E-bikes will kill the bike industry as we know it

 We're witnessing the beginning of an evolutionary shift in the bike industry and in popular bike usage. Where people used to talk about the dangers of riding on the streets, now they talk about the dangers of sharing the sidewalk with numbnuts on e-bikes. But that's not what will kill the bike industry. The sheer ease of riding a smokeless moped, combined with the popular misconception that you can neglect them they way you used to neglect your meat-powered bike, have driven sales at a phenomenal rate.

In our shop just this year, a few callers asking about bikes we carry have asked about gravel bikes, and dozens have asked about e-bikes. Then we've had a smattering of calls for kids' bikes. Maybe one or two for technical mountain bikes. Repair business is steady, but it's only enough to overload our understaffing. If we had one more mechanic we would worry about paying them. General retail, mostly clothing, used to cover a lot, but those sales are flat, too.

Yesterday I was working on the firewood piled in my driveway when I heard the buzzing of tires on the road out front. Two riders on fat-tire e-bikes blazed past at full throttle, pulling close to 30 miles per hour. Bareheaded, in shorts and tee shirts, they flashed past, headed north. The only sound was their buzzing tires and Dopplered conversation. Nothing could go wrong. They were only riding bikes after all.

In more congested traffic situations, grim accidents are piling up, but only grumpy outside observers blame the bikes themselves. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. E-bikes don't cause crashes. Unprepared riders on e-bikes cause crashes.

Yes, the mass and speed of the bikes make the crashes worse, but they only combine with the lack of street smarts among the riders.  Bad riding habits lead to more dangerous situations. The motor assistance just makes it easier to get there. People will ride the e-bike who would never consider riding the rapids of a busy street on a bike powered entirely by themselves.

I see riders on e-bikes on the street below the backshop windows. Most of them have bikes with a throttle option, which appears to be their default. Looking across the bay toward the train station where the rail trail terminates, I can see many other moped riders. They jet up effortlessly to a cruising speed a purely pedaling rider would train hard to achieve and maintain.

I pull out of my driveway and warm up at maybe 10-12 miles per hour. The smokeless moped rider hops on and spurts away at 20. Who would put up with the snail's pace of a bike without a motor? What do they gain in the short run by giving up the power assist? There is no long run. People flit from place to place and thought to thought. If the bike is cheap transportation, and a few dollars more gets a faster machine requiring less effort, who will bother to work harder?

Demand for bicycles was already falling fast as the 21st Century began. The decline accelerated, with only a brief plateau when 2020 brought a surge of demand coinciding with a dearth of supply. The bike industry was struggling after its profitable bender through the 1990s. E-bikes will end up being a bigger category than mountain bikes were at their height, but the profits won't go to traditional bike companies unless they seriously retool into motor vehicle companies. How much money will be left over for the far less popular non-motorized bikes?

Legend has it that bike manufacturers in the 1880s and '90s were surprised by the high level of demand from working class people to buy what were considered luxury items. The manufacturers hadn't recognized yet that they had created a revolutionary transportation device that needed very little maintenance for the amount of mobility it provided to people formerly limited only to shoe leather. The same calculation drives the market in e-bikes now.

Change happens faster and faster in the technological world, but pedal-powered bikes won't disappear overnight. Especially if laws and regulations restrict the age of riders on motorized bikes, pedal power will remain the child's first experience on a two-wheeler. However, I have already had to deal with motorized balance bikes for a couple of richie rich little kids whose parents want them to have the latest greatest thing. On private property, anything goes. Buy your 12-year-old a Lamborghini and let them blaze around your private race track. Meanwhile, out in the slums, kids may have to settle for the time-honored ritual of learning to wobble along under their own power until they're old enough to get a real grownup vehicle that doesn't require them to sweat.

My parents, and other adults born between the world wars, recount their experiences riding bikes. Very few people carried the habit into adulthood in the United States. In the 1950s and '60s, the bike was just a step on the way to becoming a driver. You could even buy an accessory for your bike that looked like a motor and made varoom noises. No one knows what the future holds for our species. Maybe we cover the planet with our sprawling cities, through which we dart on our motorized little bikes. The only wide-open spaces will be the ones utterly inhospitable to life. Nature will consist of cockroaches, rats, bacteria, and viruses. So will our diet.

The Woman with Exploding Nipples

 It could happen to anyone with a low-spoke-count, highly tensioned wheel with trendy alloy nipples. They start popping without warning. This customer had come in a couple of times already for single incidents of nipple failure.

