I'm a massive fan of them, but I'm not sure they'll be as practical in the UK.
This was my bike 5 years ago in China, which at the time was top of the range and cost about £1.5k. More basic moped style e-bikes started at around £300.
I think these new designs by companies like Kawasaki are the result of their initial R&D rather than a viable alternative to their performance motorbikes.
A few points:
My bike would charge overnight from a regular plug socket once every 3 or 4 days, and this would be enough to get me the 10km to and from work each day.
You have 3 speed settings with high performance, regular and energy saving. As the battery reaches the final 20% you can feel the bikes top speed falling, so unless you're an idiot you don't run out of juice in the same way a good driver rarely runs out of petrol.
Mine only had a top speed of about 50mph but with performance setting and instant acceleration it was the fastest thing on the road for inner city driving.
I don't think the UK is the right market for them though. Pretty much every Chinese city has a series of ring roads and a grid system with separate bus and bike lanes. There's quite a laissez-faire attitude about whether you ride your ebike on the roads or bike lanes.
In England they'd have to classify ebikes as road going vehicles prohibited from A roads and above, or ban them from the road entirely which puts pedestrians at risk.
Most people in Chinese cities live in high rise apartments with parking garages underneath. These have spaces for ebikes and you pay an old caretaker £5 a month to keep your bike safe and charging overnight.
Most offices, shopping malls, restaurants have a similar set up. You keep the charger inside the bike and anywhere you park up, whack it on charge.
I think ebikes are going to be great for the developing world and areas with delicate eco systems. One example is Borocay in the Philippines. Beautiful, bounty commercial style island that got increasingly polluted due to motorbike taxis ferrying around tourists. Certain parts of Bali and Thailand have the same issue.
The
president Duterte closed Borocay for a couple of years to clean things up, and when he reopened, only electric vehicles were allowed on the island.
So while EV's obviously have issues with carbon footprint, using them in polluted cities instead of tuktuks and taxis would vastly improve the air quality.
Cairo, Lahore, Bangkok, Manila, Tokyo, Delhi...even LA are where I think the market is.
I could also see Dubai and UAE making all courier bikes and taxi's EV's in the next couple of years...as the vehicles aren't owned by the drivers.
