Jonathan Xavier Weinert 2008

The following entry is a brief summary of the two papers I've written on electric bicycles and scooters (e-bikes) in China.  For the full details, refer to the papers written by Chaktan Ma, Chris Cherry, and also available on my website under the "My Projects" section.

SUMMARY:
E-bikes, though they floundered twice in the 80s and early 90s, experienced extraordinary growth in the late 90s to the present due to a combination of economic, technical, and political factors (Weinert, Ma and Cherry, 2006). Firstly, E-bike technology, specifically motors and batteries, improved significantly during the late 1990’s. Simple technology, a vast supplier base, and weak intellectual property protection made it easier for e-bike makers to enter the industry, increasing competition and driving prices down.
    Secondly, Incomes of urban households and the share spent on transportation both rose considerably due to improving economic conditions nationally. E-bike prices decreased, gasoline prices rose and electricity prices in rural areas dropped, making e-bikes more competitive economically with alternatives like gasoline-powered scooters and bus.
    Thirdly, national and local government policy motivated by energy and air quality issues created favorable conditions for e-bike growth. Banning gasoline powered motorcycles in large city centers removed the most competitive mode from the choice set.  National e-bike standards with loop-holes and flexible guidelines created a rich opportunity for manufacturers to create e-bikes that appealed to more users, namely, scooter-style electric bikes.
    Furthermore, due to changes in urban form, performance of alternative transportation modes decreased as trips lengths and congestion increased.  This made trips difficult to traverse by bicycle and slow by motorized modes, particularly buses and taxis.    
    The history of e-bikes in China provides an important lesson on the powerful impact of regulatory policy, given the evolution of technology to a market acceptable product. While technological progress was required to meet the customer demands for economics and performance, the regulatory environment provided strong impetus for the market to grow and for further investment in technology evolution. Without this the e-bike market would not have emerged. Support for this conclusion can be found by looking at the lack of growth in “anti e-bike” cities. There is further evidence of the sensitivity to local policy in Shanghai, where an alternative (LPG scooters) emerged in a regulatory environment that was otherwise favorable to e-bikes. Where regulatory policy is favorable / neutral, economics and customer expectations will determine market success.
   

    While electric bikes have some positive impacts on transportation and urban air quality, policy makers are not unanimously in favor of this mode resulting in e-bike bans in three cities. Safety is the most commonly cited concern due to their silent nature and increasing speed and weight.    City planners and policy makers are undecided on how to plan for and regulate e-bikes because it is not yet clear what effect they will have on travel behavior, public transportation use, and safety. To begin to understand these effects, we have surveyed 750 bicycle and 450 e-bike users in Shijiazhuang, a medium-sized city with particularly high two-wheeled vehicle (2WV) use, to identify differences in travel characteristics and attitudes (Weinert et al, 2006).
    From the survey results, we found that e-bikes are enabling people to commute longer distances. This has important implications on energy use, accessibility and urban expansion of cities. People under-served by public transportation are shifting to e-bike though they depend on public transit as a back-up option (i.e. during inclement weather).
    There are concerns by both bicycle and e-bike users about the e-bikes being too fast, however e-bikers find crossing intersection easier than bicycles. Women feel safer crossing intersections on an e-bike compared to regular bike, however they have strong reservations about increasing e-bike speed capability.
    E-bikes have zero tail-pipe emissions, however the electricity used to charge their batteries comes from power plants which emit pollution; these plants are 70% coal fired in China. Lead emissions from batteries production and recycling also have serious health implications due to high lead loss rates in the Chinese lead and battery industries (Cherry, 2006).    

Authors
Jonathan Weinert, PhD Candidate, UC-Davis Institute of Transportation Studies,
Chaktan Ma, Masters student, Tsinghua University Transportation Engineering,
Chris Cherry, PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies
Dr. Yang Xinmiao, Professor Tsinghua University

 

As of Oct 20, I became the proud owner of an electric vehicle.  While in America, this makes me join the ranks of a select few thousand, I'm just a drop in the bucket of the 18 million people in China who are also projected to buy one in 2006.  I'm not talking no EV1, Smart car, or GEM.  No, I forked over a whopping $260 (post-haggling, I'll have you know), for a slick new, sizzling "Vespa" style e-bike!  

