> the company’s engineers left Formula 1 to work on scooters “because we think electric scooters are the most important vehicle innovation of this century.”
I laughed out loud. Start up PR is a competition for “what’s the most absurd thing we can say”
I actually don’t think it’s that absurd. It definitely is hype but I think e-scooters and (far more) e-bikes actually are a huge innovation in personal transport, not in pure tech but in effect on lifestyles especially when you factor in cost.
I have a cargo e-bike I use as my daily driver, taking the kids to school, picking up groceries etc. If they didn’t exist I’d probably have to pay for (and deal with) a car. A lot of food delivery drivers are on e-bikes. If governments fully embraced them they could change the way a lot of cities look.
Here in Barcelona a lot of people dont have a car and there is no space for a bicycle. The scooter folds up easily and is easy to store away. When i was going to the office, people just bring them to their desk and plug them in during the day to charge. Some companies are now providing storage and charging areas for both scooters and ebikes.
scooters are great for apartments where there's no concept of bike parking / storage I absolutely hate having to bring my monster of an ebike down from 8th floor (via elevator thankfully). Scooters can use a large backpacks for storage instead as well.
The most obvious comparison is an ebike, which would be superior in every way except one: portability. Where I live these scooters are popular, and people bring them in elevators and park them inside.
This is a real issue: bike parking is insufficient and insecure from theft in many cities. Plus, you need to charge it somewhere, and bringing a conventional bike to an apartment is often prohibitive. These make scooters much more attractive in practice than they otherwise should be.
To me, a foldable bike (with larger wheels and a seat) and a moderately sized battery pack seems like a better compromise between safety and convenience.
I like to look at these things in terms of kinetic energy. 100mph is roughly 100x more KE than at 10mph.
Assume I hit a car with enough energy to break my leg and the car's windshield. This seems plausible at 10mph. Now, we scale this by 2 orders of magnitude. You could cripple lots of people with this thing in one shot. Bollards wont stop a guy with a scooter.
To be fair the guy is wearing full protection gear, so already there people should be able to get an idea about how clever it is to ride this without one.
The small wheels were blamed for people with street-legal scooters steering into a rut and falling. Seems motorsports is bringing massive improvements to regular people after a long time.
> “because we think electric scooters are the most important vehicle innovation of this century.”
Perhaps.. if you've never experienced urban property theft. Which is what prevents me from buying an electric bicycle. Similarly the designers of these products seem to incorporate no anti theft technology into any of their products.
A scooter that goes blisteringly fast? Hardly an innovation on it's own.
I’m sad that scooters are illegal to ride on the road here in the uk. I’d happily pay maybe £50 a year for insurance and tax if it was an option.
For a while I rode my father’s scooter around town, it was brilliant for short errands and fit easily in the boot of my car. Great for when a bicycle is a little too large or you don’t want to expend the energy.
(My father never actually rode the scooter, he hoped that by adding a seat he could use it instead of an old people’s buggy, but he couldn’t get his feet down fast enough and going at a slow speed on a small pavement was hard to keep balance- he got an electric tricycle instead. )
I remember when the Segway was first announced, a reporter from The Register observed that it was too large and heavy to bring inside, but small and light enough to be easily tossed into the back of a pickup truck, and it cost about $3,000, when it was introduced (which is probably double that, these days).
In particular, not at the grocery store I shop at, they have no provision for it and they would ask me to bring it back outside if I tried. Even so it would not be more secure there than outside. There is no store security and the vehicles typically don't even have a key, alarm, or tracker built into them. They disappear easily.
They don't have baskets at this store. You have to use a push cart. This probably has something to do with the amount of theft that occurs in this area. I'm also probably not equally abled to you so a _bicycle_ is more useful to me and pushing that around a store with a cart getting groceries would be a ridiculous chore.
The world would probably be better if you didn't assume that everyone's experiences are identical to yours. Otherwise I can just keep using my gas powered truck to get groceries. I can easily afford that and it's "not a problem" for me.
An EV bicycle just seemed more considerate in several ways, and unless it has the features that speak to my needs, I don't see myself using one.
Scooters are just deceptively dangerous. The ease with which you can just hop on and go 20, 30, 40mph in instant is a false sense of security. There’s no drama, no warning, just pure speed standing upright, feet mere inches off the ground. Crashing on a 100mph scooter is sure to end gruesomely.
I think even a 20 mile an hour crash can do quite a bit of damage. It doesn't take much to crack a skull or break some bones.
My response to any kind of scooter has always been "No thanks. I like having teeth.". Just not worth it to me. I'll use an ebike if I need to. Feels much more stable to me.
There is nothing that prevent a scooter from being build with larger wheels and a longer wheelbase. In fact that used to be how human powered scooters were built a few decades ago. It would not help the rider steer with his legs like a motorbike but this is at least what I would do if I was looking to break speed records.
Assuming speeds are equal I think the consequences of a crash are better on a scooter. You don’t have a crossbar between your legs to trip you as you fall, and you start in a standing position, so you’re more likely to land on your feet. Also your head and shoulders are above the cars so you’re less likely to end up under the car.
Having said that I think scooter crashes are more likely given the tiny wheels and less stable frame. Try riding an e scooter without hands. It doesn’t self balance like a bike.
E-bikes have relatively huge wheels. These interact with any bumbs, curbwalls, pot-holes, rocks in much more safe manner. This with stability makes them to me much safer.
Still does not do much difference when crashing to someone or something or someone crashing into you.
I was on a road bike with a peloton and half of us hit a pothole that was ~25cm deep when going at 50kmh. We had a few popped tubes and a damaged (but rideable) wheel.
Yes the determining factor is the length of the pothole, ie distance traveled over air, together with speed, which determines how far you fall before hitting the other side.
