When you sell electric bikes and electric motorcycles like we do, you get asked a lot of different questions.  Are they waterproof?  Can it carry me and my dog?  Why don't they just make them all electric?  

But the one question that really stands out centers around, the center of these devices, the battery packs.  Without the battery packs these vehicles wouldn't go.  Well, some of the E-bikes you can still pedal, but you know what I mean.  The packs are essential and generally heavy.  The weight is all relative depending on the unit, but no matter how small or large, your battery pack is going to be a significant part of your E-bike or E-Motorcycle's overall weight.  As a general "rule of thumb" you could think of battery weight of current technology being:

1AH = 1Lb

This isn't always true, some batteries will weigh more and some will weigh less, but in general you can consider current Li-Ion technology will give you 1 Amp Hour of power per 1 pound of weight.  Again, this isn't a accurate measurement, but one meant to help the consumer better understand the specifics around their battery.  And this is going to be very important as we get to the actual question people ask about these battery packs.  That's right, we haven't addressed that yet, but you might have an idea of where I'm going with this already.

When it comes to an E-bike, the battery pack can be small or large.  Heavy or light, it all depends on how many cells it has in it.  For most of the E-bikes on the market the battery pack is easily removeable.  If you run your battery down and want to put on another one, go ahead.  If you want to take the battery inside to charge, go for it.  This is because most E-Bike batteries don't weigh more 20lbs making it easy for your average person to remove and carry inside.

With some of the electric motorcycles that have been introduced into the market, there have been promises of a light, removeable battery that could get you around all day.  So far, it's really been one or another, but not both.  This is because of what we discussed above and the power consumption of an electric motorcycle versus an electric bike.

Now the big question we get: 

*Drumroll please*

"Are the batteries in the electric motorcycle removeable?"

That's it, that's the one.  To most of you, it seems obvious, of course you can remove the battery, just like an E-bike.  But when you start adding up the AH and what that means for your driving distance and weight, you'll see these aren't the same machines.  

To begin with, an E-bike is heavy compared to a regular bike, but they generally weigh less than 100lbs.  Most electric motorcycles use heavier DOT approved parts and weigh 200+lbs curb weight.  It's going to take more motor and more battery to get an electric motorcycle going than an electric bike.  You could use the same 20AH/20lb battery packs you would find on an E-bike, but you probably won't be happy with your e-motorcycles performance or range.  Instead, manufacturers have built bigger batteries with more AH to allow your e-motorcycle to perform they way you might expect.  To go fast, get to a certain top speed and be able to go a certain range on a single charge.  In order to achieve the trifecta balance, you need a big battery pack.  On the smaller side of range, we see e-motorcycles with 40AH battery packs.  These units have a general range of 30+miles.  Not bad, but as we increase performance, we increase power consumption, so we increase battery AH capacity to compensate.  This means the battery packs for e-motorcycles are getting into the 80AH and 100+AH ranges.  These battery packs are necessary for proper performance, but weigh almost 100lbs on their own.  It's like your battery pack is a whole E-bike worth of weight!

Those numbers make it a chore to remove your e-motorcycle battery to take inside to charge.  It also means you could really hurt yourself if you tried.  No steel toes, dropped the edge of the pack on your foot, ouch!  The point is that when it comes to getting an electric motorcycle that will have any real performance and range, you're not going to be able to take out the battery pack.  There's also another thing to think about when it comes to taking the batteries out of your electric motorcycle, the alarm will stop working.  Which might not be so bad, you already have the most expensive part in your house.  The thieves will get a shell, but you'll still be left without a ride.

There have been quite a few people that have called and asked, "Can you take the battery out of that?".  It may seem to make sense, depending on your situation, but when it comes to the electric motorcycle itself and your enjoyment of it, being able to take the battery out is truly a pain you don't need.

When City Planners and Politicians look at future planning and budgets they have lots of hard decisions to make.  The first being supporting existing infrastructure or working on new ones.  This is what I call the "E-Bike Political Paradox".  People need the existing car oriented infrastructure to continue to work and grow so they can also work and grow.  At the same time, officials are faced with the needs of the future.  They need to see ahead for their constituents and beyond.  

There have been many inflection points in American Society.  The choice to embrace the automobile allowed for expansive growth across the entirety of our Country.  For Good and Bad, it has allowed us to become what we are today.  Even that deeply incumbent set of businesses is going through their own rebuilding today.  Competing with the future, in Tesla and other new manufacturers here and overseas.  With the future being Electrification of mobility, Planners and Officials need to consider a more holistic view of the city, its future and direction of Growth.  

