My commute is 11 miles each way in busy city conditions on a steel touring bike. It was exhausting and very hard when I started . . . but after doing regular 70 - 80 mile rides on weekends this summer it has suddenly become an awful lot easier, and much more comfortable.
So, you have the freedom to commit ~20+ hours/wk to your "commute" (~40 minutes plus endpoint each way, if not more, depending on the city, and 4-5 hours a weekend on rides). Cool. Not everyone does.
If you have valid other reasons to get an ebike, then knock yourself. It sounds like your primary reason for wanting one right now is that you're afraid to really commit to making yourself tougher. That's a shitty reason.
And so yet another person probably keeps commuting in a car, because they don't have the time to commit to a pure bike commute, and isn't in shape for what is a fairly long bike commute. And will probably come up with excuses to not ride for a variety of reasons, until they're back to where they started.
Cool. I'm glad that approach is working well for you, but I've seen the result of the past 30 years of "Hardcore Bicycling or Nothing" folks trying to get people on bikes, and it doesn't work.
And, really, I'm sick of that attitude towards electric bikes from all directions. Not everyone is in a position to dedicate 2 hours a day to their commute (which is reasonable for a 13 mile commute with time to shower or cool down, assuming that their office has locker rooms or showers), and saying "Suck it up and deal with it, buttercup!" isn't particularly likely to work. Even on this forum.
Electric bikes for a commute, especially a longer commute, are a whole lot better than a car (can you at least agree on that?), and offer solutions to quite a few bike commute problems.
You don't arrive sweaty if you don't want to, which means that if your office doesn't have showers or locker rooms, it's not a big deal. If you have bad weather, you can wear nicer rain gear without sweating, which means that even in pretty hardcore rain, one is still dry when arriving, instead of being either soaked by rain or soaked by sweat. You're still out moving in the air, which I absolutely love, and it eliminates a lot of the excuses. You can carry plenty of good lighting, carry a backpack or panniers a whole lot more easily, and if one has hills, they're no longer a churning, grinding, sweaty mess to climb. Yes, I get that some people love that, and those people should realize not everyone does.
I pure-bike commuted for about a year, and it wasn't that fun. It was 5 miles, which is far enough to get sweaty, meaning that I had to either shower at work, cool down, or show up to meetings slightly sweaty. Coming home, I lived on top of a pretty darn large hill, which meant I showed up utterly soaked in sweat and exhausted, even after getting used to it for a year. It took me about half an hour to become useful again, and I pretty much stunk all evening. My wife wasn't a fan.
Compare that to an electric bike commute, which I then did for about 2.5 years (after 6 months of riding a motorcycle and deciding that, no, this was worse than a bicycle in Seattle traffic and there had to be something better), and my commute was as short as driving, I didn't show up sweaty, I could still work out if I wanted to, and I wasn't utterly wiped after climbing the hill.
So, yes, it's a viable option, and I would encourage people who are currently driving to, yes, absolutely, get an electric bike with sufficient range, because it's going to be cheaper and healthier than driving a car, and it means that they'll actually use it, instead of coming up with excuses to drive.
I think that's probably what I needed. I have no physical limitations that would prevent me from using my own leg power to get to and from work. The commute will get easier over time.
If that facepunch works, and you actually bicycle to work, great. If not, might I suggest the electric bike, since it's gobs cheaper to run than a car, and will allow you to bike to work even if you're not in the greatest shape right now?
I've been in e-bike window shopping mode lately. I don't have a car and sometimes you want to show up without being drenched in sweat. Unfortunately, I'm just one of those people who squeezes out moisture like a waterfall. Sweating when you arrive at Home Depot? Okay. But for a dinner party or meeting up with friends at the cinema...That's where the e-bike would come in handy. And I want to be able to dress up a bit without worrying about the sweaty mess part.
Yup! Not everyone has showers at work or a place one can change and towel off. I would take my ebike somewhere in a suit without thinking twice (not that I have places to go in suits very often). If you get a powerful enough one, it's quite variable effort, and if you need to show up somewhere in a hurry without sweating, that's entirely possible.
At the moment, I have made a deal with myself--I need to bike more and throughout the year and if that happens, then I can seriously consider an e-bike in a year or two.
I generally suggest people get the ebike, and buy it with twice the range they think they need, because it's so much more fun than driving that it will replace radically more driving than people assume.
