You don’t need an SUV. You need a (much) cheaper electric cargo bike. Here’s why
America has an SUV problem. Or rather, just a big vehicle problem in general. The land of SUVs and pickup trucks has somehow been tricked into thinking you need a 4,000-pound vehicle to carry 20 pounds of groceries home from the supermarket.
But there’s a better way, and it’s called an electric cargo bike. It will save you money. It will save you time. It will make you more attractive. And it will make you happier. I all but guarantee it.
Now let’s be clear about something. When I say “You don’t need an SUV,” I’m speaking in general terms. It’s true – generally – for most people reading this article right now.
Sure, there are some of you that regularly transport seven people across vast distances on highway and interstates. But most of us don’t. It’s a simple numbers game. Most people in the US live in cities and urban centers. And that’s why you don’t need a massive SUV.
And even for those that do “need” an SUV for certain specific tasks, you don’t need it most of the time. I’d bet dollars to donuts that most people reading this right now who own an SUV do most of their trips in it with just one or two passengers.
For those that really need a car, you probably only need a small hatchback or sedan. But I’m going to make the case for why you probably don’t even need that, or at least not for most of your trips. Especially when you consider just how far electric cargo bikes have come.
Twenty years ago, a cargo bike was a nifty invention and fun to look at, but they cost a fortune and lord help you if you ever had to pedal one up a hill.
But electric bikes have come to the rescue. Electric motors now allow e-bike builders to make cargo bikes that are easier to pedal up hills (or that don’t require any pedaling at all in the case of throttle-enabled electric cargo bikes). Prices are also quickly dropping, meaning you can get a great cargo e-bike for a song. Instead of buying an expensive second car, you can probably get away with one car and one cargo e-bike.
There are two main styles of cargo e-bikes: front-loaders and longtails. (Technically there are also cargo e-trikes as well, but we’ll leave three-wheelers for another discussion soon.)
Front-loaders have a big cargo area in the front and are generally more expensive due to the funky frame and complicated steering linkage that front loaders require.
Longtails look more like a normal bike but have loooooong rear ends that are stretched to give more rack and seat space behind the rider.
Front-loaders are a bit more advanced and can take more time to get acclimated to, as the rider is much farther from the front wheel than they’re probably used to. If you’re new to cargo bikes, a longtail is probably a better place to start.
Both offer great cargo space, they just do it differently.
Can cargo e-bikes actually replace SUVs?
Okay, so cargo e-bikes sound neat and all. But c’mon, can they really replace cars and trucks?
Yes, for most people they can. And you might balk at that, but there’s a reason why I’m confidently correct here.
It’s true because most people don’t use their SUVs to explore to the Amazon. They use them to go buy the stuff they can’t find on Amazon.
Picking up groceries. Dropping off a kid or two at school. Driving to work. These are all normal, everyday tasks that for some reason people think requires heavy machinery. Which is as ridiculous as it is depressing. If you live in a city and you drive a massive car, then you’re probably in the wrong. Unless you’ve got several dozen 2×4’s hanging out the back of that truck or the entire starting lineup from little Jimmy’s T-ball team in your SUV, then you don’t need that massive vehicle.
I’ve actually used cargo e-bikes to carry construction material before, including bags of cement and dimensional lumber. It’s just not that hard.
And I’ve carried multiple passengers on them as well. Three people on a cargo e-bike is pretty standard, though it helps when one or two of those extra souls are also children.
A reddit commenter in a walkable cities advocacy group recently put it best. As the redditor explained, “Are there viable bikes that can replace the true power and utility of an SUV? Not even close. Are there bikes that can replace what 99% of drivers use their SUVs for 99% of the time? Absolutely.”
Now again, there are going to be those people who say, “But I need my truck, I use it for XYZ that a bike can’t do!”
And I get it. There are some big jobs out there. My sister runs a furniture refinishing business and regularly hauls dressers, desks, and other big things around town.
