The next 10 years in the cycling industry: The best time is now

THE NEXT 10 YEARS, PART 2: We’ve spent four years taking stock of the here and now, but what about the future? Industry analyst Mark Sutton takes the crystal ball view at some potential tailwinds and some new headwinds that may affect planning in the next decade. This time, the climate is the topic…

2024 has been the year of writing about things I’d much prefer not to. Having endured six months of fairly non-stop rain to begin the year, boy did I hope that the second half of 2024 would be more productive. In many ways it was, but when the press slings its muck all too often it sticks and as such the industry has spent much of the year fighting fires. Not ones it caused, mind.
In case you missed it, this series started with an analysis of how misinformation has posed what I deem to be a quite uniquely severe threat to the profitable end of the bike business of late; that’s electric bikes and all things to do with expanded mobility.

For those that have yet to read its contents, well, the gist is that misinformation is causing a landslide of consequences for the eBike shop and workshop, none more threatening than having insurance support pulled, or in some cases tripled in cost year-on-year. Having insurance pulled is, coincidentally, a theme that carries through this column too.

So, the plan was to talk about something far more positive in the next instalment of this series, which is loosely pitched as an assessment of the tailwinds and headwinds that will come to pass in the post-Covid trading era. Within each the goal is to make expert references and be able to offer solutions where negatives apply. Sadly this is a headwinds bit; a big one, but with some hopeful ideas all the same. I promise tailwinds will follow this column, but events of late have rather pushed this subject to the forefront.

That subject is the climate crisis. And that’s the thing about the climate emergency, we tend to assume it’s a future problem. Images taken on phones of those in far-flung places. Probably just a fluke. And then it gets closer. It gets more regular. It gets more intense. Often it repeats, just a little closer together than the last interval. Then before you know it your overseas contacts have personal stories, the footage is on their phones. They have losses, whether personal or in business. It’s closer to home. Then, finally, it’s on your doorstep too. Perhaps it’s not devastating, but it’s not normal either. It’s recorded on your phone for the first time and there’s good odds it won’t be the last time either. Forgive me if that seems like scaremongering, but I see it more realistically as trend spotting.
Some of you may remember that around two years ago I signed off my time as Editor of this title with an article talking about how the bike business possibly stood to gain from the shortening of low-elevation ski resorts in Europe. The research I was able to dig out showed a one-way trend of shorter more unpredictable snow seasons and faster melt, as well as seasonal peaks shifting. Some low-elevation resorts at around 2,000 metres above sea level were seriously considering their future. More were just adapting, extending the mountain bike season to offset some of the empty chairlifts. Over a short cycle you win some seasons, you lose others. Zoom out and there is only one accelerating trend.

At Eurobike this year, on the back of that rainy first half in England, I sat with international colleagues at a dinner. Distributors and dealers from Italy, Austria, Germany. Each had something to say on the weather this year in particular. Flash floods the most common theme. It’s the first time I’ve heard the subject of climate brought up with sincerity outside of reporting on the industry’s innovators work in the space to lessen their impact. This was not that conversation, these were real stories told straight-faced, with not much of that look on the brightside spin we tend to put on adverse trends in the industry. We are, if nothing else, resilient in the face of challenges. We’re generally here because we care about our sport, or improving people’s routines, or mobility. Some of us are here simply because we love the outdoors and the freedom bikes bring.
Three months on from that dinner it feels as though the chickens are roosting in ever greater number on our doorstep.

Let me explain the trigger for going early with this column (and I ask that you excuse my omission of the personal side of some of the tragedies in order to stay on brief).

Earlier this year I began to read Ed Conway’s Material World. Only a chapter or so in there is heavy focus on one unique destination globally that has the right consistency of sand to make the silicone that goes on to become the most important ingredient in semiconductors. Semiconductors, as we know, were briefly a flash point of the global supply chain crisis during Covid and I distinctly remember a shortage of these microscopic components being an issue for the production of parts to finish electric bikes.

That location, where this unique ingredient is mined? Asheville, North Carolina in the USA, now known to be the destination of the USA’s worst flooding in recorded history and with a roughly $160 billion damage bill.

You could easily have missed in our media cycle that it was this mountainous region, over 300 miles inland and 2,000 metres above sea level, that saw some of the very worst impacts of the category 4 Hurricane Helene that made landfall in Florida’s Panhandle in September and maintained its strength as it moved inland. US trade portal BicycleRetailer.com reported that on its path of destruction, it took out numerous bike businesses and forced countless others to shutter.

Now, truth be told, I don’t know for certain that these specific semiconductors make it into electric bikes, but many of course do. There are very few semiconductor giants globally, it’s an extremely skilled, secretive business. So, supply and demand stressors would now dictate, with the mega facility now closed for many months on the back of a rare ‘force majure’ notice being issued that lowered supply means higher prices. Perhaps not eye-wateringly so, but as anyone who traded through Covid knows, one week it’s shipping prices rising, the next it’s raw materials. That’s fine in Black Swan events. This hurricane would fairly be considered one. Except it’s not anymore; Not ten days later and another potential category 5 is set to slice through the middle of Florida, presumably with even higher costs on its current path. The ocean between Florida and Mexico is currently one of the warmest bodies of water globally, but it’s not unique, a record number of bodies of water are now above 30-degrees. Needless to say, that’s hurricane fuel.

