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. I could have said that in a lot fewer words. Actually, I just did.
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.
I need to kill an elephant. What should I drive?
Your ancestors hunted the mammoth on foot with a rock tied to a stick. Use that.
Yeah but they’re all dead, what does that say about their tactics?
I mean, they hunted mammoths to extinction so, pretty fucking effective lol
I mean, we’re here, which means someone must have killed a mammoth.
But really they didn’t hunt them with rocks on sticks. They chased them toward a cliff with their friends waiting at the bottom to dispatch any that survived the fall. This is why there’s no more mammoths.
Ah, the Tremors method.
We didn’t just kill a mammoth, we killed all the mammoths.
Tge mammoths are all dead too so they were effective.
They weren’t very good at living for eternity? And really, who would want to?
If you’re looking for a magic bullet, you will probably need it in a few different calibers.
That’s a clever way to put it and I like it
Out of your seven motorcycles, which one is used for which purpose?
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.
I love the little RV! Used to have a GSF 400. Those small suzukis are so fun
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…
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.
Miles per gallon energy? What’s that abbreviation?
The E is for Equivalent. It’s how “fuel” efficiency is discussed when referring to non liquid fuel vehicles.
Gotcha, thanks.
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?
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.
Don’t tell them. Once you start looking for exceptions to “use metric for everything”, you’ll find one in every country, and people get really angry when you point this out. As if not being 100% metric is some kind of moral failing.
Car tire sizing is a bizarre, design-by-committee thing, though. Diameter is in inches, width is in mm, and sidewall width is a percentage of the width. Why?
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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.
Seems like a no brainer! And especially useful in dense cities where you don’t want to be stuck idling in a car.
When I was younger and more invincible around 2005, I bought one of these crappy Ebay engine kits for a bicycle. One thing I noticed is that it wasn’t really any slower from home to work than a car, because I could go around traffic. An E-bike would have been great. A lot of them get around on 500 watt or 750 watt motors, which is considerably smaller than an electric car’s motor.
I’d have one now, but it’s hard to ride one when I have to carry a kid with me most places.
Love to see this!
On a related note: Feel free to stop by !micromobility@lemmy.world
Watched a YouTube about electric vs gas scooters in Taiwan 🇹🇼. Apparently it’s like 6 scooters for every 10 people, crazy!
But the uptake of electric scooters wasn’t as much as they thought, but a lot of complaints were around “cost”, “parking” and "weight,
Sounds like an electric bicycle would solve all those issues over an electric scooter 🛵
Especially for the cheaper high 2 wheel nations, like Vietnam or India.
Just have to pedal a bit! 😉
If you’re not that wealthy you might be able to afford a car but not want to buy a car and an expensive e-bike. A car is useful for short distance trips in bad weather, longer trips that might not be the majority of your travelling, and transporting stuff that won’t fit on a moped (or an e-bike unless you get a trailer… or bigger stuff than that.) In that case you’re going to buy the one tool that covers your needs.
On the other hand, a car has far greater maintenance costs. The car has license, insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, etc., whereas an ebike is basically free in comparison. Electricity to power an ebike is pennies, and maintainance is a few basic tools and a new tire or inner tube on occasion.
With all the money saved, you can just rent a car for the handful of days the ebike genuinely is not sufficient.
Electricity to power an ebike is pennies
This isn’t even an exaggeration imo - I loaned an ebike for a month and didn’t notice any change in my electric bill at all, despite racking up around 100mi on it
Well, here’s some math on that. The battery pack I have in my kit-built electric bicycle has roughly 624 watt-hours in it, and being generous/lazy and not accounting for conversion and charging losses, thus costs about $0.049 to charge from zero to full (which I never do since I don’t run it flat) at my current grid rate of $0.0789/kWh. That is, 4.9 cents. Slightly less than a nickel.
It’ll propel my ass (along with the rest of me, usually) about 18 miles without pedaling, albeit not any faster than about 25 MPH.
Yeah, which is why it’s the reasonably wealthy people who have cars and not bikes. But that includes almost everyone in developed countries.
E-bikes are kind of a red herring here anyway; there’s little practical use-case for them that isn’t already covered by unpowered bicycles unless you live somewhere very hilly. (Even in moderately hilly places you get used to hills quite quickly). It’s not unreasonable to do a shopping run on a bike as long as the shop isn’t far away… But if it is, an e-bike won’t help you get there in a reasonable length of time.
E-bikes are kind of a red herring here anyway; there’s little practical use-case for them that isn’t already covered by unpowered bicycles unless you live somewhere very hilly.
Even in a place that isn’t very hilly, an e-bike could make the difference between arriving to work sweaty or not, which can easily mean the difference between biking or not. The extra help also expands the available user base to those who are less fit, and expands the range of what is doable for any given person. And, again, I want to emphasize the sweat difference, which also ties back into range (how far can you bike on a regular bike versus an e-bike without breaking a sweat?)
Exactly. I rode an ebike one summer to commute to an internship. The sweat factor alone meant I never would have done that by regular bike, as I would’ve arrived at the office sweating like a pig.
What if you need to move? You better just buy a whole cargo truck in case you need it.
Unsurprisingly there is a cost-benefit analysis going on. How often do people use their cars to do something that would be difficult by e-bike? For many of them, quite often. How often would people get use out of a cargo truck that they can’t use their car for? Almost never.
Sure, some people have cars unnecessarily. Many people could use and afford a bike but don’t have/use one. But there’s an obvious behaviour going on here which means that electric cars are important.
How often do people use their cars to do something that would be difficult by e-bike?
Almost never.
Really? Average commute distance in the USA and in the UK is 20 miles each way, which is going to be about 1h20 on an e-bike going 15mph. I would imagine that millions of people buy groceries regularly that is too bulky to transport by bike without a trailer, and I think that if you do allow a trailer, millions of people are still transporting bulky items like flat pack furniture, appliances, waste etc several times a year.
All of that amounts to more frequently than “almost never”.
Why does the bike get the lousy speed limit, a car going 15mph will take just as long.
Because in my country they are limited to 15mph by law. In the USA they are limited to 20mph, which would be 20 minutes faster, and still much longer than the average American’s commute, which is 27 minutes. In the context of the original post, there will still be many people whose commutes have stretches with much higher speeds possible, for whom the difference would be even greater, so even there “almost never” is clearly wrong.
Maybe there are people advocating for electric motorbikes, rather than electrically supported push bikes, though I don’t see them. But of course the faster you go on any kind of bike the more dangerous it is - riding an ordinary bike is pretty safe, and the exercise benefits mean it’s overall good for public health. But encouraging more people onto motorbikes, even zero-emission ones, could easily be a public health disaster due to the inevitable increase in fatal accidents. Cars are much safer per mile travelled, which again goes to the above context.
Oil, and coal, and steel, and lithium. Etc.
