Just how much CAN you spend on a cargobike?

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Issue #18 of Cargobike Culture!

This week we’re asking ourselves how much money can we spend on a cargobike. Turns out, quite a lot.

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How expensive can cargobikes get, and why it matters

This week, my wife sent me this picture of a new cargobike she saw at the park:

It’s the new bakfiets from Trek, of which this seems to be the test ride model from the local dealer. It’s super fancy. It’s got the top of the line Bosch motor, a big 750 watt battery, and even reclining seats for the kids.

But I’ve never seen one on the road in Utrecht yet. And I think part of the reason might be the price.

It starts at €8000 (€8500 or £7200). That’s a lot of money.  Eyebrows get raised when I tell people our wooden boxed, 90's designed Bakfiets.nl cost €5000. Imagine how high their brows would go if I owned one of these.

The €8k price point puts the Trek near to, but unbelievably not at the top of the cargobike pricing chart. If you really want to spend big, Reise and Muller will happily take your money.

Their Packster 70 cargobike is beautiful, and starts at €7300. But if you tick all the options which gives you 3 child seats, 2 batteries for a huge range, a rain cover, extra lock, GPS tracking etc, you’ll be paying over €11,000. And even for me (the cargobike evangelist who carefully explains to the eyebrow raisers that actually a €5k bike which replaces a car is a really good deal) struggles to keep a straight face at eleven thousand euros.

You can (and most people do) buy a great cargobike between €5000 - €6000. For example the ubiquitous Urban Arrow Family starts at €6200.

A Lovens (my favourite cargobike at the moment) starts at €5500

And the trusty original Bakfiets.nl electric starts at €3949.

So what’s the story with these very expensive machines.

Well like anything, companies are going to be attracted to all levels of the market. There are always going to be people who need an affordable cargobike (and they get even cheaper than the above examples if you start sacrificing quality), and then there’s the people who want to (and can) spend more.

I’m not accusing the Reise and Mullers of the cargobike world of gouging people. That €11k cargobike is a beast. It’s got full suspension, it’s got a 150km range. You could take that bike and cross a continent on it.

But I think there’s something else going on too.

The eye catching bikes you can never buy

This week I had an email chat with friend of the newsletter, and founder of CycleSprog Karen Gee. We were talking about how expensive some of these bikes were getting (specifically the Velo De Ville FR8 which starts at €7k).

Karen made the excellent point that sometimes it’s questionable if brands really want to commit to manufacturing these eye catching bikes. She explained that she’d seen it before in the children's mountain bike world. Brands will take their new, exciting bikes to shows, put them in catalogues but actually only make a handful. Finding and buying one can actually be quite a challenge.

The $1000 carbon fibre balance bike from Specialized is another example of an eye catching, but questionably practical bike

And I think that some of that might be happening in the cargobike world too. Maybe not the established brands like I mentioned above, but definitely the Treks of the industry. On one hand, it’s good that they’re bringing their expertise and business heft to the cargobiking world. But the cynical view is that cargobikes are big at the moment, and launching a new one is a sure way for your brand to get featured in the press.

Is that a problem? I’m not sure.

The car-ification of the cargobike

Another thing the €8000 cargobike shows us? The more cargobikes are propositioned as car alternatives, the more car-like the prices get, and the more car-like they become. The original Bakfiets was designed for the safe, easy going cycling of the Netherlands and is sold like this:

A Bakfiets.nl press image from their Facebook page

And compare it with how the Trek is propositioned.

I think theres an intangible difference between them. And some of it is brand perception; Trek is a sporty brand which sells mountain and road bikes. It wants to carry that brand value across to the Fetch too. But I think it goes beyond just the branding.

A screenshot from the Trek UK website

Trek are explicitly targeting the Fetch as a car replacment alternative (which is great). And I think when you’re designing a bike for that market, you probably start adopting more car like designs too. Take a look at the kids seats in the Trek:

And it’s not just Trek, I think the Lovens brand also directly target the car replacement buyer. Not only is the photography on their website very car industry like, I think the bike is too. There’s lots of painted metal inside and outside the box, plus they have some very swish brown fake-leather seats for the kids inside. And that LED lens flare! Yikes.

Old man yells at cloud

I’m 35, so I’m not quite at the ‘old man yells at cloud’ stage of my life, and I honestly do love the new cargobikes coming onto the market. More cargobikes = more better.

But, my feeling is that if you target the customers looking for car replacements by designing car-like cargobikes, and selling them in a car-like way, it’s possible that we’re going to loose some of the essence of the cargobike. And more worryingly, repeat the mistakes which the car world made.

For instance, is the trend for car-like, expensive cargobikes going to push the price of the lower cost options higher? It’s what happened in the car world. When people started financing their cars on mass, the industry followed suit with more expensive cars.

These new breed of cargobikes are getting bigger and heavier too (the Trek Fetch is 73kg (160lbs). It’s another trend we saw in the car world, we all know how car sizes have grown and grown over the years. And for cargobikes that’s going to be a problem for a lot of smaller bodied people who can’t manage that weight.

In the car industry, where the premium brands led, the cheaper ones followed. I hope the cargobike industry keeps innovating, but I really hope we learn the lessons from the car industry and don’t repeat their mistakes.

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Other links of interest

There’s a new delivery company launching in Belgium that uses cargobikes (hurray!) to deliver electricity to cars in the city (boooo). As reported in Ruetir, Uze will turn up next to your car, plug it in to the cargobikes onboard battery pack and sell you some electrons.

‘James, why so grumpy?’ Well I think it’s a bit rich to use a cargobike to keep more cars moving in the city. And they’re only using a cargobike because it makes it easier to park next to the customers car. I think if they could use a van they’d probably prefer it.

Its also not a new idea. There’s the most American service available in the states where you can get gas delivered to your car without you even having to be there. At least they do it with a giant pickup and don’t greenwash it with a innocent cargobike.

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That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!