Valerie Gaino was looking for a way to rely less on her car, and started mulling the possibility of a motorcycle, but nixed the idea: “I was worried about being on the highway and risking my life,” she says.
She wound up buying an e-bike for $1,600 about a month ago, ordering it directly from the Seattle manufacturer, Rad Power Bikes, and financing it over a year. Since then, she’s been commuting about 20 miles round-trip every day, barely breaking a sweat.
Her 7-year-old and 9-year-old kids don their backpacks and perch on the back rack. Gaino drops them off at school via bike, then heads to Chartwell School in Seaside where she teaches. “I just have to do very light pedaling until I get close to Fort Ord and have to climb the hill,” she says. She gets 20-40 miles on one charge, depending on how much weight she’s carrying and how windy it is.
“Riding the e-bike sometimes seems like it’s cheating, but I keep telling myself I’m replacing my car, not my bike,” Gaino adds.
The first e-bike was invented about 27 years ago in Switzerland, but until about five years ago, batteries were too bulky and heavy to be practical for most cyclists, according to Claudia Wasko, a spokesperson for Bosch eBike Systems. E-bikes appear to be posied for a boom, with more than 2 million sold worldwide last year, and one in five bikes sold in Germany and the Netherlands – two cycling-friendly countries – are electric. (In the U.S., it’s fewer than one in 10.)
“In the next few years, we expect one in every four or even three bikes sold in the EU will be electric,” Wasko writes by email. “In the U.S., we are five to 10 years behind. One reason for this is bicycle infrastructure in our cities lags far behind Europe.”
Infrastructure aside, Wasko projects the bikes themselves are only going to get more user-friendly: Think automatic gear shifting, anti-theft capabilities and live mapping. (And cost: Bosch’s commuter e-bikes start at about $2,400.)
Bosch will be at Sea Otter Classic this weekend showing off its latest models, which charge fully in under four hours by plugging into a standard outlet.
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