Life on campus at Tongji University has never been the same.  All of a sudden, my morning commute from my dorm to the office goes by a LOT quicker (used to take me 5 minutes by bike.  I shaved it down to 2.5 min by E-bike.  I rule!!).  I get a lot of stares/glares as I silently whiz past the crowds of bikers and walkers on their way to class.  My dorm security guard comments, "Wow, your bike is cute. Hehe, kind of looks like a girls style e-bike." I pay him no heed.  I know this bike is one thing and one thing only: big PIMPIN' (that means "cool" for all you over 35). I'll let the picture below do the talking.(can you tell which one's mine??)

So let me give you the stats on my new ride (nicknamed Xiao Ma Zha, or "lil'  grasshopper").  It made by a subsidiary of Honda (XinDaZhou in China). It does 0-27 km/hr in about 18 seconds.  After 8 hours of
charging, I can go about 30-35 km.  Motor power: 250 Watts (that's 0.34 hp for all you gear-heads out there.  I know you're jealous!).
It weighs 50 kg.  It has no less than 32 small  but absolutely precious butterfly stickers on its body panels (and two on the battery).

I'll admit, I've had to bring the e-bike into the dealer twice for some work already.  I noticed the actual range was nowhere near the stated 50 km range (I only got 28 km on an accelerated discharge test).  One of the  batteries was faulty, but they swapped it out and now my bike manages to crank out a modest 35 km per charge.   Only other problem is that my horn intermittently fails (not a minor safety hazard in China!), and the brakes needed adjusting.  Besides that, this bike is a gem.

One downside to this whole e-bike thing however is what I call the
"General Tsao Effect".  I used to really look forward to a quick
little bike ride from the cafeteria back to the office after lunch to
work off that heavy "General Tsao's Chicken" sitting in my gut.¹
Now, it just sits there.  Pre-E-bike, this past year in China, I've
been exclusively relying on bicycle and bus to get to/from and around
campus.  If you want to know why there are very few fat people here,
one main reason is that going anywhere takes a fair amount of work
(standing, waiting, pedaling, guarding bag from theives), which is
tiring day after day!  I've had the recent fortunate experience of
suddenly lifting myself out of the ranks of the non-motorized to the
"elite" motorized class (though admittedly still on the lower tier).
As an American, I don't remember making this transition, probably
because my parents drove me everywhere I needed to go pre-16, and I
just rode a bike for fun (or for my paper route).

Seriously, this whole e-bike life is surprisingly pretty nice.
Electric drive is great because it's so quiet and peaceful yet
powerful, kind of like sailing.  I can see why this technology is so
attractive in China.  They're not all that fast compared with cars or
motor scooters, but they're a heck of lot easier and more comfortable
than riding a bike, which is what a lot of people switch from.

Satisfied Customer,
Jonathan

1. Actually, they don't have any General Tsao's chicken anywhere in CHina! Yeah, disappointing, I know! Believe me I've searched. In fact, I haven't even never heard of this mythical General Tsao. For the best GTC, you will have to settle for Middle Kingdom in Ann Arbor Michigan. 

Just wanted to send a little hello from China and tell you what's new.

1. Biggest new thing is: I've changed my research subject!  Instead of researching hydrogen and fuel cells, I am now exploring a relatively recent, and rapidly growing transportation phenomenon in China: the rise of the electric bike.  To find out why and learn more about this, check out my latest blog on this and new e-bike/music video at www.fuelcelltrek.com

2. I've been spending the last few weeks up in Beijing working with some researchers at Tsinghua, so I'm getting to experience a whole new city, college (which is very beautiful by the way), and make new friends which is always fun!  Right now we're working on a project with the World Bank on how to preserve bicycling (and e-biking) as a form of transportation in Shijiazhuang, one of China's capital cities (pop 9 million).  The car is slowly taking over there, but the e-bike may help slow this process.

3. I did an interview with the BBC recently about a really interesting development on a large island next to Shanghai, and how they want to make this island completely energy self-sufficient and environmentally sustainable.  It's called The Dongtan Island project.  If you want to learn more about how Shanghai plans to build the world's first Eco-city (and hear my 2 cents on it), click on http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/costingtheearth_20060427.shtml  (if you don't want to listen to the whole show, I come in around minute 21, but don't mind me throwing a few embarrassing Valley-girl-ish "like"s  here and there).

4. I just partook in my friends wedding... and I was the Best Man!  For those that got my last message last Thanksgiving, weddings are indeed pretty wild, though at this wedding (unfortunately) no one got naked  and (fortunately) there were no wolves.   They DID however haze me worse than any fraternity guy I've ever encountered (best man traditionally winds up very drunk at the end of the night). See attached picture (it's a little bit like a "Where's Waldo" picture isn't it?.)

