Should E-Bikes Be More Standardized & Upgradeable?

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A recent video from Rob Rides EMTB on YouTube shows us a big potential problem with e-bikes: a near-complete lack of standardization. Let’s check the video out and then get into why this is such a big problem for both riders and the environment.

In the beginning of the video, he points out that with most bikes in the past, upgrading, repairing, and otherwise keeping a bike both functional and relevant was pretty easy. You could very easily have a bike that’s a Ship of Theseus over time, with all of the parts replaced one or two at a time until it’s a new bike.

But, now, e-bikes aren’t like this at all. Not only does every brand have different batteries, but bikes within the same brand are often too different for parts to interchange. When a new bike comes out, even a battery pack that looks identical sometimes won’t work with the new bike. When a manufacturer get parts from another manufacturer, there are even times where batteries and motors that are basically identical won’t work with the other bike due to subtle electronic differences.

This means that even buying a new bike from the same manufacturer means starting completely over and not being able to recycle or reuse anything from the older bike.

The main thing causing the problem is that there are so many different proprietary systems out there. Every company has different ideas, so you can’t swap parts, reuse old ones, or readily repair a broken bike with newer parts. There’s no one standard that everyone can share, so the companies couldn’t do this right now even if they wanted to.

Why This Sucks

There are several things that suck about this situation.

First off, it’s expensive. A high-quality bike can cost thousands of dollars. You could upgrade things like the wheels, tires, and a few other very basic parts, but if you want a slightly better motor, you’re out of luck and need to buy a whole other bike. Want more range? You’re probably out of luck there, too. When something breaks (especially with mountain bikes), you have to get a stock part to replace the broken one and don’t have the opportunity to do an upgrade. So, instead of building a better bike over time that can take more of a thrashing, you’re stuck breaking stuff over and over.

It’s also the opposite of right to repair. In many cases, your only source of parts will be the manufacturer. You’ll need to go to them for everything but the most basic parts, tubes and tires. Have a degraded battery? You’ll need to go to them. Have a motor that failed? They’re your only option, and you won’t be able to find an aftermarket part for cheaper in many cases.

Another big problem is that new bikes have to be built when you need a major repair or upgrade, which increases the environmental impact. The impact of a bike is small compared to building a new electric car, but it’s still not zero. If you could keep one bike for ten years and do lots of upgrades and repairs over time, you’d be environmentally ahead of the people who need to buy 3-5 bikes during that time.

Plus, where will the waste from all of these bikes go? Battery recycling is becoming more and more common, but a broken carbon fiber frame isn’t going to be as easy to deal with except to throw it in a landfill. Or, worse, an otherwise good frame with obsolete parts could end up in a landfill instead of being used by the owner for longer or by a new owner.

Developing Standards

The obvious answer to this is standardization.

One way to get to a standard would be for governments to require them, but this could be more challenging than it appears on the surface. Regional standards in a place like the European Union work out because there’s a regional government that can choose a standard and impose it on the industry. But, when so many bikes come from China, there’s really no way for the EU to tell them what to do. Nobody would want to build a bike just for the EU or the US, so the plan would probably end up being scrapped.

It may be better for bike manufacturers to develop some standard parts and electronics upgrade paths by themselves. Unlike the government mandate model of standardization, this would probably lead to some competing standards, but that’s a lot better than 10,000 standards. If there were 2-3 different standard bike systems, you’d at least be able to find parts for the standard parts fitment that your bike was built to.

This wouldn’t necessarily mean that there would only be 2-3 kinds of bikes. Even a simple thing, like motor bolt patterns and batteries that are interchangeable could fit in a broad variety of different bikes that the companies could build and customers could buy. In other words, standardization wouldn’t be a barrier to innovation and product tailoring.

But, getting there is going to require e-bike buyers to demand standards. No standard e-bikes are out now that I’m aware of, but we all need to be contacting our favorite bike brands and asking them to start working together to develop some standards and upgrade paths. Once these bikes are available, we need to reward the companies doing it by buying these bikes instead of cheapie non-standard ones we see in Facebook ads.

Independent shops and parts producers also need to be a part of this conversation. If manufacturers build standard parts but don’t consult the people who would actually be working on the bikes, we could miss out on a lot of good design. We’ve seen car manufacturers make cars that are not easy to work on at all, despite there being hundreds of thousands of copies, when all of that could have been avoided if engineers were required to run designs by mechanics during the development process.

Once again, though, we need to demand all this, or it will never happen.

Featured image by Jennifer Sensiba.