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Comment by bliker | Hacker News Reader

I think in many cases ebike can easily replace a second car in a family.

Yes, we went down to one car and two e-bikes. It would have been a struggle without the bikes as we live in a semi-rural area with poor public transport.

Same here. We live 18km from the city center. We have an electric car that we rarely use and two e-bikes (45km/hour kind) that we both use daily to go to work (300m elevation change). It's perfect !

How long do your batteries lasts which such a workload?

I have a short 15 minute 3-km ebike daily commute. But after 1 year the battery is obviously weaker. And i never made it past 2 years before a battery swap. I charge daily.

(I still kept my smallish car, which i now use much less)

My ebike has a 814Wh battery. It'll easily do to and from work twice. I've already done 7000km with it and no noticeable difference (<10% ?). But it's true that the battery degrades. I don't really "mind" in the sense that I treat it as a consumable and not a forever item.

That seems particularly poor. I'm still doing regular 30 mile rides with plenty of reserve after 6,000 miles on my original 500 wH battery.

This is what I think needs a bit more discussion & airtime. You're never going to eliminate cars entirely, don't try. But I think there's a good case that one car may be enough for many families when combined with ebikes, transit, & the rest.

Many urban people are also perfectly well-served by the occasional rental/carshare.

This is exactly the setup my significant other and I have. We even live in an urban area that is pretty bike hostile, car obsessed, hilly. We have one car that we share and the other bikes/walks when needed.

There have only been two or three times over the course of about 7 years that having two cars would have been nice, but it obviously didn't make that big of a deal.

It's definitely helped keep us healthier as well, particularly compared to our similar aged friend group (~30 years old). We've both gotten comments from our physicians in the last few years because of this too!

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