Electric bikes are about to get more expensive, and the timing couldn’t be worse
Biden’s tariffs are going to roil the e-bike boom.
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Good. The US can make e bikes. The problem is that the tariffs need to be solidified in place for a minimum of 10 years or manufacturers won't invest in the infrastructure to make them. If the tariffs seem likely to go away soon, no one will bother doing it on a large scale. All the Chinese made batteries are garbage, anyhow. There's only a handful of actual quality small lithium batteries and they're samsung, panasonic, Westinghouse, and miel. The ones from china horribly lie about capacity and start failing way too soon. There's a reason all the power tool batteries inside Dewalt and makita and such never use Chinese batts inside. Same for all the high end cordless vacuums. You open up a dyson battery pack, you'll never find chinesium.
The US can make them, they'll just cost $10,000 and be several design generations behind the world market.
Yeah....there's actually a bunch of e bike companies that are US based that do all the design and spec work in the US and are built at various places overseas. EBC builds em in the US, using mostly overseas parts. As far as "design generations" go the US is one of the global leaders. Juiced and Rad Power have both been making e bikes for 15 years, bucko.
The problem isn't the bikes, the problem is the lithium.
China controls a lot of the worlds lithium, and most of its refining.
They refine a lot, but hardly have most of the lithium. Most of the bigger mining operations are out of Chile or Austrailia. The largest known lithium deposit is in the USA around Oregon. They haven't started mining that one, yet. 20 to 40 million metric tons of mineable lithium.
And most of the largest mines are operated by Chengdu or Ganfeng. It's modern colonialism.
May not be Chinese soil, but the deed is to China none the less.
Lithium mining afaik is terrible for the environment and would almost definitely have american environmentalists in a snafu. It strikes me as the kind of thing that NIMBYism prevents us from taking advantage of. (Despite the fact that people have already displaced by climate change and we're putting tariffs on the goods used to reduce emissions)
Chinese batteries are plenty good enough for e-bikes. For that matter, CATL makes some of the best batteries for electric cars.
Iron and sodium based batteries are coming on the market, and those all e-bikes need.
9 of the 10 largest lithium Mines aren't in China. They're mostly Australia and Chile. Also, the largest known lithium deposit in the world is near Oregon, USA.
Right, but China has cheaper labor and few environmental regulations. Citizens of Oregon are less likely to send children and political prisoners into mines and factories.
So lithium is OK, so long as it's cheap and gotten off the backs of chinese?
Are you asking me what I would do given the keys to the nuclear arsenal? Or are you asking me what the current state of geopolitical affairs?
We won't win an economic trade war with China. China isn't the Soviet Union. We might win an actual war, but it would be the largest war ever fought on earth. China isn't Russia.
I don't want anyone mining lithium unless we can do it without destroying the planet where we live. I'd gladly trade my cell phone for universal human rights and clean water for my grandkids. But that ain't a button on my console.
Oregon is in the United States, a country where people expect life, liberty, and the pursuit of a jetski. The CCP treats its citizens like wheat for the thresher, and has zero qualms about turning some land into wasteland. Economically, you can't compete with that. If you want to place tariffs on Chinese lithium, let's do it. But we need to actually produce it here, and we have to be OK with the full, long-term cost of mining and manufacturing it, safely and cleanly.
Unless we do that, there's not much sense in acting like we're better than China. We just have a national NIMBY attitude, happily outsourcing our climate disasters and human rights abuses so we don't have to see it first hand.
Yeah. New battery tech is always almost about to come out......15 years and waiting.
It does come out. All the time. 5-8% per year, compounding.
There's a toxic positivity in how the news presents battery tech advances that leads people to think it's never coming. I'm not talking about stuff that's in a lab that may or may not be practical for mass production. I'm talking about stuff starting to come out of factories today.
Some minor changes here and there, but the underlying makeup of the batteries and their shortcomings have been largely the same. Lithium and issues with dendrites that cause them to go bad/lose capacity after around 2,500 complete charge cycles. Most of the improvements have consisted of pulse charging different cells at a time in large batteries and trying to always keep the batteries in the 30% to 80% capacity range to extend the lifespan. Batteries last longer if you put one big enough in a vehicle to go 400 miles, but only allow for a 200 mile range.
5-8% per year is a doubling every 9-15 years. This is not a small change. That means we've doubled at least once since the first Tesla Roadster.
We haven't doubled at all over the past 15 years, though. That's completely false. Not in capacity or cycles.
They have doubled in capacity: https://rockymntstage.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/slide-2-battery-charts.png
