Electric bikes aren't always a luxury: they're often a better deal than used cars

A high quality electric bike often stretches your dollar further than a old used car

Source:Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-black-suit-jacket-smiling-3778069/

Some of you might be interested in electric bikes but have several concerns keeping you from embracing this lifestyle. In the next couple of entries, I’ll discuss several concerns you might have and why electric bikes might be suitable for you.

In this first article, I’ll talk about what I’ve heard before when I told people about my electric bike: the price tag.

Price

There’s no getting around it: electric bikes are expensive. Not everyone has a couple hundred or thousands to drop on a fancy new bike. However, while the price of electric bikes isn’t low, it’s the step after seeing the price tag that matters more.

After seeing the price tag, you might ask: am I going to spend upwards of a couple of hundred to a few thousand dollars to indulge myself as a parent?

Electric bikes are nice, but they’re a luxury: I could use them for groceries, rent, or even for buying a car. Of course, I can’t deny that feeding yourself and paying rent are essential, but I’d argue that, for many people, buying an electric bike might be a better purchase than a car at that price point.

To explain that, let me tell you about my first car and a scenario many of you have probably experienced.

The first car that I ever had was a 1996 Toyota RAV4. It was a green manual two-door car, a hand-me-down that had belonged to my family for years.

But I didn’t get that car in the 90s: I first received it in 2012. That’s right: my first car was a 15-year-old car with nearly 100,000 miles on it from my family. Perhaps your first car was in better shape, as a high schooler or in your 20s, but for most of you, your first car was probably a slightly old and used car.

I loved that car and had many great memories of driving it for six years before it finally crapped out on me. But now that I have a little distance from it, I realize it cost me a ton. If everything was perfectly maintained, it might have been worth $2000 when I got it. When I sold it to the junkyard, I got $200. But that’s hardly the only expense I had with it.

I had to replace the clutch and brake pedals, car windows, trunk panels, turn signals, not to mention the transmission. I had to always buy high-mileage oil, pay to meet state emissions, buy premium car insurance, and more. And I’m sure I’m not alone.

The typical experience for many first-time car owners in the US is the same: you buy a slightly older car, checking to ensure there aren’t any major car problems. If you’re lucky, you can mostly avoid making monthly car payments on it (but many aren’t). But even if that’s the case, you can never fully pay it off in some regard.

Whether it’s buying gas, paying for insurance, state taxes, or vehicle maintenance, you will never own a car that doesn’t need some money put into it. Oftentimes, it’s not a particularly high-quality car, and many people don’t even like driving that much. There tends to be only one main reason that many people need a car in the first place: you need one to get to work (or school) by the highway.

You might need a used car if you need to drive on the highway to get to work, school, or any other place you go dail

y. But what if that wasn’t the case?

What if your work (or school) was 20 minutes or less away from you with non-highway roads (or you worked from home)? Then, you could get a much better deal with electric bikes. To explain this, let’s see what you could get for the same price as my 1996 Toyota Rav 4 (~$2,000 on a good day).

You could get a mid-range, top-quality electric bike, like the Radwagon 4 that I own. It has a 20 MPH (25 MPH with basic modification) top speed, ~50-mile range on a battery charge, and several valuable features.

Yes, it’s expensive, but in most ways, it’s a better deal than my Toyota Rav4. Once I bought it, I only spent additional money on accessories (like turn signals and child seats) and one maintenance visit. Likely, I won’t need another maintenance visit for a long while (probably next spring).

And it gets me most of the way to where I want to go. Yes, I can’t take road trips on this, and I can’t go on highways or other busy roads. But I’m not going on road trips every other day: most of the time, I’m spending it getting groceries, dropping my kid off at daycare, and other short trips.

I know that I’m incredibly fortunate enough to be able to work from home and that electric bikes won’t work for those that have long highway commutes. But I’ve often found that most of us are somewhere in between, so electric bikes could be a car replacement.

But you don’t even need to save up thousands of dollars to have a shot at riding electric bikes: there has been an explosion of affordable electric bikes (around $500-$1000) due to the pandemic. There was a ton of increased demand for services like UberEats, Amazon, DoorDash, and more throughout the past two years. As a result, many people started to work as delivery couriers, and many chose electric bikes to get around cheaply and quickly.

This is not to mention that many companies like UberEats even provide e-bikes to help couriers deliver packages. Amazon, as well, has started to deliver packages by cargo e-bike in places like the UK.

These bikes can also be adapted to hold your children for $100-200. And that’s not even mentioning other alternatives, such as using an electric bike conversion kit to convert an existing bike you might have. However, these run the risk of running into quality issues, which I’ll discuss in the future.

So for many of you, electric bikes might be less of an expensive hobby and more of an alternative, better mode of transportation.

Electric bikes offer much better value if you don’t drive far for work.

If you don’t have the money to afford a $10,000-20,000+ car upfront, you’re often forced into a crappy monetary situation when buying your first car.

Between expensive monthly car payments, maintenance costs, and more, you often spend much more than you realize. AAA estimates that the average cost of car ownership can be more than $10,000 a year.

So if you only have $500-2,000 to spend on transportation, it’s often a better idea to buy an electric bike rather than a cheap, old, used car. You’re less likely to run into expensive surprises in the future, and you can buy something high quality and do something better for yourself and society.

But you might be asking yourself, how can I begin to use my electric bike if there aren’t any bike paths for me to ride on? That’s what I’ll be talking about in the next section.

Interested in Electric bikes and supporting me? I have a referral link that will save you $50 on the purchase of RadPowerBikes (with no additional cost).