Are E-Bikes the Apple Watch of Bikes?

by Scott

Wolfgang's Pol-e-valent with a Velogical e-bike kit

Loyal readers of this blog may recall my comparison a few years back between watches and bicycles. I was thinking back to this comparison this week when I was listening to a podcast discussing the most influential watches of the past decade - watches that came out in the past ten years and the impact on the market and in some cases on wider culture and such. One of the watches mentioned was the Apple watch. When one looks at the sales numbers for these watches, an estimated 23 million of them were shipped out in 2018, you can see why it is on a list of the decade's most influential watches.

For the first 15 years of this century, watch companies had bemoaned a drop in sales. Many felt this was due to younger generations forsaking watches for smartphones. Why have something on your wrist to tell time, if you have this telephone/computer/camera timepiece to tell you what time it is and if you are late for an important meeting? With the rise of smart watches in general (I type this with a Garmin fitness watch on my wrist), and the Apple watch in particular, the trend of wearing a watch has come back.


So what does this have to do with bikes you ask? Well, I see an analogy to bicycles. Currently, one of the only areas in the overall bike business that shows significant growth is e-bikes. When we go to industry trade shows, the vast number of booths show either e-bikes or parts for e-bikes. Most of these products do not have much to do with us, but sometimes parts can have a cross over aspect to them. Our Happy Stem is one product that was designed and tested for e-bikes, but you wouldn't know it by looking at it.

The bigger question I see is will the e-bike bring people back to cycling? Will e-bikes open up opportunities for people to ride more/longer than a standard non e-bike? With companies like GM and Harley Davidson looking into e-bikes, will the situation in 10 years be where e-bikes become the standard bike being sold, and non e-bikes are for the enthusiast only? I don't have a crystal ball (believe me if I did, I'd be sitting on a nice warm island having picked out the 6/49 lotto numbers) so I have no idea how this will go, but it sure will be interesting to see what happens. Where do you see e-bikes in the market - on the rise or on the fringe? Let us know in the comments.