The hidden costs of using an electric bike

electrek.co

8 comments

Me: "I have a CHEAP SMALL EBIKE and it HAS GEARS. This is great!"
Somewhere, in a dark shadowy corner of a smoke-filled room: "Fuck this village in particular. Close the trail in both directions for more than 6 months with no clear end date."
What is the point of this article? Is it trying to be funny? If so u don’t think it works at all. Seems like some AI trash maybe?
- Agreed, I think it was trying to use sarcasm and it fell flat.
  
  It was just such a weird take that seems very like, counter productive to the obvious editorial goal of promoting e-bikes.
- I think they were trying to be clever?
For this community, the article here is very much preaching to the choir, but I'm going to give them (Electrek) the benefit of the doubt by assuming that they meant for that headline to fill a niche before a negative article does.
That is, for someone who knows absolutely zilch about ebikes, they may be inclined to do some online research. While not as unabashedly FUD-tastic as, say, the online discourse on natural gas stove tops, ebikes still attract undue flak here and there, be it tropes like ebikes catching fire in NYC -- yet never really quantified -- or e-motos claiming to be ebikes while abusing bike trails. Someone might legitimately want to find a list of ebike pitfalls, but come away learning all these neat benefits.
So if Electrek is intending to preempt FUD before it starts, they maybe this might work. But as I've commented various times in this community, I think it's a bad idea to mislead people at the onset, even if well-meaning.