But then again, maybe you’re just still stuck in that “I need a car to do this” mentality. Did you know there are actually moving companies that work entirely by bicycle? They’ll move your apartment without getting trucks involved.
When there’s a will (and a cargo bike), there’s a way.
Cargo e-bikes save money
Not only can cargo e-bikes do most of what most people use their SUVs and trucks for, but they do it cheaper.
The hundreds of dollars per month that your truck or SUV burns in gasoline would equate to probably less than a dollar of electricity to power an electric cargo bike. If you do some serious mileage then you might be looking at as much as two dollars of electricity per month.
And don’t forget the hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of dollars you’ll save each month on parking, insurance, car payments, maintenance, and all the other costs associated with car ownership.
Even the purchase price is usually 10x less. If you go nuts with the best electric cargo bikes out there from the highest dollar manufacturers, you could be looking at expensive $8,000 e-bikes. But if you are more reasonable, there are great options in the $4,000 range and still very good options in the sub-$2,000 range.
Heck, you can even get close to $1,000 if you really try. Take for example the $999 Lectric XP 3.0. It’s not a cargo e-bike (but rather a fat-tire folding e-bike), though it turns into a cargo bike when you add the $110 cargo package. Or add the $74 passenger package to easily carry a second adult rider on the bike.
Other affordable e-bikes like the Rad Power Bikes RadRunner 2 (or RadRunner Plus shown in the video above) are purpose-built for carrying passengers and offer a comfortable way to bring a friend or loved one on back.
You can even fit two riders on the back of a RadRunner as long as they’re fairly small.
Why drive to dinner in a massive car when you and your wife could zip there on an e-bike built for two? Add a little excitement and adventure into date night!
Look, just think about it
Let’s get real: Most people could do most of their daily travel needs in a city on an e-bike. But because of the world we live in, that doesn’t mean that a car can be totally replaced all the time.
For some people, that means not owning a car and occasionally using a car sharing service for the once-in-a-while Ikea trip or other car-related journey. My wife and I did that for years. If we needed a car for a couple hours here and there, we rented a car for a couple hours. It was waiting on the street corner and that’s where we left it when we were done. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
For others that still use a car somewhat frequently, perhaps that means having one family car but getting an e-bike instead of a second car. And of course, that also means trying to use the e-bike for as many trips as possible.
If you live at the end of a 3-mile private driveway that connects to a 70 mph six-lane highway, then an e-bike probably can’t be your only vehicle. But you also don’t exist because that’s a silly made-up scenario that the anti-anti-car crowd tends to think is all too common.
In reality, of course there are people that an e-bike won’t work for and of course there are still some cases where a big vehicle may be necessary. But those people and those cases are much fewer and farther between than most will realize. Sometimes it just takes looking at the problem from another angle.
The cargo e-bike angle.
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Tesla spent years selling its Full Self-Driving software, for as much as $15,000, with the promise that owners would be able to use that software to send their cars out as robotaxis to earn money when they’re not being used otherwise.
Just today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla will be charging a flat fee of $4.20 for rides in its highly-supervised “robotaxi”. But that brings up the question: if Tesla spent so many years promising that you could use your car to earn money, and it’s using its cars to earn money, then why can’t you?
Tesla’s autonomy efforts started long ago, with the relatively less capable Autopilot software which was first released to the public in 2015. Autopilot operated only on highways and required driver attention, but nevertheless was a groundbreaking driver assist system which was easy to use and more capable than most everything else on the road at the time.
Since then, most brands have implemented systems with similar “level 2” driver assist capabilities.
But that wasn’t enough for Tesla, as it promised that the system would continually improve to the point where its cars would become fully autonomous, and capable of operation without any driver inside the vehicle at all.
Nearly ten years ago, Musk started the timeline, stating in late 2015 that Tesla would have fully autonomous vehicles about two years from then. He also said that you would be able to use Tesla’s “summon” feature to call your car from New York to pick you up in Los Angeles, again targeting around 2017/2018 for that capability to be rolled out.