Many Governments, local and federal, have offered and considered rebates to allow many more to access the future as early as possible.  These rebates have centered around the auto industry, but more recently citizens and officials alike have come to recognize the E-Bike and E-Motorcycle as highly efficient and fun ways to provide mobility to their lives.  In our customer and citizen interactions we've found that pricing is somewhat a concern.  With the number one concern being road safety.  Especially in the E-bike potential and current commuter base.   

With so many different concerns of current and future mobility infrastructure, Planners and Officials are placed in the most difficult situations of decision making.  How do they allocate their funds appropriately to make the greatest impacts for today while keeping them moving towards the future.

Rebates are Great, but for Who?

Ok, so little bit of political mass population operations theory here.  The Carrot, the Stick, the Sermon and now The Nudge.  These are all things used by governments to encourage large populations to embrace change.  Rebates are generally viewed as "Carrots".  In today's environment you could call filling your gas tank "the Stick", ouch!  We've all heard "The Sermon", "It's the War, you have to pay more."  And before you go any farther with that, please, take it to Twitter, not about the politics here.  Then there's the Nudge.  I prefer this method, it's like Mom hitting you with the guilty reminder of what you should be doing.  Eventually, you hear the voice in your head and take the appropriate action.  How much any one or mixture of those works depends on individual psychologies.  Applied across the whole, you can create the greatest amount of behavioral change.  

Rebates are generally viewed as temporary.  This is because they only encourage on part of the overall required behavioral changes.  The idea being if you got one, you'll use it.  At the same time, the rebate creates a psychology of decreased value.  Since someone was able to get something for so much less than what it would normal be in an open market environment it creates a false view of lower value.  This is a large reason why I'm not the biggest fan of rebates provided by governments.  If the rebate is a direct financial provision of the manufacturer, that makes more sense to me.  This creates a direct understanding that the manufacturer is doing this to gain market share and the pricing will be higher.  Think crowd sourcing campaigns.  You get a discounted price for buying something early, that's basically a manufacturers rebate at point of sale.  

"Why should the manufacturer offer a rebate, John?  Makes no sense to me." 

I feel the same way about government rebates.  It's basically paying yourself back for buying something you might not of in the first place.  It tells me you might have had somewhere better for that money to go.  Of course E-bike manufacturers and retailers support it, it means you'll artificially come buy more product from them.  Then they can go to more investors and say, "See, people want there, we need more money."  Again, it's artificial.  And you might think as a PEV Marketplace we'd want this.  Besides, our E-motorcycles fall right inline with most the requirements of the rebates being offered or considered.  Makes some of them only a few hundred dollars some places.  

But we want a real market.  One that isn't spending government subsidies to over charging brands disguised as "rebates".  

We Took a Totally Different Approach

There's lots of companies out there that aren't going to like what I'm saying here.  And they're really not going to like it if Government Officials read and understand this too.  But here it is:

Government Rebates for Ebikes only Help Ebike Companies

There, it's out there, I said it and I'm sure many agree and disagree.  It may have helped you buy an ebike from a company that really could've sold it to you for less and still made a profit.  That's been our approach from the beginning.  We're not looking for hand outs from the Government and essentially the People of the USA, but rather their Honest Purchase from us and into the Electric Future.  We reduce prices to bring you comparable units while still making a reasonable profit.  We could charge more.  After all, the goal of a company is to make profits.  But for us, before profit, comes happy customers, who got great deals and love the way these things can change their lives.

We can do this without adding excessive overhead.  Those are the top 2 goals of a business, happy customers and efficient operations.  Profit will cascade from there.

Our Request for Officials

We are all for rebates and if already offered in your area it doesn't make any sense to pull them back.  What we would ask is that there be more focus on the infrastructure and spending.  As a business owner that offers many of the same models for less, I know that part can be done from our end.  Regardless of our own friendly competition, making them more accessible to everyone should be our collective goal as businesses.  From your end as an Official, People Centric planning for safer roadways that encourage bicycle, E-bike and E-motorcycle traffic.  There are many multi-decade and multi-generational examples in European cities that can be easily adopted and added here.   

Las Vegas, being a newer city and mostly a grid layout lends itself well to this type of future planning.  It's 215 loop provides outside quadrant access to the interior of the city.  While the cross of the 15 and 95 can allow for more direct access, for cars.  Interior areas get slowed down for safer travel.  The decreasing of reaction time/speed ratios by drivers will lead to decreased accidents and deaths.  An interesting side effect of slowed traffic and traffic on bike/e-bikes, local businesses and neighborhood thrive and become deeper communities.  Again, there are many examples of this in Europe going back to the 70's showing impact and yield over decades.  With the city layout Las Vegas has, the addition of more tunnels under the Strip, we think Las Vegas could lead the way in this planning and design.

