Ebikes: a Confession

I’ve been working on a book proposal about how ebikes developed in the U.S. market, put more simply, the story of ebikes in the U.S. for several months now, I’ve been conducting interviews with people in the industry and, unsurprisingly, while the individual experiences differ, when you pull back to the 10,000 foot level, the arc of the story is always the same. 

The short version is this: When people selling ebikes went into bike shops, they were laughed out of them. 

Now here’s a confession: When I was first exposed to an ebike, I didn’t laugh, but have to be honest and say I didn’t even try to wrap my head around their utility or even their potential. 

I’m only mildly embarrassed by this, though. I’m not nearly as embarrassed as I would be had I been a manager or owner of a bike shop that passed on the chance to sell ebikes before my suppliers began forcing them onto my shop floor. 

I need a fancy sound effect to signal we are getting in the wayback machine. Choop choop choop choop. Ding!

It’s late in 1997 and I’m working for Bicycle Guide Magazine in Los Angeles. I get a call in my office from one of the security guys at the front desk downstairs. He asks me to come downstairs because a guy has shown up in the lobby with an electric bike. When he says this, my brain checks out because I can’t reconcile the addition of the words bicycle and electric into a single term. 

Security dude tells me he needs me to come down; I can tell from his tone that he wants nothing to do with this guy and his solution to his problem is me. I grab my coworker Joe Lindsey, who some people may know from his work for Bicycling, or perhaps back then at Bicycle Guide. We head downstairs. 

I honestly don’t know if the guy was in sales or marketing or sales and marketing for the company in question. my patchy memory says it was EV Global, the company that Lee Iacocca helped to launch from the ashes of the EV Warrior brand. 

What I recall most clearly from out encounter was the desperation radiating off this guy. He begged us to write something about the ebike as if he were working for a company on the verge of bankruptcy, and for any ebike brand based in the U.S. in the late 1990s, I can confirm they were on the verge of bankruptcy. 

The most memorable part of our exchange came after he implored us to comprehend how much easier cycling would be with the help of an electric motor. I looked at him and said, “We’re cyclists because we actually enjoy the pedaling. To us, that’s the point. If we didn’t want to pedal, we wouldn’t be cyclists.”

I honestly felt guilty for the way his face fell. The simple fact is that he wasn’t understanding us, nor we, him. 

In the intervening years, I’ve seen the light with regard to ebikes, of course. And I don’t really regret turning the guy down for any coverage. The thing was, we worked for an enthusiast magazine aimed at road cyclists—people like us who liked pedaling. I don’t want to go too far down this road, but Bicycle Guide was in a tough position. Less than 18 months later Petersen would fold the magazine, and while we didn’t know that then, we knew that we were struggling to convince the brass that we knew what the magazine was supposed to portray. 

Covering that ebike simply didn’t fit with our editorial mission. That’s not the same situation that bike shops were in. It’s a rare bike shop that wouldn’t have benefitted from more sales, especially if those bikes cost upward of $2000.