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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

We (family of 5) live in Vienna and we're pretty multi modal. We have an annual ticket for the public transport system, have a minivan, a cargo bike and individual bikes for all of us. On top of that kick scooters. So money is really not an issue when it comes to picking the right vehicle since we have pretty much all the options. Within the city, the cargo bike and the kick scooters by far get the most utilization. The kick scooters in part because they are super useful to speed up the way to public transport.

But man the cargo bike is just a whole different game. Yes, it's a bit heavy but you can use pretty much all infrastructure with it and you can haul a lot with it. Particularly in the summer time when we go to the pools or other activities it's a no brainer. Parking is not an issue, neither is being stuck in traffic.

The cost obviously is a massive hurdle for most families probably, and so is over night parking for many.

Within the city we have more kilometers on the cargo bike than the car by at least double.

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> The cost obviously is a massive hurdle for most families probably, and so is over night parking for many.

Cargo bikes have an absurdly and inexplicably high cost. It's unbelievable how they can easily cost over $5k. That's nearly half a brand new car like a Dacia Sandero. The economy is barely there with all this price gouging.

I imagine economies of scale are much greater with cars than cargo bikes. If it was possible to charge, say, 50% less for a cargo bike I’m sure someone would be, and they’d be taking the entire market with them.

Not to mention, every government tripping over themselves to hand out all kinds of multi billion dollar subsidies to any car manufacturer willing to set up shop in their jurisdiction. And a slew of implicit subsidies to car manufacturing, use, storage/parking, legal frameworks ("if you want to murder someone and get away with it, do it with a car"), etc.

Yeah, scale is the problem. The market is tiny compared to cars and even motorcycles. Brands like RAD and Lectric do compete on price and as a result they sell higher volumes than the nicer expensive R&Ms or Urban Arrows or whatever.

Comparing a cargo bike to a new car only makes sense if that new car requires no fuel, no significant maintenance, no tax, and no insurance.

A $5k cargo bike it’s almost certainly a e-bike, additional cargo bikes haven’t really hit the manufacturing scale needed for automation to make sense. So there’s a significant amount of labour involved in effectively hand building, and hand welding these bikes. Something that simply isn’t true for cars.

I also don’t think there is much price gouging happening with cargo bikes. Unlike cars, the barrier to entry for new manufacturers is practically zero, so if it was easy to build new cargo bikes cheaper, someone would do it.

But even if there was significant price gouging involved. Economically, a $5k cargo bike will have a total cost of ownership orders of magnitude lower than a car, regardless of cars price.

Consumers are very sensitive to upfront cost.

There's a vicious cycle of automobile orientated development creating demand for cars. Cars are considered essential transportation tools. Bikes are considered nice to have recreational, fitness, or kids' toys. So people aren't willing to spend thousands on a bike unless it can replace a car.

You’re making some very big assumptions about “consumers” here. Unlike the U.S. most European cities have decent public transport, and a car isn’t seen as essential.

I live near central London, can easily afford a car, have a private location to park a car etc etc. But I don’t own a car, or consider a car essential, driving in London is simply the slowest, most expensive and stressful form of transport. I do however consider my bike an essential transport tool, alongside my Oyster card.

If we need a car, then we just rent one (and have it dropped off near our home). So we rent a car when going on trips out of London, or needing to move items that we can’t using our bikes.

> So people aren't willing to spend thousands on a bike unless it can replace a car.

That’s a very large assumption, you also make it sound like a bike can’t replace a car. Which simply isn’t true, for many European cities the opposite is true, a car can’t replace a bike.

situation is exactly reversed where I live. Car is a recreational luxury (get out of the city for a day, road trips). A bike is my essential day to day transportation.

The luxury status of cars is cemented by the wide availability of car rental apps that mean I have a car or van always available for the few times a year I need it for a trip to ikea or whatever.

Privately owned vehicles should be banned from city centres.

Most people I see using those 5k cargo bikes also have a car.

> So there’s a significant amount of labour involved in effectively hand building (...)

I call bullshit on that take. Some brands sell electric cargo trikes for around $1k, while other brands sell their cargo bikes for >5k. You can buy a brand new Opel Rocks Electric for 3k more than a cargo bike. Are we expected to believe that an electric mini car is less labour intensive than a bike frame with a bucket and a COTS electric motor? Unbelievable.

This where automation and scale make a huge difference. A bike can absolutely be more labour intensive to build a single unit than a car, especially when said car is being built by a company with expertise in design for manufacture, and production automation.

