Which budget long-tail cargo e-bike to buy?

As noted in my last article, electrification has helped make it much easier to ride cargo bikes, so they become car replacement vehicles for ordinary people who don’t have the leg power to push a heavy bike. However, just as important as adding an electric motor has been the advent of long-tailed cargo bikes, which have longer racks in the back for carrying kids, groceries, work tools, etc. The long-tail helped popularize cargo bikes and make them accessible to the general public.

The Long John or bakfeits style bike with a flat rack or box in the front of the rider is arguably the best type of cargo bike for carrying heavy weight, but those types of bikes are very expensive and they don’t have the maneuverability and balance of a normal bike, plus they are much longer than a normal bike. For people who want a cargo bike that handles like a normal bike and they don’t want to pay too much for the ability to carry around extra weight, the long-tail cargo bike is the best option.

Understanding the growth of e-bikes around the world

The revolution in electric micro-mobility is happening all over the world, but it is happening at varying speeds and in diverse ways around the globe. Although most news outlets focus on the competition between Tesla and BYD to gobble up the market of the legacy auto companies, and the latest EV startups to crash and burn, the changes in micro-mobility happening on the ground around the world are far more interesting and exciting in my opinion.

Unfortunately, it is hard to keep track of what is happening, since much of it doesn’t make headlines and is often poorly reported. I thought it was worth summarizing some of the trends in electric bicycles that I see globally and observing how I think they will translate in the future to developing countries like Bolivia where I have lived for the last 17 years. What happens in places like China, Europe and North America does reverberate in the rest of the world, but how that plays out on the ground is often unexpected and worth our attention.