I'm really baffled at (e-)bike prices remaining so high. There's certainly not more research than what goes into cars, admittedly amortized over smaller production runs, and battery packs should (should, but don't) cost very little (at 100$/KWh, my bike's pack should be a whopping 43 bucks, let's say 100 if we include the frame mount, the lock, the wiring and the charger).
There is SO LITTLE material overall in a bike, with 99% of the tech having changed little since the '70s, so I guess it's not patents or IP either. It's not the wheels, I can buy replacements for little. It's not the shifting system, a crappy one is 100 EUR and a decent (low-end) Shimano is under 200. It's not the chain, those are 10 bucks, maybe 25 for the higher strength ones appropriate for an e-bike. It's not the motor, as I can get a conversion kit off ebay for 150-200, which includes a wheel and electronics.
Yet, 25kg of ebike costs 12% of 1000kg of a low end city car, while using 40 times less material and not having to undergo all the same rigorous testing, homologation and what else.
What am I missing? Is it all in the frame? Is it all profit? Am I looking at this from a completely wrong perspective ?
Regular non-electric bike pricing gives some good clues. There are decent bikes made by Asian ODMs quite affordably, with simpler but good enough parts like steel frames and 3 or 7 speed IGH. They're not that easy to find on the market because it's hard to tell them apart from the crap ones, and this state of affairs is profitable to people selling bikes.
Also there's been a lot of consolidation, and there aren't many big bike manufacturing companies, so some illegal collusion is not out of the question.
Retail batteries are not $100/KWh. If you source high capacity cells from China, you can get maybe $140/KWh. That doesn't include a BMS, enclosure, labor, etc.
I completely agree with you on prices for bikes being to high. I think the reason for it is that bicycles are considered luxury items. They cost so much because people are willing to pay more and there isn't enough volume in bike sales to justify large economies of scale that drive down the price - used bikes eat up that part of the market.
If you look at bicycle parts then it seems like half the parts get updated once or twice a decade. Yet the old stuff was mostly fine.
When someone does come along and create an e-bike that's fast and comfortable enough to coexist with cars on every road short of a limited access highway it will instantly be regulated into oblivion with a bunch of hand wringing about road safety. See mopeds for an example. As soon as they got both good and cheap they got regulated to the point where a crappy car has a better value proposition.
You can already see a litany of comments expressing support for regulating ebikes so they remain a novelty niche in this very thread.
In my locale, mopeds / scooters had a very narrow niche, among college students and some employees, because they could be parked for free. You didn't want to be driving through the campus in between classes because of the scooter traffic. When the university started restricting and charging for scooter parking, the scooters vanished. At the same time I've seen practically no e-bikes in the racks on campus. Most student housing has no indoor bike storage, and they're hard to carry up stairs so it's a problem to find a way to charge them. On the other hand, as I've told my kids, "you were born with feet, you can pedal a bike." Conventional bikes have returned to their proper place at the top of the student transportation food chain.
In trafic a moped is better than a car, and an ebike better than a moped, regardless of regulations. If they impose a full helmet for ebikes I will hate it, but still choose that over a car.
The ones I like are $2000 to $12,000.
I'm waiting for a Henry Ford type of guy to bring those costs down. I guess the lithium batteries are a big factor in costs?
In the mean time, I'm sticking with my old Zapp bikes. I need a battery though.