Are Electric Bikes Dangerous? An Honest Answer

Electric bikes or e-bikes have taken the world by storm. Powered by an electric motor, cycling becomes less physically strenuous with the help of an e-bike. As beneficial and convenient as they are, are electric bikes dangerous?

Electric bikes do carry some risks that traditional bikes do not, including:

• Too much acceleration can lead to a loss of control
• Not being able to stop when desired
• Internal and external injuries
• Explosions and fires

I know the list above is scary. Before you pass judgment on e-bikes though, I highly recommend you read all the way through to gauge the above risks. I’ll even have some safety tips if you’re interested in riding an electric bike, so check it out! 

These Are the Risks of Riding an Electric Bike

As promised, let’s first begin by delving into the risks of riding an electric bike per the intro. 

Too Much Acceleration Can Lead to a Loss of Control

You’ll remember that e-bikes are powered by a motor to reduce your reliance on manual effort. 

While this feature will eventually allow you to travel further on your e-bike, the motor does take some getting used to.

Many first-time e-bike users will find themselves starting their bike and then the bike will begin accelerating right away without much warning. 

If an e-bike rider doesn’t know how to slow the bike or how to stop it because this is their first time on an electric bike, then panic can quickly set in. 

They may feel like they’re lacking control, and in a lot of situations, that’s very much what’s happening. 

As you can imagine, a situation where your electric bike is speeding along faster than you want it to and you can’t control it is going to be disastrous. 

At the very least, you could crash into whatever is nearest you. 

Maybe that’s a curb or a tree. Although neither sounds serious, you could still be thrown off your e-bike from the force of the crash, possibly sustaining injuries.

You could also hit motor vehicles on the road and even pedestrians. 

Now both you and another person could end up very seriously hurt, especially if you hit another pedestrian who has no means of protecting themselves.

If you crash into a building rather than a person or a car, you still have to worry about personal injury. 

You could also be on the hook for property damages, as your electric bike will surely cause some. 

Not Being Able to Stop When Desired

Electric bike brakes and regular bike brakes are not identical by any means. 

Thus, treating e-bike brakes like a set of traditional bike brakes once you hop on will again lead to a loss of control.

The heavier weight of e-bike brakes can also make them unwieldy to beginners, which is also quite dangerous.

As was the case before, an e-bike rider without control is at a much higher risk of crashing into people, places, and things.

This can total your bike and lead to you incurring property damages. You might also have injury lawsuits to contend with from angered secondary parties. 

Internal and External Injuries

It’s unsurprising if you’ve read to this point that electric bikes can be quite injurious.

Per Brent W. Caldwell, an injury attorney, here are the most frequently reported injuries associated with electric bike accidents. 

1. Internal Injuries

Internal injuries have hampered many e-bike riders.

Blunt trauma such as from high-speed collisions with something hard like a wall, a tree, or an automobile is one such contributing factor to internal injuries.

Penetrating trauma, which is less likely on an electric bike, is another cause of internal injuries to be aware of.

Many types of injuries can lead to internal damage, from spleen or liver lacerations to other abdominal injuries, bleeding around your heart or lungs, and head trauma. 

An internal injury isn’t one that you can see, but it does have its fair share of symptoms. Those include a lack of unconsciousness, seizures, and headaches, especially if there’s bleeding around the brain. 

If the legs are suffering from internal bleeding, then you may experience such symptoms as pain, tightness, and swelling. 

Soft tissue and skin bleeding can cause ecchymosis, which turns large swathes of your skin a deep purple hue. 

If internal blood loss occurs to a serious enough degree, you could feel faint, dizzy, and lightheaded. 

Liver, spleen, or other abdominal internal injuries can cause swelling and pain that worsen as the bleeding does. 

Depending on the severity of your injuries, you might need a blood transfusion, intravenous fluids, or even surgery to treat the injury.

The types of surgery recommended for internal injuries are fasciotomy (for internal bleeding in the thigh), craniotomy (for internal bleeding in the brain), thoracotomy (for internal bleeding in the lungs and/or heart), and exploratory laparotomy (for internal injuries around the abdomen). 

2. Spinal Cord Injuries

The hard collision of your body into a wall or automobile can cause more than internal bleeding but spinal cord injuries as well. 

After all, you’re only wearing a helmet to protect your head but nothing to protect your spine.

A spinal cord injury affects any part of the cauda equina or spinal canal, including the nerves and spinal cord. 

