While electric vehicles are the future of the car industry, the best way to reduce pollution and ensure the health of our planet may be to look beyond cars entirely. As an article in The Conversation lays out, e-bikes and scooters are having a greater positive impact on our planet than electric cars.
According to the article, as of November 2023 there were 280 million e-bikes and scooters in use around the world — 10 times as many as the total number of four-wheeled electric vehicles, per a Jalopnik article posted by MSN.
Many of the riders of those two- or three-wheeled vehicles, the bulk of them in India and China, switched from inefficient, gas-powered motorcycles and mopeds, and the effect is already being felt.
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The shift has reduced the global demand for oil by one million barrels a day, based on data published by BloombergNEF, or 1% of the world's total oil demand, per The Conversation.
That means that e-bikes and scooters are displacing four times as much demand for oil as electric cars, per a source in a podcast posted by Bloomberg — and all that despite widespread (and often overblown) fears of their batteries being unsafe and prone to spontaneous combustion.
Not only do e-bikes, which run on clean energy, cause far less harm to our planet and air pollution than gas-powered motorcycles and mopeds, but they can also save users a lot of money. The Conversation calculated that a 12-mile commute on an e-bike five days a week should cost you only $20 per year for charging.
While e-bikes are obviously not suited to every purpose, such as long trips or moving furniture, their efficiency over short distances, commutes, trips to the grocery store, etc., means that they have a big role to play in reducing our global planet-overheating gas emissions.
"Hell yes, got an e-bike last year. This spring and summer I ran all my errands on it, even trips to Home Depot, groceries, etc. Basically only drove my car when I absolutely had to," wrote one commenter.
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