This rear wheel had 27 spokes: nine on the left side, 18 on the right. The rims were a little deep, but not hard to work with. Weird-looking wheels are part of what makes a bike look modern.

To begin, I had to remove the tire. Because it wasn't a punctured tire, I went to remove it without tools. When I pushed down on the wheel to work the bead around, another nipple exploded. I called the customer to let her know we were going to do a complete nipple transplant, not just an individual replacement.

On the stand, two more nipples popped when I put a wrench on them to start loosening them. This wheel had been a real time bomb. Imagine ripping down a bumpy descent when one spoke after another detaches from the rim.

Fortunately, the diameter and thread on the bladed spokes matched the DT brass nipples I was planning to use. And the low spoke count made the swap less time consuming. I would never ride a low-count wheel myself, but I appreciate the time I save on jobs like this.

This has also been the Summer of Forgotten Through Axles. We've had several in a row. A rider calls up and asks if we have through axles in stock. We explain that there are different kinds (of course). They're not sure of the brand and type. We figure it out. We had one kicking around from a previous customer's special order that they then declined to pick up. We've accumulated one or two more, to try to cover some of the possibilities.

Next up on the list of modern problems, a mother and daughter had to forgo their bike ride because they had forgotten the keys to their ebikes, turning them into nothing more than immensely heavy regular pedal bikes. You can just ride them that way. It's a common claim in the advertising. But who would? No one, actually, unless they get caught out with a dead battery and have no one to call to pick them up.

Problems like this are right up there with forgetting the charger for your shifters. If you have electronic derailleurs and a dead battery, you got nothin'. 

There's still plenty of good old abuse and neglect to keep us busy. I figured out that the handlebar tape on these bars was about 15 years old when I removed it the other day.

The bars themselves were old enough and had been through enough rough use that I recommended replacement. The last bars I saw that had that much salt and oxidation encrusting them had been on a bike that had lived in Singapore for a year or two. Those bars were so deteriorated that I could poke a screwdriver right through them. These bars were nowhere near that level of deterioration, but still a risk according to most manufacturer recommendations. Better to be safe. It also gave us a good opportunity to put on a much shorter stem for the new rider of the bike.

Accidents will happen. One of the local ebike aficionados took a digger on their chunky steed. The owner called to see if we would work on it. To make it easier, he had contacted the president of the company that made the bike to hook us up with a direct pipeline to parts and advice. With clout like that, ebike ownership is smooth sailing indeed. When a bike weighs upwards of 60 pounds, it hits the ground with more force than a bike weighing less than 30. It also hits a rider with more force, should you happen to get on the wrong side of things as they're going every which way. The rider was apparently not hurt badly enough to be worth mentioning, so that's good. I was just musing about it as I looked at what was scuffed and tweaked.

The trickiest part will be replacing the battery case, which is cleverly inserted into the welded rear rack on this Pedego bike. It has thick cabling inserted into it, and has an irregular shape that does not appear to slide easily out of either end of the framework of the rack. The screws that hold it in place broke loose when the bike crashed, because they were never designed to restrain such a heavy piece of equipment in an impact at an angle. The good news is that the owner of the bike doesn't need it fixed instantaneously. We can put it off for at least a week or two before getting mired in its complexities.

Pedal Assist

Sunday was the fifth day of bike commuting for the week. It happened to follow a short night's sleep, and not the first such night this week.

Shop hours start later on Sundays. I like to take a longer, more peaceful ride in the extra time. But every alternate route involves steeper, taller hills. Time for some pedal assistance: drugs.

A couple of ibuprofen took the edge off.

No rail cars were out on the trail. Recreational traffic was light. It grew a bit heavier closer to town. About 30 teenage girls in running shorts and sports bras came trotting out in two closely-separated groups. I wondered what school they represented, but I wasn't going to interrupt my flow or theirs to ask a question I really didn't need answered. They were not wearing uniform colors, so no hint there.

Approaching the crossing at Center Street I was pleased to see a couple of human shields approaching the crosswalk in time to stop traffic for me so I could slip out onto the street while they went on over into the even greater path congestion on the final, and most popular, mile into the center of town. The human shields, two women in please-don't-kill-me-yellow tee shirts, were dismounting from their bikes as I rolled up into a near track stand behind them. Traffic stopped headed out of town, from our left. The car approaching from the right, inbound, also stopped. We on the path were on the verge of making our moves when we noticed the jeep approaching from the right at full speed, oblivious to the car stopped right in front of it. Impact seemed inevitable.

