Maintenance on bicycles is also insane. An "oil change" (clean and lube the chain) every 300 km or so. Even if you consider that bicycles don't travel as fast and far as cars, that's quite an annoyance to deal with about every 20 or so operating hours.
If you were to actually pay a shop to do the maintenance, I suspect a bicycle would be more expensive per km than a car.
After over 15.000 Km of cycling with our bakfiets, I think I oiled the chain maybe 20 times. Replaced the tires once (and a few spokes due to user error/ring lock still locked+kick stand+two kids in the bike is not a good combo). Still on the first chain and cassette. I have never cleaned a chain.
Maybe your carbon bike with expensive options to save every last gram of weight requires so much maintenance, but any proper Dutch city bike or bakfiets made of steel will last very long with minimal maintenance
It's more about cheap parts - low quality alloys and such will wear at a much higher rate. I killed a Hope cassette in 3 weeks (yes, actually), for example, but a high-end SRAM cassette has lasted me 2 full seasons.
So in some ways, the higher-end stuff can last a very long time.
Some brands (eg: Campy) provide for much better mid-level gear than others (SRAM), but it really depends on the model and the year. Old mid-tier Shimano gear (stx-rc / lx) used to last forever and be a very decent value offering, but times have changed somewhat.
Luckily the prevalence of eBikes is making strong and reliable gear available for us non-eBikers.
> Maintenance on bicycles is also insane. An "oil change" (clean and lube the chain) every 300 km or so.
In the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled 5km to work and 5km back, rain or shine, every workday from March to December in Toronto, Canada.
Every spring I'd spend $100 on a tune up, which usually included a new chain, and every ~second year I'd need a new rear cassette too and some new brake pads too. I've had the same tyres for 10+ years (though I get flats 1-2 times per year so needed new tubes). I lubed the chain once a week from a bottle that I purchased for $10 which lasts for 1-2 years.
I have no idea where you get your bike maintenance ideas from, but my experience was quite different after a decade of experience.
Complaining about oiling a chain is silly (especially with dry lubes), so you deserve a little push back there, but you're not wrong fundamentally.
Bikes in general do need some love. Especially: old bikes, cheap bikes, and heavily used ones: MTB and e-Bikes. They need a LOT of labour if you use them seriously, and bike shops just gouge the shit out of people. My local shop rate is $140 per hour ... for what is very often a sub-par to dangerous quality of work.
I do virtually all of my bike wrenching myself, because I grew up poor and didn't have a choice, and now I do it because I'm stubborn and like to know it's done properly. If I had to pay for all the work I've done, we're talking many 10's of thousands of dollars (I put a lot of MTB miles in). This just makes the whole affair unworkable to a lot of people.
Biking can be extremely economical, but good lord the average bike shop makes it hard. And the community just lets them get away with it, justifying insane markups and gouging by saying you have to support your LBS (this may be mostly astroturfing).
Who would be paying for this astroturfing? Shimano? Cannondale? Mike's Bikes? It's far more believable that bicycle enthusiasts that work at LBS are posting to bike forums at work when it's slow or by enthusiasts while waiting for a part to come in, than a coordinated effort by someone with money to burn is paying people to post on forums and no one's ever reported being approached to do it.
I find it a bit odd that people do so much service. Is there something about modern chain oil that makes it less effective than in the 80s? I'm pretty sure I forgot the chain most years, though whatever bike I had was always an example of survivor bias.
Modern derailleur systems use very narrow chains that won't tolerate being dirty. A hub gear setup with a 1/8" chain (or an old 5-speed derailleur setup) will tolerate much more abuse. A traditional roadster bike (stadsfiets) with full-length mudguards and an enclosed chaincase throws much less dirt into the drivetrain than a sporting bicycle with neither.
It all depends on how many watts you want to lose to chain friction and how quickly you want to wear other components out with the sandy oil slurry on your chain. If the answers are "I can tolerate tons of lost watts because it's an ebike" and "the components are cheap, who cares" then maybe running a dirty chain for ages is acceptable.
I don't know if it's actually necessary, but it's the upper end of the recommendations I've seen/heard, and I noticed a surprising improvement in performance after I cleaned/lubed it.
I assume it's also more important on e-bikes (and especially cargo e-bikes) since the chain sees higher forces over longer periods of time.
Maybe more important, however in my experience these things are neglected more often with ebikes than traditonal bikes, because the motor compensates the dirty chain or if the tyres could use some air... ;-)
It takes 5 minutes. Nowhere near as involved as with a car oil change. And it’s simple enough that unless you’re basically inoperant as a being, you don’t need to pay a shop to do it.
Lots of people missing the point- not abusing and keeping an tool maintained is easy when the market is enthusiastic about said tool.
Which is essentially what most of the cargo bicycle market is right now.
Pushing it to a wider audience and expanding your users pushes the needle in one direction only: those less enthused about care and maintenance.
It also means less skilled riders, less common sense, more abuse, etc.
And if you want to open a business doing this as a service- you have 2 groups of clients: Cyclists and non-Cyclists who own bicycles.
I don't really want to imagine having to deal with either of those as my primary clients. For entirely different reasons. Unless I was charging absurd amounts.
If you were to actually pay a shop to do the maintenance, I suspect a bicycle would be more expensive per km than a car.