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The world's 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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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.
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.
Even owning two electric cars, I've only seen my electric bill increase by about 30%. I live in the United States FYI.
My e-bike battery is about 1-2% of the capacity of my car's battery.
yep my 750w/h battery gives me up to 200km range (real world uses usually about 130km) and costs less than a dollar to charge from empty to full