The low shriek of wide tires locked up on dry pavement set the sound track for the jeep's panicked slide. The driver steered to the right, missing the stopped car at the crosswalk. The jeep stopped next to the other car. The white-knuckled driver, no doubt with jelly legs and possibly unusable underwear, put his head in his hands.

"Well done, lad!" I sang out cheerfully. You can take that as sarcasm or commendation. Both are valid. The women in front of me started across the street and I swung left to join the vehicular flow on my usual route through town. A car passed me, but the jeep never did. I wonder how long it took that guy to get his legs to work again.

After a fairly uneventful day I dropped a couple more ibbies for the ride home. I'd promised the cats we would hang out together in the Cat Lounge when I got home, but I didn't feel like trudging out the highway like I always do.

Working in The Cat Lounge

With the pain reliever coursing through me and some good coffee, not to mention the fact that we close an hour and a half earlier on Sundays, I felt pretty good as long as I didn't try to hammer too hard. One thing I learned in years of more extensive ibuprofen use is that control of the pain does not replace strength lost when a muscle group is simply fried from days of hard riding. The feeling of painless powerlessness is remarkable. You should try it once, and then not do it again. It can't be good for you.

Out the path I meandered, up the pavement of Bryant Road when I got there, and onto Stoddard, reversing my route from the morning. I'd come within .01 mph of hitting 41 on the way down the steep hill on Stoddard. Now I had to climb it. It's a familiar challenge. I'm not too proud to put the bike in low low and weave. It's actually a nice rhythm that allows good views into the woods. For a good chunk of the road there are no houses.

In this undeveloped section I was puffing along when I suddenly inhaled a cloud of unnatural perfume and chemical odor. I could not tell if it was fabric softener, bug repellent, ill-chosen cologne or what. I also spotted no source whatsoever for it in the forest and undergrowth along the road. Whatever it was, it coated my sinuses and the back of my throat so I tasted it almost all the way home. Was someone hiding in the weeds with a sprayer, spritzing unsuspecting passersby? Or was it wafting down from some distant dwelling, tendrils of chemical reek wending unseen among the tree trunks? I had no ill effects beyond the annoying, persistent taste. A good hoppy beer got rid of the last of that. It's kind of creepy though.

The rest of the ride was uneventful. The cats and I had a nice late afternoon and evening until the late summer crop of small and aggressive mosquitoes gathered as the air cooled to suit them.

Stroming around Wolfe City

In the process of diagnosing the latest Stromer electric bike fiasco, I had to go on extensive test rides.

Poor, deluded souls are invariably impressed with the distinctive-looking machines. When they express this admiration I have no choice in my OCD but to take the time to try to explain all the reasons they should question the substance beneath the eye-catching looks. Or I just grunt, pretend I didn't hear anything or smile wanly and try to get away as quickly as possible. But even if no one says anything I know what many of them are thinking: "Hey, there's another one of those neat bikes. Maybe I should look into getting one."

Noooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! I'll wake up one morning and everyone but me will be a pod-person! Actually, POD stands for Power on Demand on the Stromer console. PAS stands for Pedal Assist.

The price tag for a Stromer stops most casual inquiries. But if the unaffordable version sparks sufficient interest, the interested party can find plenty of other offerings at lower price points, and lots of happy people on forums to say how great the machines are and how simple every little process is. You can find answers to just about every question that will come up when you try to reduce your workload by increasing the weight and complexity of your bike with electric motors, batteries and control circuits.

I feel like an idiot riding around on the thing. I know that's my own problem, but since I would not own one and I would not advise anyone to get one, I feel very keenly that I function as an unwitting ambassador for the concept when I'm tooling around out there. Adding to my unease, I know a lot of pedalists who think anyone on an e-bike is a wanker. Please! I'm not one of them! I'm only doing my job!

So there I am, tooling around the steepest nearby hills in Wolfeboro, trying to get the bike to malfunction in the way described by its owner. The bike has an absurdly wide saddle that makes a squeaky, metallic fart noise with every pedal stroke. I can't stop pedaling, because the bike only screws up in pedal assist mode. So I'm grunting up Friend Street, Pleasant Street, Forest Road, and connecting them with bits of Main Street, Sewall Road and short side streets, going squeak-fart, squeak-fart, squeak-fart, over and over around the course, waiting for the pedal assist to quit on me as the owner says it does. I pass walkers and real bicyclists with a pained smile and eyes averted. Squeak-fart, squeak-fart, squeak-fart.