If you experience a neurological-level injury to your lower spinal cord, then you may have a complete or incomplete spinal cord injury.

An incomplete spinal cord injury could lead to a partial lack of sensory and/or motor function whereas a complete spinal cord injury contributes to the utter lack of sensory and/or motor function. 

You could become a paraplegic, which means that you cannot feel your pelvic organs, legs, or most of (or the entirety of) your trunk. 

If you’re a tetraplegic or quadriplegic, then your pelvic organs, legs, trunk, hands, and arms have lost sensation. 

Other symptoms of a spinal cord injury are breathing difficulties, coughing, back and spinal pain, spasms, an inability to move, and an inability to feel touch, cold, or heat. 

Surgery might be able to help, especially to remove fractured vertebrae, herniated discs, and bone fragments. Otherwise, immobilization and medications are recommended. 

3. Facial and Head Injuries

At the very least, taking a hard fall on your electric bike can lead to facial injuries such as lacerations, road rash, and bruising, even with a helmet on.

If you ride your e-bike without a helmet, then your risk of a head injury goes up profoundly. 

Not all head injuries are the same. Here are the types of head injuries you can experience after a crash on your e-bike.

• Diffuse axonal injury: A diffuse axonal injury or sheer injury damages the brain cells but does not cause internal bleeding. The damaged brain cells cannot work, and those cells can later die. Irreversible brain damage can then occur. 
• Skull fracture: Since the skull lacks marrow, it doesn’t break easily, but it can fracture. Brain swelling, known as edema, and other damage become a lot likelier after suffering from a skull fracture.
• Concussion: If the brain is injured after head trauma, then you have a concussion. Concussions usually lead to temporary symptoms, but repeated concussions can be detrimental to your long-term health.
• Hemorrhage: A brain hemorrhage is nonstop bleeding. There are two subtypes, intracerebral hemorrhages that cause bleeding in the brain tissue and subarachnoid hemorrhages that lead to bleeding around the brain. 
• Hematoma: A hematoma is a blood clot outside of your blood vessels that can affect the brain and other areas of the body. Brain hematomas could cause brain damage. 

If you have a head injury, you may notice symptoms such as leaking a translucent fluid from your nose or ear(s), mood changes, memory loss, consistent and severe headaches, muscle control loss, lack of visual focus, disorientation, lack of coordination and balance, vomiting, seizures, and unconsciousness. 

Surgery might be recommended for some head injuries. Rehabilitation and medication are other viable treatments. 

4. Dislocations, Fractures, and Broken Bones

If you get lucky after an electric bike injury, then you might only sustain a fracture or dislocation after being tossed over your handlebars. 

Yes, that’s getting lucky! 

A dislocation causes discoloration and swelling around the affected area, tingling and numbness at the nearby joints, and sometimes joint deformities. 

Pushing the dislocated area back into place can help, as can immobilization and possibly surgery.

If you have a bone fracture instead, you might experience a lack of mobility, a protruding bone (in very serious cases), tingling and numbness, severe pain, bleeding, swelling, and joint deformities. 

You could also break a bone, which will require rest and immobilization to treat. 

Explosions and Fires

The most serious risk of riding an electric bike by far is the possibility of the bike potentially exploding and catching fire.

It’s not the bike itself that explodes, but rather, an overloaded battery or engine. 

Sometimes, the e-bike fire may occur when charging your bike, and in other instances, you could even be on the bike when the fire breaks out.

If you don’t get away soon enough, you could sustain major injuries such as smoke inhalation and burns. The loss of life is also possible.  

Electric Bikes and Seniors – Why There’s an Elevated Risk

When discussing the safety of electric bikes, I’d be remiss not to mention the link between e-bikes and senior injury risk.

According to a late 2019 article from Reuters, one of the two largest groups with the highest instances of electric bike injuries is those between 45 and 64 years old. The other age group is 18 to 44. 

E-bikes can be safe for seniors to ride provided the elderly are well-versed in how the bikes work and are given time to learn to control them.

If a senior is transitioning to an electric bike from a traditional bike without experience, then terrible consequences will typically arise.

It’s no secret that compared to today’s younger generation and even the middle-aged generation that the elderly is not all that technologically savvy. 

Thus, especially when in a high-panic situation like feeling like they’re about to crash on an electric bike, a senior might be unable to recover fast enough to prevent a crash. 

