That’s unfortunate, but I’m not sure it’s reasonable to hope for much less – I was also considering DIY, but based on what I saw shopping around online, even just the electric parts (motor/battery/controller) alone, sourced straight from China, are more than half of that cost. And then if you subtract that out, the rest of it would be a complete non-electric heavy-duty cargo bike for <$700, which itself would be damn cheap. It’s hard to see how that cost could be cut much more, either: there’s a limit to how cheap the materials and manufacturing costs can get, after all, as well as a limit to how much you can reduce component quality without compromising the safety of the thing (e.g. ditching the hydraulic disc brakes in favor of rim brakes on a bike designed to carry 450 lbs might not be a smart idea).
Point is, it might be expensive relative to what you can afford, but IMO it certainly isn’t expensive compared to the raw costs of materials and labor that go into manufacturing it.
Anyway, if you live in a part of the world that’s so poor that new bikes in general are out of the question, then yeah, I guess you’ll have to wait a while for cargo e-bikes to become more available in the used market.
New bikes are affordable here, they’re about 100€. 1700 would get a really nice second-hand 125 scooter that can be used as the sole mode of transportation by many
Hmm, interesting! In that case, I’d expect it to be possible to get the price of a non-electric cargo bike down to 150€ or 200€ (in the sense that a long-tail frame doesn’t use more than 50-100% more metal than a standard diamond frame, and the rest of the components are more-or-less comparable).
How much are non-cargo electric bikes there, and how much are e-bike components? Do online Chinese suppliers like Aliexpress etc. charge your market the same prices they charge Americans?
Non-electric cargo bikes are still very expensive, last year I went to a bike expo in Valencia and the ones being shown were European-made and started at around 3000€, they were being marketed as lifestyle accessories by boutique manufacturers.
Then I go home (a more rural and poor area) and see normal working people using Chinese mountain bikes or small capacity petrol scooters to get to work and lug around their shopping, and the whole bike show thing seemed like ridiculous consumerism.
I don’t know the prices of electric bike parts, I suspect they’re a similar price to what Americans pay. The electric bikes I see here are generally mountain bikes being used by people with plenty of money to spare.
That’s unfortunate, but I’m not sure it’s reasonable to hope for much less – I was also considering DIY, but based on what I saw shopping around online, even just the electric parts (motor/battery/controller) alone, sourced straight from China, are more than half of that cost. And then if you subtract that out, the rest of it would be a complete non-electric heavy-duty cargo bike for <$700, which itself would be damn cheap. It’s hard to see how that cost could be cut much more, either: there’s a limit to how cheap the materials and manufacturing costs can get, after all, as well as a limit to how much you can reduce component quality without compromising the safety of the thing (e.g. ditching the hydraulic disc brakes in favor of rim brakes on a bike designed to carry 450 lbs might not be a smart idea).
Point is, it might be expensive relative to what you can afford, but IMO it certainly isn’t expensive compared to the raw costs of materials and labor that go into manufacturing it.
Anyway, if you live in a part of the world that’s so poor that new bikes in general are out of the question, then yeah, I guess you’ll have to wait a while for cargo e-bikes to become more available in the used market.
New bikes are affordable here, they’re about 100€. 1700 would get a really nice second-hand 125 scooter that can be used as the sole mode of transportation by many
Hmm, interesting! In that case, I’d expect it to be possible to get the price of a non-electric cargo bike down to 150€ or 200€ (in the sense that a long-tail frame doesn’t use more than 50-100% more metal than a standard diamond frame, and the rest of the components are more-or-less comparable).
How much are non-cargo electric bikes there, and how much are e-bike components? Do online Chinese suppliers like Aliexpress etc. charge your market the same prices they charge Americans?
Non-electric cargo bikes are still very expensive, last year I went to a bike expo in Valencia and the ones being shown were European-made and started at around 3000€, they were being marketed as lifestyle accessories by boutique manufacturers.
Then I go home (a more rural and poor area) and see normal working people using Chinese mountain bikes or small capacity petrol scooters to get to work and lug around their shopping, and the whole bike show thing seemed like ridiculous consumerism.
I don’t know the prices of electric bike parts, I suspect they’re a similar price to what Americans pay. The electric bikes I see here are generally mountain bikes being used by people with plenty of money to spare.