Venture capitalist Kyle Lui says that there are a lot of exciting innovations coming to the world of e-scooters. Lui says that there will be larger batteries that will be swappable and where there will be ride-sharing style incentives for people to charge and relocate the scooters.
Companies like Lime and SPIN, which was recently acquired by Ford Motor Company, are actively working on innovations that will improve the customer experience and e-scooter ecosystem.
Kyle Lui, early-stage VC at DCM Ventures, recently discussed the evolution of e-scooters in an interview with Investor’s Business Daily:
Exciting E-Scooter Innovations
I think there are a lot of exciting things happening, both innovations that the scooter companies are creating themselves and then working with third-party manufacturers. On the battery side, it’s a combination of larger batteries, we know that in the most popular markets they don’t last through the day, so we’ll see batteries that have longer charges. I think you’ll start to see things like swappable batteries. You’ll start to see things where the charging of the battery is embedded into the scooters themselves that allow anyone to be able to charge them and not have special parts.
I also think you’re going to see a lot of innovations beyond the battery to really improve the user experience. As people are riding this on a daily basis, there’s been a lot of feedback that’s been given on how to improve the consumer experience, how to make it safer, how to start to add autonomous features, how to have places for a helmet, and places to put a phone dock as you’re navigating. I think all of those will be coming in the next generation.
Taking a Playbook Out of Traditional Ride-Share
I think at the end of the day the business model is actually quite simple because the companies are very focused on driving revenue, driving number of rides, revenue per ride, and then the other side, the operational cost. So instead of having a large on the ground operations team, to be able to leverage third party, potentially even the riders themselves, to be able to charge them, make sure that they’re in the right place, and really take a playbook out of the traditional ride-sharing guys to make this an opportunity for people to make additional money.