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I’ve been seeing more and more electric bikes on the roads and sidewalks near my home. I’ve been a fan of electric bikes for years, because they help more people get outside and exercise. They’re also fun to use and extend the range of places people feel comfortable biking. However, the gold standard, the biggest aim of electric bikes, has to be replacing car trips with more bike trips. And that’s been my question — how much are ebike trips replacing car trips, versus how much are they replacing normal fully human-powered bike trips?
I have seen some people ebiking recently who were clearly doing so for utilitarian purposes — with a backpack of tennis rackets on their back, with groceries in the basket, or on other transportation trips. This brought that question above back to mind. With the electric bike market growing and growing, are people starting to use these ebikes for normal transportation more and more?
Another thing that got me thinking about this is that Lectric eBikes has pointed out that the Lectric XP 3.0 ebike is the 3rd best selling EV in the US, only trailing the Tesla Model Y and Tesla Model 3. Lectric also just launched the XP 4.0, its most advanced model yet, designed to build on that momentum. It’s actually a pet peeve of mine when people assume EV only stands for “electric car,” because it’s much broader than that and covers all kinds of electric vehicles. However, it was still a bit of an eye opener to see Lectric frame it like that — and rightly so! If the Lectric XP 3.0 ebike is the 3rd best selling EV model in the USA, it is. And many of those riders will be biking for transportation rather than taking a car.
Searching around, I can’t find great statistics definitively showing how much more people are using ebikes for transportation rather than using cars (or normal bikes, for that matter). Most of the research I’m finding is from several years ago, but much of the general narrative from the past few years is that people started biking, especially ebiking, much more during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, the point is that ebikes do enable more, further biking for a lot of people, which makes it more feasible for them to ditch the car and bike instead.
“Recent research from Portland State University found that e-bikes encourage new people to ride, gets those who already ride to ride more often, and people feel safer when riding e-bikes than standard bikes. E-bikes are replacing car trips as well. Results indicated that e-bike rides replaced 1,778 motor vehicle miles (average of 9.3 miles per trip) just within the last three trips reported by respondents,” PeopleForBikes writes.
Laka, a UK-based bike insurance company, writes that, “Among the major reasons for riding e-bikes are replacing car trips, improving fitness, and riding with less effort.“
The fact that the top reason for riding an ebike according to the data above is to replace car trips does tell us that ebikes are making a big difference. Here’s more on from eBicycles.com:
- Another study found that replacing car trips was mentioned by almost 65% of respondents as one of the main reasons for purchasing an electric bike.
- The same North American study of e-bike owners found that 60% of respondents felt safer riding an electric bike compared to a traditional bike and further 42% said that the e-bike had helped them avoid collisions.
- Similarly, an Australian study concluded that 60% of respondents to an online survey said that replacing some car trips was the main reason for purchasing an electric bike. This was followed by 49% of respondents who said that they were motivated by being able to ride with less effort.
So, yes, ebikes are actually replacing car trips. How much so depends on the data source, but it’s clear people are ebiking instead of driving thanks to the core benefits of an ebike. All those Lectric ebike sales aren’t in place of Tesla Model 3 sales or Toyota Corolla sales, but some of them are!
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