Anti-electric bike propaganda
Everyone who owns an e-bike should be extremely concerned about how the car industry is promoting misinformation or true but distracting narratives around e-bike safety.
It's unbelievably hypocritical to point out the need for e-bike power restrictions without mentioning the unbelievable lack of regulations for high-end sports cars or super cars.
The direct analog argument to European legislation is useful for establishing classes but fundamentally flawed. Europe has tons of dedicated bike infrastructure and has spent years building to that. The reality of e-bikes in the US is mixed use: pedestrian sidewalks, roadways, and rarely dedicated bike lanes. If we want to effectively transition to better infrastructure we need to have municipal regulations and not statewide or federal. If your vehicle is substantially slower than others on the same roadway it can create hazards. That's why there's minimum speed limits on the highway. One of the benefits of bicycles is the fact that they have the flexibility to be very safe on a sidewalk and in the middle of a roadway.
The cost of not transitioning to substantially more e-bike usage as fast as possible almost certainly will cause measurably more harm than the alternative. Just because it's not this spectacle, that's in your face doesn't mean that climate change isn't happening obviously everyone in the sub, agrees with that. Cars are treated as a given and e-bikes are treated as the nuisance, so make that make sense. It's clearly big oil and big Auto trying to manufacture consent.