https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24166934/ebike-battery-china-tariff-price-increase-biden-climate
Biden’s tariffs are going to roil the e-bike boom.
While that might be true, it doesn't look like The Verge was sponsored by any specific ebike company to write this article, since they never mention any specific brand.
Edit: actually after scrolling down enough, they did interview people from some ebike company. Still doesn't look (too) sponsored
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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.
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.
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
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced major new tariffs on Chinese imports, including electric vehicles, batteries, solar cells, and a range of other goods.
But environmental groups warned it could hinder our efforts to meet our climate goals by making things like EVs and solar panels more expensive.
“The expiration of Section 301 tariffs will cause a further weeding out of underperforming e-bike companies and, unfortunately, consumers will most likely see prices rise across the industry,” said Levi Conlow, CEO of Lectric eBikes, in an email to The Verge.
And states across the country are recognizing the potential of e-bikes to help reduce emissions and car trips by offering rebates and other incentives to make them more affordable for consumers.
The Biden administration, though, is more fixated on getting people to switch from gas to electric cars, through $7,500 tax credits and billions spent on EV charging infrastructure.
But US companies have an opportunity to step up and reshore their manufacturing operations or find new international suppliers that are located in countries that aren’t the target of our protectionist government.
The original article contains 916 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I think US consumers will manage. As non-American I find it strange that so few Americans seem to recognize that trade isn't going to magically make the world a peaceful united place.
It's all free market until they can no longer compete. Then it's time to get down and play dirty.
The point is that, when trade has the potential to make the world a peaceful united place, capital and its state will violently intervene to extract a "profit" instead.
I'm glad they put the real headline in the URL so I don't have to click the bait. I hate the Internet now. It's like they want us to stay exclusively on the big platforms
Just buy a regular bike. And no you don’t need a expensive Specialized or Cannondale.
No but at the same time you shouldn't buy a bike from Walmart either because it will turn you off of biking pretty fast.
wait did they ban cars? no, so it will be fine, you want a bike (e or not) you can still get them and have no place to ride them safely.
Because there's no other way to affect climate change than to exploit Chinese slave labor?
