On ya bike: growing demand for electric bikes

The future zipped past Nathan Reizer one day while he was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on busy St Kilda Road, Melbourne.

"The traffic was backed up forever and this thing whizzed past us," he recalls.

"Once we got to the lights, we could see it was an electric bike."

Just the ticket

The blur on two wheels was just the ticket for Reizer and business partner Baron Katrinski. The pair were looking to invest into a new business and through research, found electric bikes, or e-bikes, were hugely popular across Asia and Europe. Yet hardly any bike retailers were selling them in Australia.

"We found that generally we'd go to a large, normal bike store and ask, 'Do you have electric bikes?' and inevitably, the guy would say, 'Yeah, we got one or two out the back gathering dust somewhere'.

"By the time we got to the back they were old, clanky, uninteresting Chinese bikes. It was a good indication to us that there was a gap in the market."

Five years ago they opened Melbourne Electric Bicycles, selling motor-powered bikes to everyone from the elderly needing extra oomph up hills to environmentally minded commuters. Read more