The assist in pedal assist is not a magic effort eliminator. You have to give to get. I topped out on the hills breathing hard and sweating. I simply got there faster than I would under my own power on my own bike. Having a motor allows you to go faster and perhaps work less, but because the assistance comes on and goes off in response to your effort, the drag of the motor cuts in whenever you let up, slowing the bike more than an unassisted bike would slow down from gravity alone when you let up momentarily on the pedals. The bike yaws as the power fluctuates. It's pretty annoying, especially if you're predisposed to be annoyed.

Nothing about the ride made me suddenly feel, "Hey, I want this." I just wanted it to be over.

Because the bike never misbehaved, I could only go on what my research discerned. The lithium-ion battery probably cut out because it had not been charged lately and the long grade the owner was climbing threatened to over-discharge it. Either that or the system was overheating from the long effort and cut out because of that. The battery was pretty low when she brought it in and went flat overnight. But my first test ride on a shorter course with the low battery did not trigger a malfunction. My longer test ride, after fully charging the battery, did not cause any trouble either.

Bikes functioned happily for a century without electrics or hydraulics. Think about that.

Every time I have to wrestle with the problems of someone's ultra-modern marvel, whether it's a high performance carbon road rocket, a kinkily articulated full suspension mountain machine or a three-ton behemoth of battery power I go over and kiss my own bike hanging on its hook. You and me, baby. Simple pleasures.

Aggravated battery

Got a call from a wealthy summer resident last month asking if our shop would receive and assemble three or four Stromer electric bikes for him. He's been a dedicated pedaler for many years, but those years have a way of adding up. Mr. X gave up riding the Mount Washington hill climb a year or two ago.

One of his friends is executive chairman of a corporation known for battery powered tools. The chairman has been into e-bikes since Lee Iacocca had his fling with them in the 1990s. We've gotten to see the evolution of the type as he has brought in various broken ones from his fleet. Apparently he is an energetic advocate. Since he took up the Stromer brand he has hooked up several of his friends.

One of those friends brought in two older Stromers. They've lost the keys to the battery compartments. The customer service guy at Stromer told me they can't replace those.  They're apparently not cross referenced to the serial number. Both bikes also have an intermittent electrical problem causing the pedal assist to cut out randomly. Intermittent problems are always great fun to track down. The manual says to check the right brake sensor. Just for grins I checked both of them.  To do that I had to make a test lamp because I don't keep any kind of electronic diagnostic equipment here. The sensor is just a push button anyway. I needed to see how sensitive it was so I could determine whether a rider who rests a hand on the lever could cut the motor out with only a slight twitch.

To get the sensors out I had to remove the lever blades. Electric bikes are bulky, heavy and complicated. Some combination of those factors -- weight, size and complexity -- makes even a simple job take a lot longer.

The Stromers weigh at least 60 pounds. About 25 pounds of that is the rear wheel. The wiring for the motor connects back there. The rear axle is keyed so it goes in the right way. So any job that involves removing the rear wheel means you have to juggle this heavy wheel as you guide it into its nest of cables, past the rear derailleur, sliding the brake rotor back into the caliper, with the axle oriented the only way it will go in.

The older Stromers have Avid cable disc brakes. The levers used on electric bikes have to be set up to accommodate the brake sensors. These levers predate the introduction of cable disc brakes, so their leverage is set up for traditional cantilevers. This means when you pay upwards of two grand for a fancy electric bike with cable disc brakes they feel mushy. Admittedly I've only seen the e-bikes that have wandered into my shop, but every one of them across the price range has had the same lame brake levers hooked up to mushy cable disc brakes. You'd think the e-bike industry would have caught up with the times by retooling to make a sensor-equipped lever with the right pivot distance for the brakes they're actually operating, but that kind of organized thinking seems alien to the battery brigade.

The new Stromers I assembled have Magura MT 2 hydraulic disc brakes. There's only a sensor in the right lever, so you could ride the front brake while still powering the motor, but how many people use the front brake by itself? I do, but I'm a deviant.

The rear brake on one bike went really mushy without making a puddle of fluid to indicate a leak. There was a little fluid around the caliper, but nothing to indicate exactly where it came from or when it got there.

To bleed the brake the bike needs to be oriented so the hydraulic lines run upward to the lever. Stromer puts the rear brake down on the chainstay. Magura says to remove the pads and push the pistons back all the way before bleeding the system. So that means the 25-pound wheel needs to come out and the bike needs to be held in the work stand with the front end pointing at the ceiling.

