The trade press has decided the e-bike had its moment and blew it. Warehouses in Europe are stacked with unsold inventory, shops are slashing prices, and PIERER Mobility, the Austrian group behind the Felt and Husqvarna bike brands, walked away from the bicycle business entirely. All true. The European industry body CONEBI logged combined bike and e-bike sales value down almost 9 percent in 2023, and Roland Berger found German-speaking makers sitting on more than seven months of stock by mid-2024. That is a hangover from the pandemic buying spree, not a verdict on the machine.
Here is the load-bearing number: even at the cautious end of the research, the typical e-bike replaces about a quarter of the car trips its owner used to drive. It is not a bicycle upgrade, it is a car substitute that happens to have pedals. How much it substitutes depends on where you look. A 2020 scoping review by Bourne and colleagues in the Journal of Transport and Health, pulling from 76 studies, found e-bikes replacing anywhere from a fifth to well over four-fifths of car trips; a separate meta-analysis by Bigazzi and Wong in 2020 put the median car substitution at roughly a quarter. The tidy "a third to a half" you see quoted is the optimistic end of a wide range, not settled fact.
The sales mix tells the same story more plainly. In Germany, e-bikes have outsold regular bicycles since 2023 and held at 53 percent of the market, per the industry association ZIV. In the Netherlands they were 56 percent of new bikes in 2023, according to RAI Vereniging and BOVAG. When half the bikes a serious cycling nation buys have a motor, the category is not a toy anymore.
What convinced me is what happens after someone switches. Norway's Institute of Transport Economics, in work led by Aslak Fyhri, tracked new e-bike owners and watched their daily cycling distance more than double, from about 5 kilometers to over 10, with their daily trip count up by roughly half. A related study from the same group found no offsetting drop in their other exercise.
Now the money, because that is where you actually live. The American Automobile Association (AAA) puts the cost of owning a new car in the US at $12,297 a year. An e-bike runs on the order of a thousand a year to keep on the road, a rough estimate rather than a surveyed figure. If it lets you shed a second car, the gap is thousands a year, though the exact number depends on whether you drop the car or just drive it less. On the climate line, a Portland State study modeled about 225 kilograms of CO2 saved per e-bike per year, but read that as one optimistic scenario, not a law of physics.
The two-year question, my usual test, favors it. Buy a mid-drive bike, the motor at the pedals rather than in a wheel hub, with a battery you can unclip and swap. Some models are app-locked and have bricked when their maker's servers shut down, so favor one that keeps working when a company pulls the plug. Those choices outlast the cheap bikes with the battery sealed into the frame, which age like a phone and die with it.
So skip the hype and the bust alike. If your daily trips are under 10 kilometers and you own a second car you resent, this is the rare gadget that pays you back. If you already bike everywhere, you are the person it helps least.