Tesla soon upgraded its rhetorical ambitions, selling a different piece of software on top of Autopilot, which it calls “Full Self-Driving.” The idea was to pre-sell this software to Tesla owners (with a price that would only raise over time as the system got closer to launch – but that was another broken promise), and if you purchased it, you would be able to activate the software on your car when it’s ready.
All along, Tesla hailed that it was ahead of the field on self-driving efforts, largely due to the enormous amounts of data that it was collecting with millions of cars equipped with self-driving hardware (even though it double-charged some of those owners for hardware they already bought).
It said that, once self-driving is solved, the company would be able to simply flip a switch and enable the entire fleet to drive everywhere, without geofences, instantly with a simple software update.
Musk said in 2023 that this moment would be the “single biggest step change in asset value maybe in history,” echoing a previous moment when he said in 2019 that Tesla vehicles are “appreciating assets”.
The reason for this is because the cars would then be able to operate without a driver, which means they’d be able to accomplish new tasks without taking any of the owner’s time. You could send it to pick up your kids from school and not have to leave work early, or you could get it to grab a delivery for you, or any other number of ways that it would give you back time that you would otherwise have spent driving.
But even moreso, it could make you money. Tesla said it would start its own ride-hailing service, then called “Tesla Network,” and that owners would be able to send cars out, running their own autonomous taxi services while they’re at home, at work, or otherwise not using their car.
Needless to say, none of these promises have played out, despite them being made starting a decade ago.
But despite that, Tesla has already started making money from its system, it’s just not letting its customers who paid $15,000 make money from the system they were promised would be a financial boon overnight.
Tesla starts charging for autonomous taxi rides
Tesla’s much-awaited Robotaxi launch starts this afternoon in Austin. It’s a much more limited launch than one might have expected given the hype and the long, continually-pushed-back lead time, but some people will finally experience what it’s like to be picked up by a Tesla with nobody in the driver’s seat today
But it’s still not a full robotaxi – there will be a “safety monitor” in the front passenger seat, along with teleoperators for backup, geofencing (which Musk once said isn’t “real self driving”), limited operation times, potential weather limits, a user list limited to Tesla superfans, and only around 10 vehicles in the area. It will, however, count as “level 4” autonomous, if there truly is nobody operating the vehicle.
We’re looking forward to the first videos of the experience, which should be imminent whenever the launch does happen. The launch was previously scheduled for this morning, then noon, and now “this afternoon” as announced by Musk today (cutting it quite late, as if Tesla needs the first half of the day to finish preparations on a system that they’ve reportedly been testing for “several days”)
The announcement includes a mention of the fee that Tesla will be charging for this fledgling effort, in contrast with other driverless taxi services that have operated for some time before they started charging fees. Both Cruise and Waymo went through various stages of operation before they moved to public rides with fees, including safety drivers, employee-only limitations and so on.
But by the time they charged fees, they had been operating for some time with nobody at all in the vehicle, unlike Tesla’s first effort today (though both had a waitlist for the public to join the service, but your position in the waitlist was not determined by how nice you’d been to the company on twitter – for example, I used Waymo in a press preview period, and I didn’t have a minder in the car with me telling me that I had to be nice).
Today’s announcement by Musk shows that Tesla is charging a fee from day one, before the system is really self-driving, given the many limitations of this launch. The fee is set at $4.20 – an apparent reference to Musk’s many reported drug addictions.
So this raises the question: if Tesla’s service is good enough for it to charge money, good enough for Tesla to call it a robotaxi, good enough for Tesla to put up a whole page about it, where’s that software update and asset value increase Tesla owners were promised?
After all, this was supposed to happen instantly, delivered to the whole fleet, and not geofenced (except for the matter of regulatory approval – how’s that going for you, Elon?). That’s the story Tesla has always told, anyway.
