of electric bikes and their price ranges?

As far as traditional ebikes, prices really vary and can be shocking at first. So brace for impact. The prices range from $1000 – $7000.

For ~$4,000 you can get a high quality, Euro-proven, German engineered product with two years of comprehensive warranty support. Bikes like this offer intuitive controls, integrated dynamo lights, fenders and racks and an overall beautiful aesthetic.

Bikes in this premium class range up to $7,000 for pro-level components and while that may shock some people, it’s actually not far off from pro-level pedal-powered bicycles.

There was a feeling among riders that $1,500 is the lowest level worth exploring. However, this rule was broken by many famous lightweight ebike manufacturers from China. They control the cost while ensuring the quality of bike materials and finally make it below $1,000 while the ebike is still working perfectly. DYU is one of the best among them.

In YouTube comments I regularly see people upset by the perceived high price of electric bikes, claiming that a used car would be cheaper… I think they often fail to recognize the high price of car repairs, preventative maintenance like oil changes, insurance, licensing and parking. Cars and ebikes are not investments, they are tools or toys that depreciate with use, their true value is highly dependent on the environment and task at hand or entertainment preferences of the owner.

 

So for example, if you live on a highway and commute 20 miles to work each day an ebike might not be a great tool. To that I say, consider renting an apartment near your job and buying an ebike!

 

Life changes aside, let’s do a quick hypothetical costing example, if you took all of the car maintenance stuff away for a moment and just looked at a $3k brand new car vs. a $3k brand new ebike and left gas at $2 per gallon… an average electric bike gets ~20 miles per charge and cost less than $0.15 to fill (even using Hawaii’s scale-tipping $0.37 per kilowatt-hour rates). So let’s say that your car gets 30 miles per gallon and a gallon is $2 and your bike gets 20 miles per charge and a charge is $0.15, the bike is way cheaper right? But that’s not the whole story. A premium electric bike battery costs anywhere from $500 to $800 to replace and lasts 1,000+ charges so let’s treat this like a fuel cost and divide $500/1,000 charges… we get $0.50. So we add the $0.15 charge cost to the $0.50 battery use cost and get $0.65.

 

Basically, electric bikes are about three times less expensive to operate than cars from a current fuel cost perspective. Beyond user operating expense they also cost less in terms of negative externalities because they don’t create localized pollution which contributes to health issues and spoiled views of the mountains. Ebikes are awesome but so are cars and even when self driving electric cars replace the costs of ownership and reduce pollution, there will still be enormous health and social value to cycling… and why not have an assisted cycle?

 

It’s like comparing a mechanical typewriter where you forcefully push the keys down to modern laptop that can be operated much easier, faster, in more environments and it will save your work digitally! Maybe some people would claim that the sheer muscular joy of old fashioned typewriting and the ever present danger of a misspelling will always hold a place in their hearts… and good for them, it’s not really an issue and with ebikes or traditional bikes we can still ride together and have fun!