E-bikes now account for almost 10% of bicycle sales in the UK, with 180,830 of the things sold by bike shops and online retailers. That’s according to the latest data from online statistics website Statista, which found 9.67% of bikes sold in the UK were now pedal-assist models, up from just 0.86% in 2015.

Even more encouragingly for riders, the average price of new e-bikes actually dropped in 2023 across the EU and the UK, down 5.7% at €2,350. It’s something most of us have noticed over the past two years as bike shops slashed their prices to shift the high levels of stock they have backed up. And it doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon, with big sales and discounts on the best mountain bikes expected right up until Christmas.

E-bikes have come a long way since this Cube AMS Hybrid skidded onto the scene in 2015, starting from almost zero percent of the market

It’s hard to argue that bikes have got cheaper over the long term though, something born out by the data. Statista reckons prices did indeed rise by 27% for eebs over the pandemic bike boom, from 2018-2022. We’ve looked into these price rises before, to try and figure out whether bike brands are ripping us off, check out the video below.

Mountain bike sales are harder to dig down into because road and commuter bikes still outsell proper off-road bikes. But Ahrefs, which crawls the web looking for trending information and search patterns, reckons more than 17,000 riders in the UK search for “e-bike” every month, with “e mountain bikes” scooping most of the traffic. That traffic spike is up a huge 60% compared to the pre-lockdown levels of 2019. 

The most searched for brands according to Ahrefs data were pretty surprising too, with Cube, Trek and Mondraker coming out on top.

The UK is still not an e-bike welcoming country though, when you put it into context with the rest of Europe. Germany benefits from over 2.1 million e-bike sales in 2023 – over 10 times as many as the UK. French riders snapped up over 781,000 e-bikes, and in The Netherlands bike shops sold 448,000 despite having a population of just 18 million. That’s one e-bike every forty people. 

Paul’s Cycles, which commissioned the research from Ahrefs saw a 12% increase in electric bicycle sales between 2023 and 2024. Check out  The data also showed:

• 1 in 4 UK adults have considered purchasing an electric bike (Electric Bike Alliance).
• 39% of UK adults in a sustainable transport survey said that a reason for buying or considering buying an electric bike was to tackle journeys that are ‘too long’ for a conventional bicycle (International Journal of Sustainable Transportation).
• 54.3% choose e-bikes because they are ‘less effort to ride than a conventional bike’ while 26.2% choose them ‘to avoid car parking problems or costs’.
• 25.1% choose e-bikes because they are less expensive than driving, and 15.4% because they are less expensive than public transport.
• In the same survey, 24.7% of respondents cited being unable to ride a conventional bike for long as part of the reason for e-bike purchases, while 31.4% chose them for environmental reasons.
• 47% of car owners say that e-bikes are a suitable alternative to cars for shorter journeys (AutoTrader).