DiCostanza. “The main reason they stopped riding bikes was because of hills.” Pedego has opened nearly 60 stores in the US and it has sold bikes to tour companies in San Francisco and Washington, DC. ElectroBike, which operates 30 stores in Mexico, opened its first American store in Venice Beach, California in the autumn of 2014 and hopes to grow to 25 US stores in a year. CEO Craig Anderson says: “We want to help reduce traffic, help reduce our carbon footprint and promote a healthy lifestyle.” He tells customers: “Ride this once and try not to smile.” Startups like Pedego and ElectroBike will have to compete with big companies like Trek and Currie, which, in 2012, was acquired by the Accell Group, a public company based in the Netherlands that is Europe’s market leader in e-bikes. Accell owns the Raleigh brand, as well as Haibike, an award-winning German electric bike. “Accell has great expectations about e-bikes in North America,” Currie’s Larry Pizzi says. “While baby boomers are still a very important segment, we’re finding that a lot of younger people are using e-bikes for transportation, instead of cars.” Accell’s Yuba brand even sells a cargo bike with a stronger motor and rear rack. “You can carry two children,” says Pizzi. “You can carry 45kg of shopping. It’s a minivan alternative.”