Cars a built using huge injection moulded plastics components that are trivial to automate at scale, and metal bodies carefully crafted to make automated assembly trivial. Plus there will be a huge investment into fixtures and assembly processes that effectively reduce the human labour to little more than biological end effectors. Little operator skill or experience is needed for high productivity.

Compare that to bike frames which haven’t been optimised to automated mass production, and where manual welding is primary construction methodology. I can absolutely guarantee that a vaguely welder costs substantially more than someone that just needs to operate a fancy screwdriver. Welding requires significant skill and experience to do productivity, and compensated appropriately. Welders aren’t trivially fungible, screw driver operators are.

If don’t think that labour is the reason for the cost of cargo bikes. Then why don’t make contribution and tells us where you think the cost comes from, and why competitors haven’t sprung up to reduce that cost and make a killing.

I'm sure you could recruit the same bike frame welders in China/Taiwan to make a bike for you. There are some that are willing to make custom modifications on demand for a very reasonable price. If they can do that for one-off welded bikes, then making a standardized cargo frame is absolutely doable for a reasonable budget.

Sure, there's more material, more bending, more welds, and it'll cost more, but you could certainly do that within reason. Like much of the bike industry, these markups are rooted in a foundation of bullshit.

Maintenance on bicycles is also insane. An "oil change" (clean and lube the chain) every 300 km or so. Even if you consider that bicycles don't travel as fast and far as cars, that's quite an annoyance to deal with about every 20 or so operating hours.

If you were to actually pay a shop to do the maintenance, I suspect a bicycle would be more expensive per km than a car.

After over 15.000 Km of cycling with our bakfiets, I think I oiled the chain maybe 20 times. Replaced the tires once (and a few spokes due to user error/ring lock still locked+kick stand+two kids in the bike is not a good combo). Still on the first chain and cassette. I have never cleaned a chain.

Maybe your carbon bike with expensive options to save every last gram of weight requires so much maintenance, but any proper Dutch city bike or bakfiets made of steel will last very long with minimal maintenance

It's more about cheap parts - low quality alloys and such will wear at a much higher rate. I killed a Hope cassette in 3 weeks (yes, actually), for example, but a high-end SRAM cassette has lasted me 2 full seasons.

So in some ways, the higher-end stuff can last a very long time.

Some brands (eg: Campy) provide for much better mid-level gear than others (SRAM), but it really depends on the model and the year. Old mid-tier Shimano gear (stx-rc / lx) used to last forever and be a very decent value offering, but times have changed somewhat.

Luckily the prevalence of eBikes is making strong and reliable gear available for us non-eBikers.

> Maintenance on bicycles is also insane. An "oil change" (clean and lube the chain) every 300 km or so.

In the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled 5km to work and 5km back, rain or shine, every workday from March to December in Toronto, Canada.

Every spring I'd spend $100 on a tune up, which usually included a new chain, and every ~second year I'd need a new rear cassette too and some new brake pads too. I've had the same tyres for 10+ years (though I get flats 1-2 times per year so needed new tubes). I lubed the chain once a week from a bottle that I purchased for $10 which lasts for 1-2 years.

I have no idea where you get your bike maintenance ideas from, but my experience was quite different after a decade of experience.

Complaining about oiling a chain is silly (especially with dry lubes), so you deserve a little push back there, but you're not wrong fundamentally.

Bikes in general do need some love. Especially: old bikes, cheap bikes, and heavily used ones: MTB and e-Bikes. They need a LOT of labour if you use them seriously, and bike shops just gouge the shit out of people. My local shop rate is $140 per hour ... for what is very often a sub-par to dangerous quality of work.

I do virtually all of my bike wrenching myself, because I grew up poor and didn't have a choice, and now I do it because I'm stubborn and like to know it's done properly. If I had to pay for all the work I've done, we're talking many 10's of thousands of dollars (I put a lot of MTB miles in). This just makes the whole affair unworkable to a lot of people.

Biking can be extremely economical, but good lord the average bike shop makes it hard. And the community just lets them get away with it, justifying insane markups and gouging by saying you have to support your LBS (this may be mostly astroturfing).

Who would be paying for this astroturfing? Shimano? Cannondale? Mike's Bikes? It's far more believable that bicycle enthusiasts that work at LBS are posting to bike forums at work when it's slow or by enthusiasts while waiting for a part to come in, than a coordinated effort by someone with money to burn is paying people to post on forums and no one's ever reported being approached to do it.