My bleed kit was improvised late in the last century. After two rounds of bleeding -- completely reassembling the bike to check each time -- the brakes were better, but still not great. Interestingly, there were two black bikes in this shipment and the brakes felt a bit mushy on both of them. The brakes on the red men's bike and the white step-through felt much firmer.  The color is coincidental, but perhaps it indicates production runs with different personnel or even different factories.

A new bleed kit is on order. Friggin' hydraulics.

If you're thinking of getting an electric bike, don't. Just go the whole Hog, as it were, and buy the new electric Harley Davidson. The pedal assist thing is novel, but when it quits on you you're left with a bike that handles like a truck. Imagine pedaling a truck. A two-wheeled truck with sluggish steering. The heck with that.

The older Stromers I've worked on have twist throttles you can use when the control unit is set in the proper mode so you can just twist its ear and feel it leap forward. It takes more out of the battery than any other mode, but it cuts right to the best part of having a motor: putting out no effort to fly through space. Pedal assist not only requires that the pedals be moving, you also have to put at least some pressure on them. That sounds exhausting. And because the power comes on in spurts based on your own output it can make the bike surge a bit erratically. I suppose you adapt after riding electric bikes long enough. I only get to play with them for a few minutes at a time.

In the repair shop the bikes take up a lot of room, especially when you start taking them apart. Information about their innards is hard to get, even from the manufacturer. Manufacturers seem much more interested in pumping more products into the market than in helping existing customers keep existing bikes running smoothly. It seems to be part of the inherent nature of electronics that things work perfectly until they don't work at all, whereupon you junk the whole rig and start over. But some of these characteristics apply to all modern manufacturing and many modern products. Shimano shifters, for instance. And all manner of consumer electronics.

If I did not have an immensely wealthy person's name to drop, I wonder if I would get the level of service I've received so far. Even with the magic name the quality of service has diminished. I think the Stromerians may have crunched the numbers and decided they don't need to be quite so responsive to get their trickle from the trickle-down. No sense wasting deference when profit remains the same. Even a high profile customer is just another existing customer. In modern business ethics, existing customers get taken for granted while the energy goes to snaring new customers. Customer loyalty does not engender manufacturer loyalty, it breeds contempt. That attitude has afflicted the bike industry since the 1990s. No one can tell them how foolish and shortsighted it is. They'll have to learn the hard way, if consumers ever wake up and decide they're sick enough of it to support a different model. A whole lot of shit will have to hit a whole lot of fans for that to happen. So maybe the contemptuous manufacturers are right not to worry.

Mixed in with the electric shenanigans were plenty of brain teasers involving conventional bikes. Repair season is upon us, though business seems to diminish every year. It's not going to competing shops...much. People just don't seem to be around, let alone spending money.

I don't really think of myself as a stud

Back around 1990-91 we had a winter with early ice and late snow. Even though we would all prefer to go cross-country skiing, we studded up our mountain bike tires and had a few laughs on the frozen lakes and trails. It was fun, but I felt it was more of a novelty than a policy. I sold my studded tires to an ice boater who would stake his DN out in the bay and ride ashore on his bike.

Now it's 2013.  Winter has become unreliable. After four winters without consistent exercise I'm going to try dashing out for a nooner on the mountain bike with studded tires rather than cling to any illusion that I might ski.

On the bike I'll be getting a workout right from the shop door. I can buzz over to the rail trail for a quick one even if the snowmobiles have packed it to concrete.

I lose my park and ride parking place as soon as my friend's driveway needs to be plowed.  They don't clear the non essential spaces. And the town lets all the other potential spots fill in,  too. So I would be driving to work as usual in ski season.  I would just be giving up the skiing in favor of something easier to arrange.

I still have a few commutes left, and maybe more than a few. Then when the snow closes in I can mount the toothy tires for my midday escapes.

Speaking of winter, on the path last week, on a morning that seemed cold at the time, on my way in I met two riders outbound with sled dogs towing their bikes. I'd seen other training rigs on the path, but this was the first time I had seen the mushers using mountain bikes. And it occurred to me that here was a much cooler pedal assist than an electric motor. Talk about renewable energy. Sled dogs love to run. A couple of dogs with nice personalities might even increase the cyclist's appeal to other road users.

I did wonder what it was like to be dragged into a rail crossing by a couple of boisterous dogs. I didn't get to see that maneuver.