Electric cars will certainly reduce your carbon footprint, but why not get even cleaner and greener with an electric bicycle? Last week, I took a spin on a Styriette at the Magna headquarters in Aurora. What a beautiful bicycle and what a great way to travel on two wheels.
This is a pedal electric bike; you can pedal it normally with no assist or you can dial up the juice and get a gentle electric boost. Dial it up to the top boost and you can really move at the limit of 32 km/h.
Positive assist makes pedalling easy. On the other hand, you can switch it over to negative assist; that makes pedalling harder but it charges the battery. Negative assist is for going down hills or just to give yourself a good workout. These pedelecs, as they're called, are catching on fast in Europe.
This is not an electric scooter - far from it. It is a well-designed, perfectly balanced, premium bicycle that includes a back wheel with an electric motor and a three-speed gear box on the hub, a lithium/ion battery pack and a little controller on the handlebar that manages the whole system. It pedals and rides just like a normal bicycle; the only difference is you can magically keep up with Lance Armstrong climbing L'Alpe d'Huez if you selected the full electric boost.
The first Styriette was built in 1938 by Steyr-Daimler Puch in the hilly region of Styria in Austria. It had a little two-stroke engine to help with the hills. Styria contains Frank Stronach's home town and his current castle. Magna's after-market division, Magna Marque, bought the Styriette brand and decided to update the classic with what it calls its BionX electric propulsion system. Magna Marque's president is Manfred Gingl, former CEO of Magna itself, and you can guess what part of Austria he comes from.
The notable thing about the BionX system is how light it is and how seamlessly the power assists your pedalling.
Adding a bit of rechargeable battery electric power to a high-end bicycle seems to me to be the formula to get aging Baby Boomers back in the bicycle lane. You can choose to have no assist when you enthusiastically start out on your bike ride, but can turn up the power when the hills, headwinds and exhaustion defeat you. You can get a range of up to 80 kilometres if you go easy on the electric-assist. Magna Marque thinks it's got wellness and greenness rolled into one.
Its business is not producing Styriettes - this is a limited-edition demonstration bike. The company builds electric propulsion kits - or modules - for major bicycle manufacturers.
It's the same approach the senior Magna takes with automotive OEMs. But while Magna does business in the billions, Magna Marque has grown from zero in 2007 to a claimed $50-million this year in BionX revenue. It says it's in the business of developing "innovative transportation interfaces between man and machine."
So, what's the next machine for this "interface?" It looks like Magna Marque will have an electric-assisted pedal boat out shortly and it hints mysteriously about a "personal mobility vehicle" in 2012.
But this assisted pedalling doesn't come cheap. The kits it sells to bicycle manufacturers (wheel, motor, hub, rechargeable battery and management system) are about $1,500 a copy. The limited-edition Styriette is five grand.
I've pedalled/ridden the cheapo electric scooters and consider them to be death traps with horrible handling and dodgy brakes. Magna Marque is not interested in that market. It's targeting the high end of the global bicycle market with a product that keeps you on your bike minus the exhaustion.
The Green Highway needs a bicycle lane and BionX might put a lot of new riders in it.
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