Further, a senior has more fragile bones than the average person due to their age and possibly medical conditions and even some medications. 

Thus, while a younger person sustaining the same injury might come out of it relatively unscathed, the same cannot be said for the elderly. 

Are Electric Bikes Safer to Ride Than Traditional Bikes?

Between electric bikes and traditional, nonmotorized bikes, which is the more dangerous? 

That distinction goes to e-bikes for these reasons.

Traditional Bikes Are Easier to Control

Since a traditional bicycle has no motorized controls, many riders find it far easier to manage their speeds and feel like they’re in control while riding.

After all, unless you start pedaling, a traditional bike won’t go anywhere. 

Granted, it’s the same with an electric bike, but once you take off, there are some very critical differences.

On an e-bike, you can reach high speeds very quickly. On a traditional bike, you choose your pace.

While slowly pedaling is not very conducive to cycling, at least not for long periods, you can switch from a moderate to a faster and then a slower pace and back again simply by exerting yourself more or less. 

When you want to stop, you know exactly how to do it. After all, most people are taught to ride a bike as children.

This can fuel the arrogance that switching to an electric bike will be easy peasy even though it isn’t. 

Traditional Bikes Cannot Catch Fire or Explode 

There’s another significant difference between electric bikes and traditional bikes: fire risk.

Even if you pedal a traditional bike like mad, you’re never going to be able to create enough friction that the bike will explode.

Now, could the tires explode? Yes, they could.

However, exploding bike tires don’t cause a fire. You will be propelled from your bicycle at a high rate of speed, and you will likely end up seriously hurt. 

Your bike could be a little mangled, and you’ll certainly need new tires, but it should be in usable condition because it didn’t catch fire.

An electric bike explosion is a lot more intense. The bike will literally catch fire, and if you’re on it, that can be highly dangerous and even life-threatening, as I made clear in the last section. 

E-Bike Safety Tips

I’m not telling you all this to dissuade you from riding an e-bike if that’s what you want to do. 

Rather, I want you to be an informed consumer. Keeping that in mind, here are some electric bike safety tips to follow the next time you go for a ride.  

Familiarize Yourself with Your Electric Bike

To prevent that horrifying feeling of blitzing off on your e-bike without your control, it helps to get to know your electric bike, ideally before you buy it.

When you go to a shop to check out various e-bikes, ask lots of questions. 

Even if you plan on shopping for an electric bike online, you should still visit a shop to get a feel for what it’s like to sit on and even use an e-bike.

Some electric bikes have torque-based sensors that allow you to gradually accelerate, and others will accelerate you as soon as your feet touch the pedals. This is known as a cadence-based system. 

Go Slow in the Beginning

There are three types of e-bikes, and although they top out at speeds of around 30 MPH, that can still be too fast when you feel like you cannot stop. 

Even if you familiarize yourself with how an e-bike works and gains speed, you don’t want to push the pedal to the mettle in the beginning.

Instead, start on open, level terrain where an electric bike shouldn’t accelerate to a higher degree than you’re comfortable with, especially if yours is a cadence-based e-bike. 

Once you get used to that, you can start incorporating hillier terrain into your rides. 

Learn How the Brakes Work

I mentioned before that electric bike brakes are nowhere near the same as traditional bike brakes, so allow me to elaborate more on that now.

E-bike brakes weigh more, as you’ll recall, whether they’re hydraulic disc brakes or mechanical disc brakes.

Hydraulic disc brakes will brake as strong as you pull. 

In other words, if you only apply light pressure, then you come to a light stop. If you’re pushing hard on the brakes, you can stop hard, and rather suddenly too.

Mechanical disc brakes have a cable that can adjust the caliper positioning, which requires more of your physical effort to stop. 

You’ll have a brake lever that allows you to stop on an electric bike. Get used to when to pull that lever and how hard when riding. 

Always Wear a Helmet 

My last tip is hugely important – you should always, always wear a helmet whether you’re riding an electric bike or a traditional bike.

As I hope I made clear, your injury risk is a lot more severe with an e-bike, which is all the more reason to protect your noggin! 

Conclusion

Electric bikes can be dangerous, as they don’t behave exactly the same as a traditional bike. 

They can go a lot faster in a much shorter time, and the risk of components exploding is not something you have to think about with a traditional bike either.

That’s not to say that you can’t have a safe experience on an e-bike, especially once you understand the parts of your bike and how they work!