San Mateo >> E-bikes.
Kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Which is good marketing news for the electric-bike industr,y which is currently riding a wave of popularity, especially here in sunny, athletically minded California, and enjoying buzz like it got at this weekend’s Electric Bike Expo in San Mateo.
“I think people would be surprised to see how much fun they are to ride,” said Louisa Gillett of Hillsborough who, along with her husband and 3-year-old daughter Helena, did exactly that on Sunday morning, test-driving some of the premier and emerging electric bike brands that were available for a spin around the enclosed 25,000-square-foot loop. “The last time I rode one was about five years ago and they’ve changed so much. They’re much more stylish; the older ones felt clunky and heavier.”
Her daughter agreed: “Good,” Helena said of her ride. “It was fast.”
E-bikes are on a roll, says event spokeswoman Melissa Balmer, founder-director of PedalLove.org, which touts bicycling as improving personal health and well-being, especially for women. She says consumers are starting to discover the joys of electric bikes. Most are pedal-assisted which means the rider keeps pumping but gets a boost from the small electric rechargeable motor attached to the frame.
“E-bikes are already huge in Europe and now for a lot of people, especially in Southern California and here in Silicon Valley, they’re catching on as a means of transportation,” says Balmer. “E-bikes are a big hit with the tech community, which is also coming up with new makes and models all the time, as well as baby boomers who want to have that healthy heart.”
The e-bike is marketed as a way for people to get some exercise and fresh air while not necessarily breaking a sweat. It’s simple: You get on and start pedaling, and the motor — depending on the power level you’ve set on the handlebar-mounted control display — kicks in. Riding, say a 15-mile commute to work on an electric bike, is a lot less sweaty or exhausting than doing it on a traditional bike, says Joe Witherspoon, owner of Motostrano in Redwood City and San Francisco, one of the Bay Area’s largest e-bike dealers.
“Let’s put it this way: You can actually walk after a three-hour ride on an e-bike.”
As a 14-year veteran in the Bay Area’s bicycle business, Witherspoon has seen an incredible growth in consumer interest in e-bikes the past few years. “Our business in the past five years has gone from e-bikes being 10 percent of what we sell to now closer to 90 percent,” he said. “We’ve opened a second store in San Francisco because the demand is enormous.”
Industry surveys show e-bike sales in the United States, which lags behind Europe and Asia, continue to climb year by year and a 2016 report from Navigant Research suggested that by 2025, e-bike sales could lead to annual revenues of $24.3 billion globally.
Witherspoon said “guys are selling their dirt bikes and their Harleys and buying electric bikes so they can ride with their wives and their kids and go off-road,” he said. “A lot of them look at these things as their retirement.”
E-bikes are defined by the Consumer Product Safety Commission as “a two-or three-wheeled vehicle with fully operable pedals and an electric motor of less than 750 watts (1 h.p.)” and a maximum road speed of 20 mph. Individual states, however, are free to craft their own laws on such as things as top speeds. E-bike enthusiasts point out that the nation’s patchwork quilt of varying regulations on e-bikes is a problem. Like California, about 20 states have legislation that defines an e-bike as a bicycle, doesn’t require licensing and allows e-bikes to use bike lanes. In other states, however, even low-speed e-bikes are lumped in with motorcycles and/or require a license or a specific registration.
California is a leader in the field and, says Balmer, and “has passed a law that other states like Utah have picked up. California is really showing leadership and we now have the majority of the country’s e-bike manufacturers, split evenly between Orange County and Silicon Valley.”
One of those local manufacturers, Van Nguyen of Tempo Electric Bikes in San Jose, was on hand for the expo, inviting attendees to try her bikes, which range in price from $4,500 to $6,000, approximately in the middle of the e-bike price range. Founded in 2015, her six-person company manufactures two models and “they’re perfect for people looking for alternative transportation and who want to stop using their car so much.”
That draw is a big one in the traffic-snarled Bay Area where an e-bike could turn an hourlong commute up Highway 101 into a 15-minute jaunt along an adjacent bicycle trail.
“We’ve doubled our sales in the past two years,” says Nguyen, who rides her e-bike in heels. “I think the industry needs to do more education and raise awareness around e-bikes and we’re doing that with this weekend’s expo. We feel the breakthrough for the industry will happen when the average consumer realizes how easy these bikes are to ride and then you’ll have more and more people wanting to do it instead of driving.”
