It’s a simple pleasure, but Xu Beilu savors it daily: gliding past snarled traffic on her motorized bicycle, relaxed and sweat-free alongside the pedal-pushing masses.
China, the world’s bicycle kingdom — one for every three inhabitants — is going electric.
Workers weary of crammed public transport or pedaling long distances to jobs are upgrading to battery-powered bikes and scooters. Even some who can afford cars are ditching them for electric two-wheelers to avoid traffic jams and expensive gasoline.
The bicycle was a vivid symbol of China in more doctrinaire communist times, when virtually no one owned a car. Even now, nearly two decades after the country began its great leap into capitalism, it still has 430 million bicycles by government count, outnumbering electric bikes and scooters 7-1.
But production of electric two-wheelers has soared from fewer than 200,000 eight years ago to 22 million last year, mostly for the domestic market. The industry estimates about 65 million are on Chinese roads.
CHEAP, CONVENIENT
Car sales are also booming but there are still only 24 million for civilian use, because few of the 1.3 billion people can afford them. And unlike in many other developing countries, Chinese cities still have plenty of bicycle lanes, even if some have made way for cars and buses.
“E-bike” riders are on the move in the morning or late at night, in good weather or bad. When it’s wet, they are a rainbow army in plastic capes. On sunny days, women don gloves, long-sleeved white aprons and face-covering sun guards.
One of them is Xu, on her Yamaha e-bike, making the half-hour commute from her apartment to her job as a marketing manager.
“It’s obvious that driving would be more comfortable, but it’s expensive,” she says. “I like riding my e-bike during rush hour, and sometimes enjoy a laugh at the people stuck in taxis. It’s so convenient and helpful in Shanghai, since the traffic is worse than ever.”
The trend is catching on in the US and elsewhere.
In Japan, plug-in bicycles are favored by cost-conscious companies and older commuters.
“Many company workers are beginning to use them to visit clients instead of driving, to save fuel costs,” says Miyuki Kimizuka of the Japan Bicycle Promotion Institute, a private industry group.
Australians use electric bicycles in rural towns without bus and train service. Tony Morgan, managing director of The Electric Bicycle Co Pty Ltd, the continent’s largest manufacturer and retailer of e-bikes, says he has sold about 20,000 in the past decade, priced at A$1,000 (US$800) to A$2,000.
In the bicycle-friendly Netherlands, the industry says sales passed 138,800 last year.
In India, Vietnam and other developing countries, competition from motorcycles, as well as a lack of bike lanes and other infrastructure, are obstacles.
Indian sales have risen about 15 percent a year to 130,000 units, thanks in part to a 7,500 rupee (US$150) government rebate that brings the cost down to about the cost of a conventional bicycle. But they are far outnumbered by the millions of new motorcycles taking to India’s roadways.
In China, electric bikes sell for 1,700 yuan (US$250) to 3,000 yuan. They require no helmet, plates or driver’s license, and they aren’t affected by restrictions many cities impose on fuel-burning two-wheelers.
It costs a mere 1 yuan (US$0.15) — about the same as the cheapest bus fare — to charge a bike for a day’s use, says Guo Jianrong (郭建榮), head of the Shanghai Bicycle Association, an industry group.
They look like regular bicycles, only a bit heavier with the battery strapped on. Some can be pedaled; others run solely on battery. In China, their maximum weight is about 40kg, and maximum legal speed is about 20kph.
“For us, these are tools for transportation,” Guo said. “We’re not like Americans and Europeans, who tend to bicycle for fun or exercise.”
BAD ACID
The e-bike doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, though it uses electricity from power plants that do. The larger concern is the health hazards from production, recycling and disposal of lead-acid batteries.
Although China is beginning to turn out more electric bikes equipped with nickel-meter-hydride and lithium-ion batteries, 98 percent run on lead-acid types, Guo said.
A bike can use up to five of the batteries in its lifetime, said Christopher Cherry, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who researches the industry. A Chinese-made battery containing 10kg of lead can generate nearly 7kg of lead pollution, he says.
“Electric bikes result in far more emissions of lead than automobiles. They always use more batteries per mile than almost any other vehicle,” Cherry said in a phone interview.
In China, owners are paid about 200 yuan (US$30) to recycle old batteries but the work is often done in small, under-regulated workshops.
With price competition brutal among China’s 2,300 electric bike and scooter makers, manufacturers have shied away from embracing costlier, cleaner technology. But bigger foreign sales and demand for better batteries may speed improvements.
“We are trying to upgrade to lithium battery technology to be able to sell internationally,” said Hu Gang (胡剛), a spokesman for Xinri E-Vehicle Group Co, the country’s biggest e- bike manufacturer, with sales of more than 2 million units last year.
The goal is to boost production to more than 5 million units by 2013, he said.
“It’s not that we’re that ambitious,” Hu said. “It’s just that the industry is growing so quickly.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts