Coming up for air: Misinformation, culture wars and eBikes

Coming up for air: All we’ve been doing for four years is taking stock of the here and now, but what about the future? Taking a crystal ball view, industry analyst Mark Sutton looks outward at some potential tailwinds and some new headwinds that may come to govern how we plan for the next ten years…

It’s been just about long enough already, hasn’t it? The bike industry has felt as though it has been the metaphorical deer in the headlights now for a few admittedly tough years. It’s been incredibly difficult to feel anything other than paralysed in the face of extreme uncertainty. How do you plan for a party when there’s rain forecast for months?

While the stock overload is easing overall, albeit slowed by a mix of poor weather and a dire economic backdrop, there’s still far too much of certain lines clogging the pipes. To this day to speak of the overstock issue is to suck the air out of the room. The risk takers and market makers remain sat on their hands, waiting. There’s not much more to say about Covid’s effects on our industry, other than to forewarn the young blood in our industry that next time euphoria hits you must have the foresight to know the music will stop and there will be less chairs.

I distinctly remember 2020. It was pandemonium the second that the trade understood that the set of conditions before us were unprecedented and positive. In the lead up to 2019’s close the trade was gloomy. A popular thread on a trade forum titled only ‘tracking closures’ was (and still is) the most read of all; it’s little wonder that when the tune changed the pure joy at first overwhelmed and then extrapolated outwards. You may recall at the time crashed stock markets, except leading the rebound was medical science, toilet roll manufacturers and bike industry stocks. Then came the vaccine and all of a sudden everything went back to normal for about a day. Then all of a sudden nobody knew what normal was and nobody has since.

Anyway, you know the story. You’ve lived it day and night. I promised an attempt at futurism and with each case made I’ll reference a book that has got me thinking about the subject and its effects on our bubble. Briefly on that note, to this day, nobody does this better than Jay Townley and his Human Powered Solutions email is well worth your signing up to, even accounting for its US-focused content.

Misinformation, culture wars and the judiciary

Oh boy, isn’t this wound fresh? While this may seem a relatively new phenomena, truth be told we just live in a digital world now. Everyone became a publisher and then the actual publishers were told they’re no good by an empowered masses. Then came the us vs them formula, turning news channels into entertainment shows with experts and, erm, other people of varying relevance competing for decibels.

How does it relate to the cycling industry? Going back through the archives of the Cycling Industry News Market Data, which is now in its seventh edition, the authors previously adapted a question on the challenges the trade faces on an ongoing basis. When I saw the data I remember glossing past the obvious and, staring me in the face, I recall in the top three adverse outside factors affecting trade seeing ‘cycling’s image in the national press’.

Long before things were ‘woke’, cycling and cyclists were being beaten with a variety of sticks and with the digital age that expanded onto social platforms. Often verbatim attacks and misrepresentations of truths. The bingo card: ‘You don’t pay road tax’. ‘You always ride two abreast’. ‘You weren’t wearing a helmet, you deserve to get hit’. ‘This isn’t The Netherlands’.

You’ll know as well as I that this stuff sticks, even though each point is refutable in seconds with either a Google search or basic decency. No amount of evidence can replace a widely shared, repeated lie. The language permeates deeply. You’ll no doubt have been frustrated time and time again to see the headline ‘car kills cyclist’. Did it? By itself? Language really matters, because those headlines dehumanise us. How about ‘drunk driver kills 10-year-old cycling to school?‘ That felt different, didn’t it? It should, because that’s what happened. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a position where this dehumanisation and the thinking of motornormativity has seeped into the legal system. How often can you recall an ultra-light sentence handed down for a killer driver, or a licence handed back because ‘they need it for work’?

So, how does disinformation build? In recent years dialogue has dumbed down to slogans on repeat. Numbers can quickly amplify an idea, then herd mentality comes into play. Then as more emotion piles in conspiracy becomes emboldened, unchecked by the mob who pile in on any challenger. This is how Donald Trump came out of the shadows and into the light, emboldened by a feedback loop of stirred emotions that draws in a larger and larger crowd. It’s no different when it comes to minor-league culture wars either. The misinformation formula, so outlines author Sander Van Der Linden in his book Foolproof, is to DEPICT: Discredit, emotion, polariSation, impersonation, conspiracy and finally trolling.

In making notes for this series I came to recognise the pattern again in observing how cycling and cyclists have been lesser targeted in the past 18 months or so. Now the focus has turned to ‘electric bike fires’, ‘speeding eBikers’, ‘criminals on eBikes’. It is the familiar generalisation and misinformation formula in a different era.

Now, two things can be true at once. All of the above are problems, but they are also misrepresentations. Insurance firm Laka dug up the stats on e-mobility goods fires this summer and found that of the half million e-scooters and bikes on the market, 0.011% encountered a fire. 99.989% did not, but if you check Google news at the time of writing with the term ‘electric bike’ headlines mentioning fire are available on tap. This is what’s known as an availability bias, which in simple terms is our tendency to be able to recall recent examples without considering the broader probabilities over an extended period of time.

The vast majority of bike shops I’ve spoken to in the past year say that 50% or more of customers mention fires when buying, which is obviously wildly disproportionate when you consider that the same person would never question the shop assistant in TK Maxx when buying a candle about how often they cause house fires, or to be less silly about it, ask a car dealership the same. By the way, car fires happen more often than eBike fires; a rate of 0.1%. Who’d have thunk it?

Call me crazy, but if I were to sow the misinformation seed that this is right out of the big oil playbook to keep the advancing eBike industry at bay as cars become a harder sell, well you might find yourself repeating it, just to test the water with like-minded folk. Just a little suspicion goes a long way nowadays when such things can amplify at unprecedented speed. See how easy it is to say something plausible, without any true basis and just see which way the wind blows? Of course, the oil and motor industries have run larger, more effective campaigns to paint it as a superior transport in the past, so who knows.

When it comes to combating misinformation Van Der Linden commissioned a game designed to pre-bunk and immunise against misinformation. The theory goes that a weakened, light-hearted dose of a piece of misinformation can reduce the credibility down the line and help people susceptible to falsehoods better spot them in advance.

When you’re in the process of selling an electric bike, you might pre-warn that ‘there are some crazy stories about eBike fires are out there in the press, but that really there’s no difference in the battery to that of the phone in your pocket. Just don’t try to strap a can of Nitrous Oxide to it like in the Fast and Furious and you’ll be fine.’ Keep it light, and informative then show them where they can find more information if they want to. Job done.

Drawing somewhat closer to a conclusion, we have a perception and education problem and it’s BIG. Because of the press amplification of this subject landlords, transport services and major buildings like Canary Wharf are now banning electric bikes from premises. That is absolutely a stone-cold sales killer on all fronts and it may well be the industry’s most underrated threat at this moment. Not a problem of our creation, but ours to fix all the same. We absolutely have to fall in line behind the idea the electric bikes should not be tampered with, that conversion kits must be tested and regulated, also that universal charging kits from mass merchants be prohibited from entering the market.

I raise this because it’s serious and in witnessing the powder keg the UK became on the basis of misinformation this summer I know how susceptible so many people can be to a lie repeated often. I also just don’t want to have to spend another ten years arguing about a ‘road tax’ equivalent for the eBike.