The pedal bike may have reached the end of its evolutionary path. That’s maybe a shocking thing to say, but consider that almost no meaningful design advances have been made in road bikes for the last five years or so. They’re light. They’re aerodynamic. They accelerate beautifully, shift smoothly and stop on a dime. Until some miracle material comes along to improve on either ride feel or long-term durability, we’re in pretty good shape.
Mountain bikes are similarly great, with small refinements in suspension performance still trickling out, but again, no game changing developments recently. Mountain bikes have gotten so good that the “new” bikes are mainly filling in spaces on the suspension travel curve.
On some level, the evolutionary arc of these machines, both road and mountain, is limited by a variety of equipment guidelines issued by the UCI for sanctioned racing. Despite those unnecessary bureaucratic strictures, the bikes we pedal today are really fantastic.
Simultaneously, it’s a fair guess that there are more engineers currently working on eBike design than working on pedal bike design. The eBike market, unburdened by UCI dictate and not yet being regulated by most governments except in cursory ways, is wide open and all sorts of new and traditional players are rushing in, trying to get a foot hold. In this still immature stage of eBike development, companies are throwing all sorts of design and engineering resources at it.
eBikes are evolving rapidly. Batteries are getting better and lighter. Power is being transferred more efficiently. A ton of work still needs to be done to make sizing (and handling) better for riders of all sizes, and I suspect the industry needs to establish a few more standards before companies are going to invest in the tooling to make that happen, essentially gearing up to produce bikes that fit small and tall riders.
Engineering is the driver of mechanical evolution. You might look at the market and say that pedal bikes are much further along the curve than eBikes, but we have likely reached the tipping point behind the scenes, the moment when the evolution of one modality began to outpace the other.
Massive sums are being plowed into eBike engineering, because traditional bike companies and seemingly every company that thinks of itself as a “transportation” designer are piling in with the idea that this really is the killer personal mobility solution. We wondered and wondered how to grow the cycling population, and if today’s landscape is anything to judge by, the answer was to remove the need to work for your watts.
eBikes are already cannibalizing pedal bike sales and growth, and eBikes aren’t even great yet. What level of innovation will we see in pedal bikes going forward? Will innovation begin to trickle down from eBikes, instead of the other way around? Will people on unpowered bicycles become marginalized users of infrastructure? Will our bike options narrow as big companies convert mainly to eBike manufacturing?
And will we look back to this moment as the time when everything changed?