Easy Riding with Battery Power

E-bikes have a surprisingly long history, but until recently, they somehow never managed to really take off. That was because their evolution is so deeply intertwined with battery technology.

As rich as it is, the history of the bicycle is basically about trying to reduce the effort of using the bike while keeping it as simple as possible. Consider the dandy horse, or as it was more fittingly called in German, the Laufmaschine. Literally running machine,” this 1820s design was propelled by the rider pushing along the ground with the feet as in walking or running. It was therefore merely just a plaything for the rich and bored, until in the 1860s, pedals were added. Now the velocipede became a viable means of transport, coming in a variety of shapes and forms - some had three wheels, others could carry two passengers in tandem or sitting next to each other.

Bizarrely enough, back then, steam velocipedes actually had been a thing. The Michaux-Perreaux built some time from 1867 to 1871, and the 1867 or 1868 Roper steam velocipede are sometimes also considered the first motorcycles long before the gasoline-powered Daimler Reitwagen first hit the corners in 1885. With a 62 kg steam engine between your legs and on wooden wheels with iron tires, riding the Michaux-Perreaux must have been an interesting experience, to say the least.

Who wants to pedal anyway

These early attempts at a substitute propulsion system for bicycles were obviously doomed to fail. However, on the verge of the 19. and 20. centuries, internal combustion engines became compact enough to be fitted to a bicycle frame. Or into the rear wheel, as it was the case with the first vélomoto,” the 1892 Millet. It was actually equipped with a 500 cm3 five-cylinder rotary engine directly attached to the fixed crank of the rear axle. Typically, however, these bikes were of more conventional designs with a gasoline engine bolted onto the frame, usually of the two-stroke variety and producing one or two horsepower.

Meanwhile, in the late 1890s, not just one, but several e-bike designs were patented in the US. An inventor by the name Ogden Bolton Jr. took a regular bike frame and attached a DC motor to the hub of the rear wheel, fed by a 10-volt lead-acid battery. A certain Hosea Libbey used a more altered frame with two electric motors crammed into the hub of the crankset. The design by John Schnepf had even four fractional horsepower motors connected through a series of gears, while Mathew J. Steffens opted for a more conventional solution using a driving belt along the outside edge of the rear wheel. 

In other words, there had been no shortage of ideas, but the heavy and low-performing batteries of the period made e-bikes utterly impractical. Until the 1930s, when advances in lead-acid chemistry resulted in a revival of the concept, particularly in Europe. A typical e-bike of that era would be the Phillips Simplex. With its 0.2 hp motor weighing 10 kilograms and the 12-volt battery another 20 kg, it wasn’t exactly a lightweight but offered a pretty decent range of around 80 kilometers. What was less great was the Simplex’ price, roughly half of what you would pay for a small motorcycle. 

So, the renaissance of the e-bike was rather short-lived. Following WWII, the demand for cheap personal transport was high, but saturated by motorcycles which offered more bang for the buck, or by microcars such as the Messerschmidt Kabinenroller or BMW Isetta. And as Americans and Europeans were becoming wealthier, the bicycle was relegated to just sports gear. While for most of the second half of the 20. century, battery technology did not evolve much anyway, apart from some advances in the realm of lead-acid batteries. 

Energized by lithium 

This only changed with the advent of lithium-ion batteries which were much lighter and offered both longer range and faster charging times compared to other chemistries. Also, in the late 1990s, torque sensors and power control systems were developed, allowing for optimizing the motor’s operation across different conditions, increasing its lifespan. As a result, new e-bike models appeared with their production steadily increasing, according to estimates by roughly 35 percent within the years 1993 to 2004. 

The e-bike boom first took off in China, where, by the mid-2000s, 10 to 20 percent of all two-wheeled vehicles in major cities were equipped with an electric motor. Up until the pandemic, the Chinese market accounted for roughly two-thirds of global e-bike sales, but since the late 2010s, Europe is catching up. For instance, of the 4 million bicycles sold in Germany in 2023, 2.1 million were e-bikes, surpassing regular” bikes for the first time. Globally, there are more than 150 million e-bikes in use, with this figure rising by some 7 percent annually. Not bad for a technology that had already been written off, twice even.