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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
You won't see me buying cows and fencing to disrupt their market, I have better things to do.
You probably don’t. You’re seeing some combination of prices you don’t like and/or profiteering.