TL;DR: Due to being smaller and lighter, electric bikes and mopeds require significantly less energy to move themselves around than an electric car. The article starts with a headline about “oil demand” but then spends much of the rest of its length harping on consumer monetary costs instead.
Also, in SE Asia and other places where the primary mode of transport is a small motorbike, as it happens these small motorbikes actually pollute a lot for their displacement due to having basic uncomplicated engines, often not running very well, and lousy or absent emissions controls. ICE vehicles are also at their worst fuel consumption/distance traveled ratio when they’re idling or crawling around urban areas at low speed. Replacing these with electric versions just makes sense.
Full disclosure: I own a gas guzzling truck, a fuel efficient car, seven motorcycles, and an electric bicycle. I use different tools for different jobs, as appropriate. If you’re looking for a magic bullet, you will probably need it in a few different calibers.
Your ancestors hunted the mammoth on foot with a rock tied to a stick. Use that.
I’ll bet you weren’t expecting to get an actual answer to this, but I’m going to give you one. (Spoiler: None of them are a Harley.)
First, I do use all of my bikes for commuting (the electric bicycle often, too, when the fancy strikes me) and usually ride a different one each day. They all get better mileage than my car and certainly better than my truck.
KLR650: Long distance touring and adventure rides, motocamping, hauling comically large objects that should not be transported by motorcycle.
Bashan BSR-250/Enforcer: I ostensibly bought this for my nephew to ride on adventure trips with me, but I also use it for tooling around town, light duty shopping, etc.
Honda VT750C/Shadow A.C.E.: Two up riding and touring, also good for making lots of obnoxious noise. My wife likes the passenger seat and sissy bar. Goes faster than the Vanvan, even with two people on it for long trips.
Yamha FZ6R: Dicking around on twisty roads. Irritating Tesla/M3/AMG/Corvette owners.
Orion/Nicot RXB250L: Playing in the dirt, at the motocross track, off road, doing wheelies, and narrow technical trails I probably shouldn’t try to manhandle the KLR down.
Honda CH50/Metropolitan: In town errands, shopping trips. It achieves ludicrous fuel economy and you can fit a lot of stuff under the seat. My wife rides this one more than I do.
Suzuki RV200/Vanvan: Bought for my wife to learn how to ride a “real” motorcycle, i.e. with a clutch and gears. She uses it for motocamping trips.
Relevant username, lol.
I used to have a DR650, and used it much like your KLR. It was getting tothe point where I had to fix it all the time, I had another weird little bike that I couldn’t get parts for which also needed help… I ended up selling both and buying one bike that I could just ride. I love riding, and love different bikes for different things, but I don’t like maintaining a fleet of stuff, keeping tags up to date on a fleet of bikes, so…
Zlich. Because – stay with me here – I can only operate one of them at a time.
“BuT tHe PrOdUcTiOn ImPacT!!!”
I bought all but two of them used. That ship sailed before I even swung a leg over.
This article is vastly understating the potential benefits of e-bikes. Like-for-like replacements for car trips are only the tip of the iceberg; the real benefit of e-bikes is that the more people that use them, the less car parking we need. That means we can put back all those buildings we destroyed when we razed our cities for the car.
Don’t forget you can ride a mile or two to the train station and get around like that.
Even if you have a bike in town and one at home. Two bikes are cheaper than 1 car and more space efficient.
If everyone had an ebike, getting on and off the train would be a complete pain in the ass. I guess if there were lock boxes it might be OK, but hundreds of people trying to get their bike on a train would be a nightmare
Many urban-suburban trains, and even some regional trains, have entire cars dedicated for bicycles, with no (or only few) seats. This is very scalable on multiple scales, when the demand is growing:
- Adding more bicycle cars to existing bike-friendly trains 🏩🚞🚃🚃🚃🚃🏫
- Adding more bike-friendly trains to existing lines 🚆🚆🚉🚊🚇🚇
- Building new well-placed bike-friendly stations on existing lines 🏢🏪🚵♂️🚵♀️🚈
- Adding more passenger railway lines to existing rail networks. 🛤️🛤️🛤️🛤️🛤️
I did the math once for my own commute, on my e-bike and with my electric car, and found that while the electric car uses only 20% of the energy that an average gas-powered car would, the bike uses just 1%. My bike, on my route (both directions averaged together) got 2,200 mpge.
Just another example of how Americans will use anything but metric (we do use metric sometimes, I know, it’s just a meme). We could easily measure it in Wh/km, but then we would also have to change how we measure gasoline cars if we want people to make direct comparisons. But, since we sell gas by the gallon, we would also have to change how gas is sold. When the EPA first came up with mpge I thought it was stupid (we don’t buy electricity by the gallon!), but I’ve come around to the convenience of being able to easily compare the two types of fuel. The EPA assumes 1 gallon of gas to contain 33.7 kWh of energy.
Maybe we should get everyone to switch to Joules for measuring, buying, and selling gasoline and electricity?
It’s a pretty flawed comparison, though. It assumes a certain amount of fossil fuels being burned at the power plant that’s feeding your electric car. That’s a number that varies a lot between regions, and is bound to change as more and more renewables are spun up. Putting solar panels on your home throws the whole comparison out. It’s nearly useless.
To be fair, even in metric countries in Europe, they use imperial occasionally. This is the case for wheel sizes and display sizes, both usually measured in inches.
The E is for Equivalent. It’s how “fuel” efficiency is discussed when referring to non liquid fuel vehicles.
Yup. There’s a Wikipedia page listing all the modes of transportation and their efficiency. Electric bikes are just about the most energy efficient way to transport humans.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
My only problem with ebikes is there’s no chance in hell I’m consistently driving on the road with cars.
With how convenient these are, I hope there’s more push to add protected bike lanes in road heavy places to increase adoption.
To clarify - I’m not going on the road in anything but a car
Protected lanes or paths only for me on any form of bike/scooter
So you are afraid of cars so you take your own car… I fully understand that but it is all the problem.
We have to constantly remind drivers that road are for everyone, and not only to go full speed.
Here they painted bikes on roads and put speed limit at 30kmh so it is better, drivers seems more conscious, but we still see too much distracted people that don’t realize they can easily kill someone just by not looking constantly at the road.
Looks like your problem is not with ebikes, but your city’s infrastructure.
Whaaaaat? You mean electric last-mile micromobility cuts down on emissions in a significant way, just like people had been saying for years? Who would have thought?
Car-brain finds small electric vehicles are more efficient, in shocking study.
… but will instantly fabricate reasons why the car will be needed at least 5 times a day anyway.
