While e-bike popularity was growing well, it saw a huge surge in May 2020. This was thanks to the pandemic which had people picking up e-bikes to avoid buses, trains, and taxis. While interest hasn’t reached the peak of that unique time, we can see that 2021 continued the upward trend.

For 2022, that looks to continue. March is essentially the start of ‘e-bike season’ as warmer weather gets people on the saddle, and search interest this year is significantly above where it was at the same time in 2021. Good news for e-bike manufacturers.

The main driver of this interest is Europeans. Over the last 12 months, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and Finland have searched around this topic the most as a proportion of their total searches.

Meanwhile, interest in India and Vietnam is relatively high, while it’s growing in Thailand. Considering the massive use of motorcycles by the average person in these countries, that’s a very positive sign for the future of e-bikes.

It’s not just search interest which is up either. We created a Brandwatch Consumer Research query to track mentions of e-bikes on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and forums to see how they are trending.

E-bike seasonality is present here too. While it’s not as pronounced, the e-bike conversation unsurprisingly peaks in late summer. After a dip when the pandemic was declared in March 2020, interest soon jumped, with things really taking off across 2021. And in 2022, before it’s even over, March has seen the most e-bike mentions of any month yet.

It’s hard to miss that spike in 2020 though. What major milestone of the e-bike’s journey to road supremacy caused it?

Oh.

Nevermind that it turned out to be an electric motorbike, this article attracted huge attention worldwide. And when we dig into the data, often the biggest news stories about e-bikes relate to crashes and injuries.

We wondered if this had affected online sentiment around e-bikes, so we tracked how that’s changed over the years.

That big spike in negativity, for example, came with news of Simon Cowell’s injury. But we can see that negativity has been gradually rising across the years. As of last week, just 43% of electric bicycle mentions were positive.

But when we dig into the topics behind the negative mentions, it’s not full of terrified people tweeting about the horrors of e-bikes. While discussions surround dangerous riders and crashes, another big topic is around them being stolen. On top of that, there’s lots of discussion of how e-bike owners are treated by drivers, or how not enough is being done to support electric bicycle ownership.

On the latter, we can see in the positive mentions why this is so important to many. Along with posts about the general virtues of taking an e-bike on a ride about town, environmental issues come to the fore. Many see e-bikes as part of a green future, with people cutting down on car trips and their gasoline use.

As you would expect, the latter type of posts increased as gasoline prices shot up this month. This shows e-bikes could be positioned as a cheaper and more cost-stable alternative to cars.

Another major topic is how e-bikes open up the world of cycling to people who were physically unable to join before.

With electric bicycles cheaper than ever, it looks like 2022 will be the Year of the E-Bike. But at the same time, it doesn’t look like interest is going to fade away. If things continue as they are, we can expect to see electric bicycles become an increasingly common sight on our roads.

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The Brandwatch Bulletin team