Try jumping of a car at 25kmh. You'll be on your feet for some time indeed, the next step is both your wrist buckling (or snapping) because you'll instinctively put your hands up, and after that your head contacting the ground. Even at 15kmh I doubt most people would handle that gracefully.
From what I gather the injuries are similar, but escooters are used by more diverse people whereas regular bicycles are more of a lifestyle choice, much more nighttime accidents and accidents involving alcohol
You can land on your feet but you have to see the crash coming. You will also basically create a runaway scooter that might hit someone as you jump off. This won't work on s pot hole you missed that basically ate your entire front tire catapulting you forward with no warning. I have had both happen to me and my wife driving around the city.
Yeah I’m a scooter rider and there’s no way I would get on a scooter going that fast, even with protective equipment. Much less use it around other people.
yep, in London it's pretty normal to be driving at 30 and be overtaken by a teenager on a scooter with no insurance, no protective equipment and not a care in the world. They can kill themselves for all I care but they can easily kill a pedestrian or cyclist which doesn't seem reasonable to me.
killing themselves is not the worst thing than can happen to them, and not so likely. Other possibilities involve long years of suffering in bed and on a wheelchair.
But the e-bikes are more heavy and will also likely make other people suffer.
> the company’s engineers left Formula 1 to work on scooters “because we think electric scooters are the most important vehicle innovation of this century.”
Oh, they left F1 to develop another exciting, high performance vehicle that will sell in similar numbers to an F1 car.
> It reportedly produces over 24,000 watts of juice with a high-power dual motor controller setup developed with partner Rage Mechanics, which is a French company making all kinds of high-performance electric microvehicles.
So they actually left F1 to resell a downsized version of someone else's designs (Rage Mechanics developed a 50kW version) with extra springiness in the steering to make it less twitchy at higher speeds.
I laughed out loud. Start up PR is a competition for “what’s the most absurd thing we can say”
I have a cargo e-bike I use as my daily driver, taking the kids to school, picking up groceries etc. If they didn’t exist I’d probably have to pay for (and deal with) a car. A lot of food delivery drivers are on e-bikes. If governments fully embraced them they could change the way a lot of cities look.
This is a real issue: bike parking is insufficient and insecure from theft in many cities. Plus, you need to charge it somewhere, and bringing a conventional bike to an apartment is often prohibitive. These make scooters much more attractive in practice than they otherwise should be.
To me, a foldable bike (with larger wheels and a seat) and a moderately sized battery pack seems like a better compromise between safety and convenience.
Assume I hit a car with enough energy to break my leg and the car's windshield. This seems plausible at 10mph. Now, we scale this by 2 orders of magnitude. You could cripple lots of people with this thing in one shot. Bollards wont stop a guy with a scooter.
Re-invent the Penny Farthing perhaps. An electric version of that, with some funky way of lifting the rider up, would be amazing.
This is like the cronut of bikes, all the downsides of a scooter, and none of the upsides of a motorbike.
At 100 MPH you hit the brakes and instead of stopping the whole thing just rolls over to slam you with the same velocity to the ground ? x)
Perhaps.. if you've never experienced urban property theft. Which is what prevents me from buying an electric bicycle. Similarly the designers of these products seem to incorporate no anti theft technology into any of their products.
A scooter that goes blisteringly fast? Hardly an innovation on it's own.
For a while I rode my father’s scooter around town, it was brilliant for short errands and fit easily in the boot of my car. Great for when a bicycle is a little too large or you don’t want to expend the energy.
(My father never actually rode the scooter, he hoped that by adding a seat he could use it instead of an old people’s buggy, but he couldn’t get his feet down fast enough and going at a slow speed on a small pavement was hard to keep balance- he got an electric tricycle instead. )
Solves the theft issue for once and for all, unless you get mugged.
The world would probably be better if you didn't assume that everyone's experiences are identical to yours. Otherwise I can just keep using my gas powered truck to get groceries. I can easily afford that and it's "not a problem" for me.
An EV bicycle just seemed more considerate in several ways, and unless it has the features that speak to my needs, I don't see myself using one.
My response to any kind of scooter has always been "No thanks. I like having teeth.". Just not worth it to me. I'll use an ebike if I need to. Feels much more stable to me.
Assuming speeds are equal I think the consequences of a crash are better on a scooter. You don’t have a crossbar between your legs to trip you as you fall, and you start in a standing position, so you’re more likely to land on your feet. Also your head and shoulders are above the cars so you’re less likely to end up under the car.
Having said that I think scooter crashes are more likely given the tiny wheels and less stable frame. Try riding an e scooter without hands. It doesn’t self balance like a bike.
Still does not do much difference when crashing to someone or something or someone crashing into you.
Good luck on a scooter. You’re a meat pencil.
can this still be called a pothole, lol? at which point does a pothole become a hole...
Try jumping of a car at 25kmh. You'll be on your feet for some time indeed, the next step is both your wrist buckling (or snapping) because you'll instinctively put your hands up, and after that your head contacting the ground. Even at 15kmh I doubt most people would handle that gracefully.
From what I gather the injuries are similar, but escooters are used by more diverse people whereas regular bicycles are more of a lifestyle choice, much more nighttime accidents and accidents involving alcohol
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-12627-x
But the e-bikes are more heavy and will also likely make other people suffer.
Oh, they left F1 to develop another exciting, high performance vehicle that will sell in similar numbers to an F1 car.
> It reportedly produces over 24,000 watts of juice with a high-power dual motor controller setup developed with partner Rage Mechanics, which is a French company making all kinds of high-performance electric microvehicles.
So they actually left F1 to resell a downsized version of someone else's designs (Rage Mechanics developed a 50kW version) with extra springiness in the steering to make it less twitchy at higher speeds.