Central Shanghai traffic is just as busy as in any other big city – but if you close your eyes, at times you can hear almost nothing. That’s especially unnerving when you cross a road looking at your phone, and a car or a motor scooter suddenly zooms past. That’s because many of them are electric.
For pedestrians, that makes the encounter with electric vehicles potentially deadly. According to one study, electric cars are 40 per cent more likely to hit a pedestrian than a vehicle with a combustion engine. That's why in Europe – from July – all new electric and hybrid vehicles will have to have a noise-making generator, while existing electric vehicles and hybrids must be retrofitted by 2021.
But it’s not Europe where most electric vehicles are hitting the roads. It’s Asia. More specifically, China. In the UK, there are some 140,000 electric vehicles today – quite a surge from just 3,500 in 2013. But in China, 22.7 million of them were sold in 2018 alone – more than in the rest of the world combined.
But it’s not cars that are leading the electric vehicle revolution. “Large scale electric car adoption is still plagued by cost and infrastructure issues,” says Dushyant Sinha, an analyst at Frost and Sullivan. Instead, it's two-wheelers: electric motor scooters, mopeds and electric bicycles, not least as electric cars do not address the endemic issue of road congestion that’s plaguing most large Asian cities.
In China, more than 300 million motorised two-wheelers are on the road, says Sinha; electric vehicles make up around ten per cent of sales in the category. Global sales of electric bikes last year reached 40m, according to a recent report – and China accounts for 90 per cent of this.
The two-wheeled electric revolution is now going beyond China. India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and other Asian markets are starting to embrace electric two wheelers at scale. Global e-bike revenue is estimated at US$1.4bn, of which US$830m is in Asia Pacific. While the rest of the world is just getting ready for an electric vehicle future, in Asia it’s already here – and it’s the electric motor scooters that are leading the way.
For governments, promoting electric two-wheelers helps address the issue of tailpipe emissions, especially in large markets such as China and India, where non-electric but extremely popular two wheeler scooters with their two-stroke engines often get blamed for high pollution levels.
China is not the only the world’s leading market for electric motor scooters and mopeds, but also the leading producer – by far. Manufacturers range from Sunra (producing up to four million a year) to Yadea, AIMA and Zhejiang Luyuan; and, on the more premium end, there is Niu. Also in the running are Taiwan-based Giant and Merida, both of which also have some of their manufacturing facilities located in China. In India, local companies like Hero and TVS have launched electric two-wheelers, alongside startups like Okinawa, Ather Energy and Twenty Two Motors. Japan’s dominant motorbike companies – Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki – have also started to sell electric scooters and bikes.
In a way, the wide adoption of electric motor scooters and bikes in Asia isn’t surprising; after all, sales of petrol-powered motorbikes were already huge. In India, every year consumers buy eight times more motorcycles and scooters than cars. It’s not just about cost or environmental considerations, but regulation: Depending on engine size, in many Asian countries it’s possible to drive a scooter without a driving license. In Vietnam, for example, only bikes with an engine larger than 50cc require a driving license.
Another reason is price. In China, production has reached such scale and efficiency that it’s possible to buy a new electric motor scooter for less than $100. Second-hand models are even cheaper, and users can also buy kits to convert normal bikes to e-bikes. In some parts of Asia, electricity grids are also better developed than fuel stations networks, meaning electricity is also often cheaper than petrol.
The rest of the world is slowly following suit. A recent European Union report estimated the number of e-bikes sold in the EU rose from 1.1m in 2014 to almost two million in 2017; Chinese companies manufactured the majority of them – just under 700,000. Uptake in Germany and the Netherlands has been particularly high.
It hasn’t been without a backlash, though. Heaps of small rental electric scooters from Lime, Bird and the like clutter city streets the world over (alongside the many abandoned dockless rental city bikes). Sales of larger electric scooters, meanwhile, are struggling after the cut of government subsidies; global trade wars are doing their part: US president Donald Trump pushed up tariffs on Chinese electric scooters, and in February the EU announced plans to impose import duties on cheap Chinese electric bicycles.
Wherever you find them, though, electric two-wheelers also pose a safety risk. Electric scooters and bikes have been blamed for rising death tolls amongst cyclists, mostly because people lose control or are not able to come down safely; as they fall over, the fairly heavy electric scooters can crush them.
At the recent Geneva Motor Show, Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Mini and Volkswagen all showcased new electric car models and the sounds they make. For Volkswagen, the sound has to be distinct from the one a regular car with an internal combustion engine makes. It's both about safety and image. “Performance models need to have a more assertive sound, with more bass. It cannot be a high-pitched din, like a sewing machine. It has to be futuristic,” Frank Welsch, who heads technical development at Volkswagen, told Reuters. SUVs have to make a deeper sound because they are bigger, he added.
Mercedes-Benz, meanwhile, is looking into artificial humming noises to warn pedestrians. And AMG is collaborating with the rock band Linkin Park in search for the perfect sound for its electric vehicles. Jaguar has already developed an Audible Vehicle Alert System for its I-Pace model, which is heard outside but not inside and sounds somewhat like a quiet air-raid siren.
Automakers may end up creating distinct sounds for their vehicles, there is an agreed standard: it has to be a mix of white noise and tonal sounds. White noise is pleasant to the human ear, and the direction where the sound is coming from tends to be easily identifiable. Tonal noise from combustion engine cars bounces off hard surfaces, and it’s sometimes tricky to instantly identify the source.
What’s becoming a significant problem in China and other Asian countries today will soon be going global. The National Grid estimates that by 2030 there could be about nine million electric vehicles on UK roads. As the electric revolution gathers pace, it’s high time we got the sound right.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