Our Request of Riders and Citizens

No one is going to argue that our roads could be safer in general.  After the recent pandemic traffic fatalities have skyrocketed.  If you agree, and you would like to feel safe riding a bicycle/ebike/emotorcycle, please contact your local City, County, State politicians.  Let them know what you've told me.  I ride almost daily and multiple times each ride I avoid a collision.  Once in a while it's even my mistake.  No one's perfect, but overwhelmingly, I'm dodging someone in a car not looking or not caring.  Tell, them about your experience too.  Tell them you want safer streets to ride on.  Tell them that if they were safer you'd save money and have a better quality of life.  That your mobility shouldn't be oppressed by the high cost of fuel, but lifted up by the abundance of Electricity!

    Probably the single most asked question I get besides, do you have a discount code, is,  "Are you just a drop shipper?" I know it's meant as a way for the customer to understand our place in the process, but there always seems to be this under lying tone of, "That means they're not in your hands."  Which you would be correct.  There's also a tone of, "What kind of Drop Shipper are you?" Not all companies that use drop shipping are created equal and we'll  get into that too.

Let's Start with that....

    Let's start with the different types of companies you may encounter that use drop shipping.  It might surprise you that some of the largest corporations in the world use drop shipping.  They have someone make it for them, then someone else handles all the logistics.  There's a company that is worth over a trillion dollars that does that for lots of companies, the Big "A".  That is the core of their "Seller Model".  Not one of my favorites, but you can't deny the fact they do very well as a drop shipper.

    Now there's other companies, usually smaller ones, where the person or people will just pass-thru list an item for a company.  They act more like a sales rep and payment processor.   If you need support or to return something, you'll need to talk with the company.  They would be the other end of the spectrum from the Big "A".

    And then there's companies like ours.  We're in the middle.  We provide listings, support, sales, services.  We don't go as far as the Big "A" in telling our manufacturers how to operate, and we don't tell you to go talk with the manufacturer when you need support.  We ride in that middle ground, providing you help when you need it and supporting our manufacturers in their efforts to provide you with quality products at reasonable prices.

    When you think about if a company  uses drop shipping, remember, it's not about how they get it to you, it's about how they treat you after you got it.

Drop Shipping is Better you say?  Do, go on with your bad self...

    When we started putting E-powersport together we took a long analytical look at the processes involved.  This includes how we store and ship items.  All items, we have so many more coming.  We had some very interesting shipping experiences of our own.  We decided the best way to make sure you get a fully functioning E-bike is to send it freight or Carrier as little as possible.  Or what I like to call, "The LCD Shipping Consideration".  If you've ever shipped an LCD, they're horrible.  80% of the time it's fine, the other 20% totaled.  This is why they tell you to keep the box and all the foam packaging.  Every time you move an LCD you risk breaking it.  This is what we saw with even the heaviest boxed Ebikes.  Double walled would even see rip throughs and in2out punctures.  

    Now you're thinking, that makes no sense, I move the thing all over when riding it.  I take it to the mountains, desert, the coffee shop, etc.  Yes, but it's your E-bike.  All the shipper knows is it's another heavy, awkward box in their truck.  And if you didn't you should've gotten the insurance!  LOL!  Seriously, even though they try, the shipper can only control so much.  There's lots of other boxes, pallets, big things that need to be strapped down and moved with 4 pallet jacks and oops, ripped the box.  

    That's why we decided whenever possible we'll use drop shipping.  If it's cost effectivity no longer provides the same value add we see in reducing the overall shipping and handling issues, then we'll look to do different.  At current, it provides the best experience for our customers, allows us to have reduced costs passing savings on to you and focus our efforts on making sure we're bringing you products that have a very high value to cost ratio.

Responsibility and Sustainability

One of the other big reasons to use Drop Shipping is Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability.  Which is something we're all about, so it makes sense we'd use the method that requires less fuel, less infrastructure use and less creation of pollutants.  As we grow, we'll continue to look at new ways to expand on this vision.  Once we can get things delivered by an Electric Semi Truck it's happening.  When it comes to being a sustainability focused company, it only makes sense to reduce all the things we're working against, by also reducing the amount of impact your exciting new e-bike has in getting to you.  By those numbers if an e-bike company isn't using Drop Shipping, are they really living up to the collective mission?

    There's nothing wrong with drop shipping products.  Sometimes it's actually the best way to go.  It's about how  they treat you once the sale is done that matters most.