I think it is a weirdly important time to imagine the future of electric bicycles.
We like to imagine hover cars, spaceships, jet packs blah blah blah… what about a far future e-bike that can be peddled by a person, is light enough to pick up and carry a reasonable distance and also has a battery big enough to go 1000 miles on a charge? An assumption of almost every sci-fi is that humans figure out how to make immensely powerful engines and store huge amounts of energy in small devices and yet the most obvious application, electric bicycles, is always ignored.
Landing on an alien planet with a group of people and need to make a camp? Make dirt biking trails and boom you have a transportation system that is extremely low maintenance and simple to maintain. Is there some kind of obstacle like a river? Bicycles are easy to carry to the other side of the obstacle were you can get back on.
Are we in a far future post apocalypse but with advanced technology? Literally everybody is going to be riding around electric bicycles.
What makes electric bicycles such a weirdly invisible technology in media is they don’t seem futuristic like a segway or electric unicycle. They just look like a gravel bicycle with a battery strapped to them… but that is what makes the electric bicycle paradoxically such a sure bet for being used absolutely everywhere in the future no matter which direction things go. We already perfected the mountain bike design, the road bike design, the gravel bicycle design…. it’s like we spent the 20th century developing the perfect chassis for an electric motor and battery meant to transport a single person and some cargo and now we are finally getting around to dropping the electric motor and battery in.
Less futuristic cities with flying car traffic, more solar punk futures with electric bicycles having replaced the vast majority of personal transit on lightly developed planets, large space stations ships and…. just about everywhere else too.
I mean if course they’re worse than regular bikes, but that’s not really the point is it?
Apparently a fancy lightweight aluminium frame regular bike can be worse in terms of resources used for producing it, compared to a regular ebike with a steel frame. I guess this also counts for titanium and carbon-fiber frames.
I mean, i guess, but there are aluminium, carbon and titanium ebikes too.
I like that ebikes get people out of their cars, and they also get a whole different demographic riding, which in turn - at least i have the hope - will lead to way broader parts of society wanting better infra.
