e-Bikes + China = Hope

Next Page >>

Third, many of the middle-class Chinese with urban jobs who Westerners count among those soon able to afford automobiles, mainly because they work in cities, will not have the extra money to buy a car.

The average Chinese worker is not uniformly a middle-class consumer of escalating affluence.

Most Chinese have current or recent ties to rural life in the poor, vast inland.

Ironically, it is the people living in the countryside who are the Chinese who could make good use of automobiles.  They have distances to travel and somewhere to park.

But they can't afford cars. 

Nor could they afford the expensive tolls that automobile drivers must pay on national highways.

Some migrate temporarily to the cities for work in order to earn money for their families in the countryside. Others relocate permanently and become residents of sprawling cities.  In both cases, incomes remain low and their savings sufficient only for necessities.

These Chinese workers with current or recent rural connections save their money with great care for a home and a child's education.

Soon after the child's schooling finishes, savings must pay for a wedding.  Next, savings must cover medical expenses ... until old age and death.

That is the extent of the economic cycle, and the major expenditures, in the lives of many Chinese workers, of both urban and rural origins.

Slowly, the life of these workers is becoming more stable and predictable, more secure.  It is not rapidly approaching a point where it will include automobile ownership.

For these reasons -- that those who have money for automotive purchases are city-dwellers for whom cars seem a burden and installment debt foolish, and that average Chinese workers are not overwhelmingly the affluent consumers with an abundance of disposable income that Westerners imagine -- a reasonable person may doubt that the average Chinese worker will soon face the choice between an e-bike and an automobile.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Next Page >>

Visit eBikesDaily.com each day for photos and news of smart riders and the electric bikes and scooters they use for daily transport.  Here are the bikes and people who help drive today's exciting innovation in e-bikes worldwide.