At the time of Helene, over on the other coast of the North America, Acapulco, Mexico was simultaneously being levelled by the second major hurricane in two years. No one in their right mind will rebuild there now, you’d think. Even if they did, just try getting insurance. This theme, it seems, is going to become a headache for any businesses operating in high-risk areas, but actually premiums are rising generally for anyone near water, be that ocean or river. Dense populations tend to cluster around such things.

I’m conscious that talking about faraway places will lose your attention and as yet I’ve not said enough about bikes, so let’s take a look at this year in England. We know that the first half of the year was wet. Really wet. But more consistently than barrages that came and went. Sub prime conditions for moving bikes, all the same. Now fast forward to September, where the monthly rainfall was 300% above average, 330%+ in localised places like Oxfordshire. Bizarrely, Scotland’s rainfall was generally below normal levels.

For every one-degree of warming the atmosphere holds on average 7% extra moisture, but at the upper end of the scale the water retention calculations have gone as high as 28%. Now that the latest El Nino cycle has been accounted for, it seems generally accepted that we are now beyond 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial baseline and the broadly accepted ‘target’ zone for warming. The 2020 reduction of sulphur levels in shipping fuels that, when spent, reflected the sun’s rays, it seems, had been masking the true warming effects. The result is abrupt and unaccounted-for warming and a spike in abnormal weather events.

Rather than changing course, we’re still accelerating warming. The conditions for cycling are already inclement, to say the least. Personal anecdotes don’t matter much here, but 2024 was the year I bought a full-body waterproof suit. I simply would not have kept up our reviews schedule on CyclingElectric.com without it. A tangible effect on my work and no doubt yours in tandem.
We have, of course, always sold waterproofs and pointed out that people do still cycle in the rain; London proves it as much as Amsterdam at this stage. However, that may suit existing cyclists, but it’s not great optics for marketing to new clients.

Don’t just take my word for it, only two years ago, you (well, 46% of bike shops) told CyclingIndustry.News’ annual market research that the weather was the fifth greatest obstacle to selling bikes. If you’re curious, the top four were safety concerns and lack of infrastructure (72%), cycling’s press image (59%), the perception of theft risk and lack of parking (54%) and Government policy messing with cycling appeal (51%). I’d love to take that survey again now to see if anything has changed.

On the freak weather since, cycling industry advocacy leader Adam Tranter flagged: “Making the UK’s existing transport infrastructure more resilient is going to be urgent, difficult and costly. And we can’t afford not to.”

He’s right. In the UK, 26% of all of our emissions come from transport, so we have a massive opportunity for cycling to make a huge contribution to the national reduction effort. In fact, emerging in the midst of the new Government’s carbon capture announcement came an IPCC graph that showed a deep cost-to-benefit analysis of all the tools at our disposal to make a difference. What is immediately evident is that carbon capture is about as poor an investment as you can make on account not only of its cost, but also its readiness to be deployed at scale. It was, in fact, the worst of all solutions in the energy category.

Scroll down a touch to the settlements and infrastructure section and shaded in blue, which represents a cost so small it doesn’t register on the ‘USD spent to co2 saved’ scale, is public transport and bicycling. The impact of cycling, it is determined, could be as impactful as moving entirely to energy-efficient lighting and appliances and more so than making efficiencies in shipping and aviation.

And guess what: Our industry’s product has far greater potential to reduce carbon emissions than the Government’s costly flagship scheme! Not only is the cost substantially lower, but our technology is already deployed and successful at scale. All we need is a few cycle paths and a little subsidy to drive uptake, as proved successful in France, and cycling could be the silver bullet not only for climate, but also for health and congestion.

It’s crazy that the Government missed this fact, isn’t it? Make sure you remind your MP at every opportunity.

To finish, a few facts from recent research of mine into the subject of raw materials and carbon cost of our industry’s products, comparable to neighbouring products.

• Pound for pound of material, the Tern Quickhaul at 22.9kg carries more load (150kg) than a Tesla Cybertruck, which takes 998kg for its 3,009kg weight. Often they carry the same loads, albeit miles apart in cost to the user and broader society.
• A smaller electric car battery layout typically uses about 66 times the Cobalt and 100 times more lithium. Boost the size to a truck or SUV and the gap widens drastically still; the aforementioned Cybertruck using around 246 times the resources of a 500Wh e-bike battery.
• The Bloomberg New Economics Foundation has found that electric two-wheelers (inclusive of e-scooters and e-motorbikes) are delivering 60% of the world’s transport emissions reductions. They only use 4% of the battery materials that large EVs do.
• Manufacturing emissions attributable to an electric bike are 109 times lower than than of a Range Rover (Source – How Bad are Bananas, Mike Berners-Lee)

Find the first part of Mark’s opinion pieces on The Next 10 Years here.