May, 18 2006:  So, as some of you know, I’ve been on a quest for the past four years seeking out a form of transportation that doesn’t pollute our cities, that’s energy efficient, and that doesn’t depend on oil. I had high hopes that I’d find this in fuel cell and hydrogen technology, thus I embarked on my “fuel cell trek”. This trek has led me from the world’s automotive heartland, Detroit (though maybe not for much longer), to the world’s center of innovation, California, (where semi-conductors and boy-bands were born), and finally to the world’s manufacturing mecca, and rising global consumer of cars, China.

Well, after four years of looking, I finally found it in a very unsuspecting place. In the 1,000 year old village in the Shanghai countryside, where people live on a couple dollars a day and the average home lacks even a toilet, it hit me (well, almost). I was crossing the intersection and nearly got blind-sided by a surprisingly quiet…zero-emission… Electric Bicycle.

(my all-time favorite ebike picture: A guy riding his ebike...carrying another guy...carrying another ebike...while onlooker stares in disbelief!)

While this was my very first encounter with this intriguing technology, it definitely wasn’t the last. It’s kind of like when you sit down on the sidewalk in summertime and start staring at the ground, first you see one ant… then a couple more… then you realize the whole ground is swarming with bugs. That’s how electric bikes are in China. Once I started noticing them, I noticed that they’re everywhere and the numbers are growing fast. In 2000, 330,000 were sold in all of China. By 2005, they were selling 10 million a year. (picture below of guy taking a heavy load by ebike)

Being a graduate student researcher, it’s my job to ask questions that will keep me in school a little while longer (joke^_^), so I starting inquiring into WHY this is such a big phenomenon in China, while in the rest of the developed world, the car is the mode of choice. Well the first obvious reason is that these bikes and the fuel they consumer are dirt cheap. You can buy one for the price of an average cell phone here ($100-$250 USD), and to charge the battery for a month's worth of commuting (3-40 km/day) is a whopping $1.25. Another big reason is that cities have started banning gas powered scooters and motorcycles in some city centers to reduce air pollution. Ebikes came in to fill the void. Another reason is the strong history of bicycle use in China. China has an estimated 450 million bicycles, and most people (besides the extremely poor) have at some point in there life used a bike to go to work or school. There’s more reasons, which I’m beginning to explore and which will ultimately form my dissertation. I’ll bore you with the details at a later time.

The important point is that, in terms of sustainable transportation for developing countries, this is a really interesting technology!

Why:
- You can go 100 km on 1.5 kWh, equivalent to 1,362 mpg gasoline equivalent (33.5kWh=1 gal gas equiv)
- It's a zero-emission vehicle (important for urban cities, though pollution is still generated at the power plant, which is usually coal in China)
- The fuel can be made from renewable energy

These three reasons alone make e-bikes a homerun for cities plagued with poor air quality and governments worried about energy security and future oil supply. No need to even mention the benefits to congestion, parking, and the increasing mobility it's bringing to working women and the elderly.

The even more interesting question is: what will e-bikes lead to? The world is watching (while nervously biting their nails) while China buys more and more cars and gasoline. This will inevitably drive up oil prices around the world, not to mention the environmental disasters that loom ahead from the CO2 and other pollutants emitted by a billion more cars.

Will battery technology develop faster because of this huge new market and possibly open the door to completely electric (or at least strong hybrid vehicles)? Will the super-cheap Chinese ebike and rising congestion in cities “drive” people out of their cars and onto an e-bike? Will a Chinese-specific new all electric mini-car evolve from this?

Hydrogen:
So what does this mean for hydrogen (and more importantly, for Hydrogen Boy ;-), see my Halloween 2004 costume). Well, as some may say, I guess I’ve jumped off the hydrogen wagon, at least for now. It just seems so far away. I’ve been involved pretty heavily for the past 3 years, and of course there’s been some great progress, but realistically, there’s some huge technical challenges that need to be overcome (namely in reducing cost and durability of fuel cells). In China, these problems are magnified by the even greater pressure for cheap and reliable transport. I’ve been going to fuel cell and hydrogen conferences and events for years which was pretty much the only place I could catch a glimpse of the the technology in action. I just went to my first ebike trade show last week in Shanghai where hundreds of exhibitors were showing off their ebikes or batteries, motors, etc. My friend, upon leaving the show, hopped on his e-bike to head back home. I can’t wait for the day when people are actually driving fuel cell cars to fuel cell conferences, but it seems still a long way off.