Originally Posted by 50PlusCycling

A motorcycle will last longer, it will take you farther, faster, and more comfortably than an e-bike. A motorcycle is less likely to spontaneously ignite in your garage, it will continue to go 200 or more miles on a tank of gas until the end of its service life, whereas e-bike batteries lose capacity over time. My own e-bike goes less than half as far as it could when it was new (7 years ago), and while I could replace the battery, the $450 price tag is a little steep. I’d rather spend that money on beer.

When it comes to licensing and insurance, those are generally required on e-bikes which have performance levels similar to motorcycles. As the e-bike market grows, there will be more accidents and injuries, and calls to license and insure e-bikes. Roads require tax money to keep them maintained, and unlicensed, unregistered, and largely untaxed vehicles aren’t going to provide those funds. There was a video on YouTube attempting to explain that cyclists actually paid more in taxes than car drivers, but after looking at the figures, it appears one of Enron’s former accountants is still out there writing more fiction than Stephen King.

As for being “green,” if we use cars as an example, you would need to ride your bike 60% farther than a gas-powered bike before you reached the point you overcome the extra emissions needed to produce the battery and motor components.

What’s more, e-bikes are still rapidly evolving, meaning the bike you buy today will be technologically obsolete in short order (like mine). If you are one of those consumers who upgrades their bikes as often as they upgrade their phones, because they want the latest features and performance, you’ll likely be going through bikes pretty regularly.

We haven’t had EVs on the market for very long, but their used and worn out components are already being dumped en masse in Chinese landfills. The cost of recycling these components is still much higher than building them from raw materials. A motorcycle is largely aluminum, with some copper, iron, steel, and brass, these materials can be quickly and cheaply recycled and reused. If you are driving a new car today, at least some of the metal in it has DNA from the Ford Model T and A, melted down and reincarnated into many generations of new cars. This is much less the case with EVs.