While electric vehicles are the future of the car industry, the best way to reduce pollution and ensure the health of our planet may be to look beyond cars entirely.
As an article in The Conversation explains, e-bikes and scooters are having a greater positive impact on our planet than electric cars. According to the article, there are currently 280 million e-bikes and scooters in use around the world - 10 times as many as the total number of four-wheeled electric vehicles.
Many of the riders of those two- or three-wheeled vehicles, the bulk of them in India and China, switched from inefficient, gas-powered motorcycles and mopeds, and the effect is already being felt.
The shift has reduced the global demand for oil by one million barrels a day, based on data published by BloombergNEF, or 1 percent of the world’s total oil demand.
That means that e-bikes and scooters are displacing four times as much demand for oil as electric cars at present, per a source in a podcast posted by Bloomberg.
Not only do e-bikes, which run on clean energy, cause far less harm to our planet and air pollution than gas-powered motorcycles and mopeds, but they can also save users a lot of money. The Conversation calculated that a 12 mile commute on an e-bike five days a week should cost you only $20 per year for charging.
While e-bikes took off in other parts of the world the US was slow to catch on, until the Covid pandemic, when streets were closed off, public transit numbers dropped and people were looking for alternative ways to get around. This, combined with city and state efforts to cut pollution from transportation to meet climate goals, has helped fuel an e-bike surge that has no sign of abating.
The market for e-bikes in the United States in 2023 is expected to be worth $2.59bn.