new ‘commuter cool’
Keith Felch is admittedly a big guy, but more than a few super-fit cyclists in Southern California have been left wondering how that dude just went flying by.
And then his wife, Mary, comes motoring past.
She says, laughing:”They stare, like how can a girl go past me”. It takes the added riders a few abnormal but again they amount it out.
They have electric motors.
The Felches, who alive in Aliso Viejo, California, acclimated to drive everywhere, except back they acclimated their bikes for recreation.
When they got their new e-bikes,that changed,made by a company called Optibike. Now, mostly they ride to work,but they also ride to go shopping and to go to breakfast.
Keith Felch says the couple has cut 50 percent of their car-use since they started electric biking.
And there are other benefits. Keith Felch dropped 30 pounds and his blood pressure fell 10 points in the first six months he owned the electric bike, he says.
Although Mary said it is important to have a positive effect on the planet,the Felches don’t exactly classify themselves as “environmentalists,”.
“I abstruse that the affliction bulk of billow that you put out [in an automobile] is in the aboriginal mile, so if we can accomplish alike some of those beneath trips on our bicycles, it makes a big difference,” she says.
Who wants one?
Brent Meyers, director of sales for Ultra Motor US, says electric bikes attract different types of buyers.
Many are attractive to accomplish a blooming imprint.
Some are “active adults” who have ridden bicycles for years who — as they get older — are unable to do the same kind of riding they did when they were young.
Other buyers want to avoid a sweaty entrance into the office and to ride their bikes to work quickly.
Oddly — or conceivably not — Ultra Motor US sees its arch sales back the amount of oil skyrockets, says Meyers.
Two wheels, a motor and 100 million riders
Electric bikes are still somewhat of a novelty in the United States, but in China they’re everywhere.
In fact, Chinese electric bikes number more than 100 million — which is about four times the number of Chinese private cars, according to Electric Bicycles Worldwide Reports. The bikes are popular in Europe as well.
Sales abstracts for the United States are adamantine to pinpoint.
In the United States, about 200,000 electric bicycles were awash aftermost year, said Ed Benjamin of the Light Electric Vehicle Association — about alert the cardinal awash in 2005.
But the industry has hit a bump in the road from the recession, as sales were down about 10 percent in 2009, he said.
E-bikes are mostly made by specialty companies, but the growing sales trend has been noticed by the big boys.
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