Lubing and cleaning a chain takes literally 30 seconds though and the materials cost like fifteen cents.

How do you clean a chain in 30 seconds?!?

Hold a rag on the chain and spin the cranks?

turn bike upside down, spin chain with pedals using hand, while applying brush and wd40

I find it a bit odd that people do so much service. Is there something about modern chain oil that makes it less effective than in the 80s? I'm pretty sure I forgot the chain most years, though whatever bike I had was always an example of survivor bias.

Modern derailleur systems use very narrow chains that won't tolerate being dirty. A hub gear setup with a 1/8" chain (or an old 5-speed derailleur setup) will tolerate much more abuse. A traditional roadster bike (stadsfiets) with full-length mudguards and an enclosed chaincase throws much less dirt into the drivetrain than a sporting bicycle with neither.

It all depends on how many watts you want to lose to chain friction and how quickly you want to wear other components out with the sandy oil slurry on your chain. If the answers are "I can tolerate tons of lost watts because it's an ebike" and "the components are cheap, who cares" then maybe running a dirty chain for ages is acceptable.

I don't know if it's actually necessary, but it's the upper end of the recommendations I've seen/heard, and I noticed a surprising improvement in performance after I cleaned/lubed it.

I assume it's also more important on e-bikes (and especially cargo e-bikes) since the chain sees higher forces over longer periods of time.

Maybe more important, however in my experience these things are neglected more often with ebikes than traditonal bikes, because the motor compensates the dirty chain or if the tyres could use some air... ;-)

> If you were to actually pay a shop to do the maintenance, I suspect a bicycle would be more expensive per km than a car.

Not even close.

As other commenters have noted, lubing a chain is not especially challenging or expensive.

It takes 5 minutes. Nowhere near as involved as with a car oil change. And it’s simple enough that unless you’re basically inoperant as a being, you don’t need to pay a shop to do it.

With a fully enclosed chain guard, you hardly ever need to clean or oil the chain. Belt drives are basically maintenance-free.

Lots of people missing the point- not abusing and keeping an tool maintained is easy when the market is enthusiastic about said tool.

Which is essentially what most of the cargo bicycle market is right now.

Pushing it to a wider audience and expanding your users pushes the needle in one direction only: those less enthused about care and maintenance.

It also means less skilled riders, less common sense, more abuse, etc.

And if you want to open a business doing this as a service- you have 2 groups of clients: Cyclists and non-Cyclists who own bicycles.

I don't really want to imagine having to deal with either of those as my primary clients. For entirely different reasons. Unless I was charging absurd amounts.

300km is BS. No need to do so much maintenance every week unless the environment is really dirty.

My suspicion is that prices would drop a bit there was more competition on the market. That said: they are not really “mass” manufactured so I do understand the cost. One could probably learn a thing or two from car manufacturing to crank them out at a higher volume and lower cost. Presumably the investment cost into automation however doesn’t pay off.

> all this price gouging

Price gouging is short term and localised. If you truly think you’ve identified a mispriced product, this is HN. You’re capable of more than loosely complaining about it.

> Price gouging is short term and localised. If you truly think you’ve identified a mispriced product, this is HN. You’re capable of more than loosely complaining about it.

I don't understand what point you tried to make. Whenever I see price gouging, my reaction is not to "disrupt markets" or put together elevator pitches. I move on with my life because I have better things to do with my life than planning to startup a company whenever I'm baffled by something.

In this case, if I see companies price gouging cargo bikes, I solve all my problems by not buying one. Easy. No elevator pitch required.

But that doesn't mean that people aren't being fleeced by these cargo bike companies.

> don't understand what point you tried to make. Whenever I see price gouging

You’re describing a product that’s too expensive for you. Just because something is expensive doesn’t prove price gouging.

You may also be confusing profiteering in general with price gouging. Even then, you’re made no argument showing the problem is excess margins. Unless you’re looked into the BOM, labour, inventory and certification costs, “this feels expensive” isn’t insightful.

> I have better things to do with my life than planning to startup a company whenever I'm baffled by something

Then it’s not price gouging or profiteering. It’s someone providing a niche product conveniently.

(I personally cannot see how you can make a high-power, decently-ranged, decent-quality electric bike in low volumes with fairly-paid labor and safe storage of e.g. the large batteries without a cost floor of a few thousand Euro.)

