Most discussion about electric vehicles currently centres on the sexy Tesla range of sports cars, or the sluggish roll-out of pure electric cars such as the Nissan Leaf or Mitsubishi’s i-Miev.

And that discussion is often focused on the negatives – the high purchase price, the ‘range anxiety’ about how far the battery will get you, the lack of charging infrastructure in Australian cities and so on.

But while those debates continue, at ground level another transport revolution is taking place via the much more affordable electric bike. And yes, I notice this more than most because I’ve been commuting on an electric bike for a year.

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While laws between states and territories vary, most jurisdictions permit two types of e-bikes – power-assisted vehicles with motors up to 200 watts, or ‘pedalec’ bikes on which a motor of up to 250 watts is okay, as long as it’s only activated by pedaling.

Tesla: the much pricier way to join the all-electric revolution. Photo: Getty

In reality, many pedalecs have more powerful motors, and some have handlebar-mounted throttle controls to keep the machine moving when the legs have stopped.

Mayor of the City of Fremantle (recently dubbed Australia’s only must-see city), Brad Petitt, was an early adopters of the technology. He’s already onto his third e-bike, which he says allows him to wear a business suit and ride the “hilly three kilometres” to his chambers.

Petitt says the number of bikes arriving at Fremantle’s main train station has risen dramatically in the past couple of years, with a rising proportion of e-bikes – so much so that the Council is now looking at ways of adding charging stations to the secure bike lockers provided at the station.

This technology is more disruptive than many people have realised, because it appeals to people who would not dream of making the push-bike a mainstay of their travel.

Gary Cookson, who owns e-bike specialist Cargo Bikes in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Collingwood, say for many families an e-bike with load carrying capacity, including child seats, is replacing the ‘second car’ by delivering many of the same benefits, at dramatically lower cost.

Richard Johns, principal of Australian Automotive Intelligence, points out that Australia has never had so many cars on the road.

His data shows that back in 1971, there were 600 private and commercial vehicles on the road per 1,000 Australians over the age of 20. That’s basically the era of the one-car family.

By 2001 that had grown to 880, and through the prosperous mining boom years we bought even more cars to end up today with 989 vehicles per 1000 adults.

Johns says we don’t just have two-car households, but with kids living at home longer there might be three, four of five car households.

An electric bike charging station in Madrid. Photo: Getty

This is where the e-bike may have its greatest impact – not replacing ‘the car’, but replacing the second or third car.

Figures published by the RACQ put the cost of running a small car at 61 cents per kilometre, or $175 per week.

Its research assumes 15,000km of travel a year, and finds the cheapest car in its ‘small car’ category, run from new to five years old, is a Ford Focus, costing $8,342 a year. That figure includes petrol, servicing, rego, finance and insurance.

The cheapest all-electric car, at present, is the Nissan Leaf, which RACQ says will cost $13,384 per year.

Now both of those modes of transport are more comfortable than an e-bike, particularly in wet weather. But they are dramatically more costly than an e-bike – and not necessarily quicker for commuters.

Time is on their side

Let’s look at the time issue first. If you commute between 10 and 15km each way to work there are plenty of e-bikes on the market that can cover that distance virtually without pedaling at all.

But at the same time, these machines look and function a lot like normal bikes which means they are quite legal to ride on road or bike path, and like other traditional bikes, can legally filter through traffic queues.

Many of them can be lifted on and off trains, and even carried up into office buildings in the elevator.

Those factors combine to cut through city traffic, meaning the journey is a lot quicker than their slow-ish top speed would suggest.

Show me the money

When it comes to the family budget, the difference in operating costs is huge.

Yamaha’s electric-power-assist bicycle, YPJ-MTB concept. Photo: Getty

A sturdy, comfortable e-bike with a 15 amp-hour battery will set you back around $2900 (entry level models start at around $1100), and costs around 15 to 20 cents to charge from any normal powerpoint – a full charge takes about three hours.

Servicing is minimal, but Gary Cookson says you’d be unlucky to pay more than $90 every six months, even with heavy use.

The battery is the most expensive component – around $900 to replace – and can be recharged about 1,000 times.

To be super-conservative, let’s assume the bike is clapped out after five years of daily commuting and went through two batteries in that time.

So over five years, charging the bike 1200 times to commute five days a week, you’re looking at a total cost of around $4940 or $988 a year.

That’s about one-ninth the price of a small conventional car, or one-thirteenth the price of an electric car – in both cases greatly helped by the lack of rego, and most likely lack of insurance.

In years to come, the current debates over what the ‘car of the future’ will look like may look quaintly like Kodak wondering what the camera of the future would look like – when most of us now take better pictures with a rechargeable device called a smartphone.

The smart-bike, if we can call it that, could just be the technology that reduces the per-capita number of vehicles on Australian streets for the first time in decades.