Some will point out that this measured rollout of autonomous taxis makes more sense, as safety is paramount. This is obviously true, and is why other companies have focused on gradual rollouts. But if this is still just a test and isn’t full self-driving by Musk’s definition, then Tesla probably shouldn’t call it a robotaxi and probably shouldn’t charge for it.
Also, those other companies didn’t spend ten years selling a system, for up to $15k, promising the largest asset value increase in the history of the world. They didn’t say that you’d be able to summon your car across country to come get you. They didn’t claim to be robotaxis when there was a safety monitor in the front seat, and they didn’t continually hype up a launch that got pushed back the better part of a decade and is still being pushed back today, on launch day, as the hours tick on into “afternoon.”
Meanwhile, Musk’s mouth is still writing checks that Tesla owners can’t (yet?) cash, as just today he posted a clip of himself being interviewed last month, stating that “by the end of next year” (Elon! Play Freebird!) Tesla will have hundreds of thousands or millions of autonomous taxis on the road, making money for customers who purchased FSD.
So, Tesla owners get to wait, once again, until Tesla deigns to give them the crumbs they paid so much for and have waited so long for. The company will be happy to collect money itself in the interim – but you can’t. Thanks for the 15 grand.
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A record-breaking heat dome over the central United States is sending temperatures – and cooling bills! – soaring into triple digit territory. Luckily, there’s a readily available technology that can help keep your home cool without playing that infuriating and unwinnable “keep your thermostat at 79 degrees” game: a home solar and battery system.
SKIP THE STORY: get me a price on a home solar system.
This summer of 2025 is just getting started, but a massive “heat dome” enveloping much of the central and eastern US this week will lead to, “levels of heat and humidity not seen in June in many years,” according to AccuWeather. “There will be little relief at night, with some urban areas failing to fall below 80 for multiple nights in a row, increasing the risk of heat-related ailments such as heat exhaustion or stroke.”
All of that sounds horrible, of course – but if you’ve been looking for an excuse to add a home solar and battery solution to your home, a terrifying heat dome is as good an excuse as any!
If you need more to consider:
- Solar panels can reduce (or eliminate) your energy bills: this one’s obvious, right? If you’re using less grid energy then your bills will go down – and at a time that not much else is!
- Solar panels act as physical shields for your roof: this 2011 study by the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego found that solar panel arrays can reduce roof temperatures by up to 38%, resulting in cooler attics and less heat transfer into your air conditioned living spaces.
- Keeps your home cool when the grid fails: massive heat means massive loads on your local grid, which can mean rolling blackouts or brownouts. If you lose power in your neighborhood, a solar panel array alone won’t keep your lights on because grid-tied solar systems are designed to automatically shut off for safety reasons, preventing electricity from flowing back “up” power lines and endangering utility workers trying to restore power. Home solar not only reduces the load on your grid, but a battery backup will enable you to keep your home and food cooler while services are restored.
- Fight back against climate change by choosing a renewable resource: because the energy you’re using to keep your home cooler is for sure coming from a renewable source when you’ve got solar, it’s a fair bet that it’ll greener than whatever you’re doing now, even at a lower temperature setting.
- The right time is absolutely RIGHT NOW: in the latest Senate version of the GOP’s budget and tax bill, better known as Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the established 30% tax credit for home solar and battery systems is going to be over (bye-bye) 180 days from the time the President signs it (other tax credits for utility-scale solar and wind projects are going to be completely phased out by 2028). That, combined with record low battery prices, mean the timing is tough to beat.
That’s my take, anyway – and as the temperatures keep climbing, it makes sense to make sure your roof is doing more than just impersonating Sheryl Crow all summer.
In a home solar and battery backup system, you’ve got a real, physical, and electrical edge in the fight against this years’ relentless summer heat wave … and, like, not to sound alarmist or anything, but it probably won’t be any cooler next year.
Original content from Electrek.
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