E-bikes in China

E-bikes in China

Just found this interesting post on how big electric bicycles are becoming in China. Some interesting observations to be found here.

It’s kind of like when you sit down on the sidewalk in summertime and start staring at the ground, first you see one ant… then a couple more… then you realize the whole ground is swarming with bugs. That’s how electric bikes are in China. Once I started noticing them, I noticed that they’re everywhere and the numbers are growing fast. In 2000, 330,000 were sold in all of China. By 2005, they were selling 10 million a year.Being a graduate student researcher, it’s my job to ask questions that will keep me in school a little while longer (joke^_^), so I starting inquiring into WHY this is such a big phenomenon in China, while in the rest of the developed world, the car is the mode of choice. Well the first obvious reason is that these bikes and the fuel they consumer are dirt cheap. You can buy one for the price of an average cell phone here ($100-$250 USD), and to charge the battery for a month's worth of commuting (3-40 km/day) is a whopping $1.25. Another big reason is that cities have started banning gas powered scooters and motorcycles in some city centers to reduce air pollution. Ebikes came in to fill the void. Another reason is the strong history of bicycle use in China. China has an estimated 450 million bicycles, and most people (besides the extremely poor) have at some point in there life used a bike to go to work or school.