E-bikes and e-scooters close to exceeding new car sales

About 65,000 new electric bikes and scooters were brought into New Zealand last year – nearly 18,000 more than in 2018 – set to overtake new car sales in a few years.

The latest e-mobility figures from Statistics NZ show a massive rise in year-on-year e-bike and e-scooter sales compared with slowing passenger car registrations with 104,000 new ones last year along with 140,000 used imports.

E-bikes have become so ubiquitous that New Zealand may need to start re-building its transport priorities around them, micro mobility expert Oliver Bruce tells Stuff.

“They are used in a very different way to regular bikes, we should be thinking of them more like new vehicles.”

Bruce believes people are buying e-bikes to commute and are using them more often than a conventional bike, usually over long distances and replacing car use.

E-scooters are also increasingly popular for short-distance journeys, replacing walking, driving, and public transport.

Bruce sees a major growth opportunity for e-bikes, saying they remove the difficulty in cycling up hills and he suggests incentives could be applied encouraging businesses to provide e-bikes for staff transport.

A discount deal on e-bikes for public servants was announced late last year by associate transport minister Julie Anne Genter.

The initiative was established by the NZ Transport Agency which also helped produce an e-bike purchasing guide for employers.