Following your thought process, even better is everyone on bikes. That’s what is happening slowly in many developed cities.
Everyone on a motorcycle (mostly scooters) is what you have in southeast Asia. And true, it allows much higher densities than US highways packed with cars, but the price is reduced confort and security… Hard to make people accept that nowadays.
To give a contrarian view, I would happily become an electric bike customer. I think it is a great idea to apply electric motors to motorcycles :
- Torque is usable at low speeds. To have the same experience in a ICE bike require a huge and comparably heavy motor, like the triumph speed triple or a Harley-Davidson.
- Range is still a bit low but not far from the 250km/150miles an ICE bike can have. By the way, most bikers I know, myself included, have to stop before reaching such distances. Confort makes it hard to do more.
- Speaking of confort, less noise and vibrations is a huge plus
Price is still high bit it will reduce. We also can hope for range increases too [1].
My main concern currently is charging time, even with fast charging, 40min is still a bit too much for me, and I hope that progress will be made in this area (with 800v architecture maybe?)
Around here there's been semi-historically a bike culture in my city (certainly not at Amsterdam scale but one of the most bike friendly city in France). I see an increasing number of people with ev bikes, and in turn an increasing proportion of that are ev bikes that borderline being 70cc equivalent, maybe even 125cc, both in power, style, and usage (as in there are pedals but the drivers don't pedal). Except for the speed cap they're essentially more like small ev motorbikes (masquerading as ev bikes because regulations) than big ev bikes.
To give a contrarian view, I would happily become an electric bike customer. I think it is a great idea to apply electric motors to motorcycles : - Torque is usable at low speeds. To have the same experience in a ICE bike require a huge and comparably heavy motor, like the triumph speed triple or a Harley-Davidson. - Range is still a bit low but not far from the 250km/150miles an ICE bike can have. By the way, most bikers I know, myself included, have to stop before reaching such distances. Confort makes it hard to do more. - Speaking of confort, less noise and vibrations is a huge plus
Price is still high bit it will reduce. We also can hope for range increases too [1]. My main concern currently is charging time, even with fast charging, 40min is still a bit too much for me, and I hope that progress will be made in this area (with 800v architecture maybe?)
[1]: https://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/new-bikes/2023-energica-...