I see price gouging in the price of cheese at my local grocer.

You won't see me buying cows and fencing to disrupt their market, I have better things to do.

> see price gouging in the price of cheese at my local grocer

You probably don’t. You’re seeing some combination of prices you don’t like and/or profiteering.

You might have missed the exchange rate a little. The cheapest Dacia Sandero is over $18k USD, more than 3x the $5k idea. But you can get very nice e-cargo-bikes for $2-3k, and you’re comparing one of the cheapest cars anywhere to the fanciest electric cargo bikes available, which is almost like comparing a $100 Walmart Huffy with a basket to a Porsche. Look for reasonably priced cargo bikes, and you can easily find them.

It doesn't have to be economic if you want it.

> it's a bit heavy but you can use pretty much all infrastructure with it.

What do you mean by this exactly? Can you take it in a subway/train?

I was just in Vienna for a week. I was surprised to see just how many people biked through the city. We obviously spent our time where the tourists do in the center, but how far out from there can you live in Vienna and still have what you said above remain true?

I don’t think the distance to the city center matters but the trips you take. A have a colleague who lives very far out but he cycles his kids by cargo bike to the daycare which isn’t too far away, then to the train before commuting into the center.

In the US at least, the non-car infrastructure becomes less of a thing the farther out that you are.

What are you primarily using during winter and rainy months?

Since our older kids go to school themselves I don't have to cycle them any more. The last few years I dropped two kids of at day care by cargo bike regardless of weather. The alternative is basically public transport because the combination of traffic and lack of parking locations in the city make dropping them off by car impossible for me.

So I basically have the choice of cycling in the rain (the kids are rain protected in the bike anyways) and taking the bus and subway. However at either one of those sides I need to walk a bit anyways and then the kids also get wet.

So despite potentially wet and snowy weather, it's still the best option.

> What are you primarily using during winter and rainy months?

In the Toronto, Canada, I cycled 5km every workday to/from work, from March to December, rain or shine: as long as the roads were clear I added layers for winter, and during rain I put on rain gear (like even a simple poncho):

* https://www.mec.ca/en/product/6017-198/mec-hydrocycle-jacket...

I bought my rain gear many years ago, and it gave be ~decade of service (don't cycle nowadays because of WFH/hybrid, but the gear is still good).

pretty milk winter in toronto as well

> pretty milk winter in toronto as well

How many people live in IECC Climate Zones ≥5:

* https://basc.pnnl.gov/images/iecc-climate-zone-map

And even for those that do, just because someone may not cycle in the winter, that does not preclude cycling during the other three seasons. Further, not all winter days are bad, even in colder climates.

See also "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

Or a fellow in Calgary:

* https://www.youtube.com/@Shifter_Cycling

Or a couple that have live(d) in Ottawa and Montreal:

* https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity/search?query=winter

Winter weather in calgary, ottawa, and montreal are all warmer than winnipeg or edmonton.

All bakfiets models come with (optional) rain tents, so young can kids stay dry and out of the wind. Cold is usually more of an issue than rain on longer trips. In a bit of snow, I feel a lot safer on my bike than in a car. Just adjust speed and do controlled braking to feel the grip (or lack thereof). It helps a lot that I live in a flat country (Netherlands), as snow/ice and slopes are a really bad combination with cycling.

vienna has a very mild winter. they're barely just below freezing most of the time.

People bike in rain and snow.

everything is relative. biking in vienna in winter isn't similar at all to biking in winnipeg in the winter.

> everything is relative. biking in vienna in winter isn't similar at all to biking in winnipeg in the winter.

Perfect is the enemy of the good: just because you can't cycle everyday, twelve months of the year, doesn't mean you shouldn't perhaps cycle for 6/8/10 months of the years when it is "possible".

But on the topic of locations, how about Finland? "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

Or a fellow in Calgary:

* https://www.youtube.com/@Shifter_Cycling

Or a couple that have live(d) in Ottawa and Montreal:

* https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity/search?query=winter

Also look at the larger conversation of one of the most car-centric countries, the US: how many folks live in climate zones (say) 1 to 4:

* https://basc.pnnl.gov/images/iecc-climate-zone-map

What does "winter" mean there?

Ya, I could bike in -20c to -40c weather for 1.5 hours a day in each direction (3 hours a day), or I could drive to work and be warm for 25 minutes and have 2.5 hours to do useful things with my life.

Bike nuts are nuts.

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