Dockless The Best Thing To Happen To the Ownership Model: A Smaller Piece Of A Gigantic Pie – Part 2

EASIER ACCESS IN LOW DENSITY AREAS

While it’s feasible to plop hundreds of scooters in a dense parts of town, there will always be large swaths of urban areas where it will probably not make financial sense for rental/sharing companies to have, maintain, and rebalance scooters or bikes. In such areas, ownership would work really well. We’re already seeing user behavior mimicking ownership: bringing a LimeBike or Bird inside apartment complex gates in the evening to guarantee access to one in the morning has been reported among semi-regular users.

HIGH COST OF FREQUENT RENTAL

A quick scoot around the block is pretty cheap. But any ride over 15-20 minutes means spending $4-5. Longer rides cost more. Renting a bike or a scooter for commuting to and from work can quickly add up to $10-15 per day. So daily, regular use ain’t cheap and ownership would make much more sense.

MORE CAPABILITIES

The generic JUMP bike or Spin scooter is fine for a quick ride. But as users start using them regularly, they will start becoming more discerning and more demanding of their electric rides:

• Steeper hills: Those who live in hillier areas will find some rental LEVs under-powered and will want to opt for more powerful LEVs. Today’s Bird scooters have 250W motors, but there are many comparable scooters like the Speedway Mini 4 Pro double that with 500W of power.
• Smoother rides for bad road conditions or longer rides: Models with more suspension, larger, cushier, more capable tires help smooth out an otherwise bumpy rides. The hefty tires of Sondors or Lithium Cycles should help with some smooth sailing.
• Off-roading: LEVs aren’t just utilitarian. In fact, our research indicates that a significant percentage of LEV owners use them for fun. A Rad Rover fat tire electric bike provides much off-roading awesomeness and a OneWheel lets riders essentially snowboard on any street or trail.
• Faster: With the safe (boring) top speed of 15 mph, many users will quickly feel the need to go a bit faster, especially on protected bike lanes or roads with limited car traffic. Faster pedelec e-bikes like the BULLS Urban EVO allow riders to fly up to 28 mph!
• Cargo: As people begin using LEVs more and more, they’ll begin using them to run their errands and might feel the need for some cargo capacity. An URB-E let’s you put a baskets on a scooter and wheel it around a grocery store and cargo bikes like the Virtue Cycles Schoolbus+ are practically SUVs without the 6000 extra pounds and tens of thousands of dollars of expense.
• Design/self expression: While the generic LEV might work for pure utilitarian function, many might prefer something well designed, unique, or customized, and might pay top dollar for the sleekness of a Propella or the retro of a Faraday Porteur.
• Craving a challenge: Any 4 year old can ride a Razor scooter and this ease is one of the appeals of e-scooters. Yet some people will want more of a challenge. Electric unicycles for instance take days to learn, weeks to get good at, and months to master. But that’s why thousands love them. The journey is half the fun!
• Weather: Writing from sunny Los Angeles, it’s easy to forget that sometimes water or ice falls from the sky. When the atmosphere does decide to misbehave, there are protected bike/car hybrids like the Organic Transit ELF to keep you nice and dry.
• Balance: Finally, not everybody is completely able bodied. The elderly or those with disabilities would have a much easier time with e-tricycles, like a Sun 24″ Electric Traditional Tricycle, which require no balance.

Here’s Propella’s Founder/CEO Ben Tarassoli echoing some of these points:

The ownership models works better for e-bike and other forms of lightweight electric vehicles. From a design standpoint, most electric bikes used by bike shares like LimeBike or Jump are simply a motor and battery added to a bike and do not count for weight distribution, comfort, ride dynamics, etc. Most regular e-bike commuters pay attention to great design and want to invest in a long-term solution.

BUT CLEARLY, DOCKLESS SHARING WILL MEAN A MUCH SMALLER OWNERSHIP MARKET, NO?

Nope.

True, before renting/sharing, ownership had a near 100% market share. But it was a teeny-tiny market. It was super niche.

Renting/sharing has suddenly blown the LEV market wide open, exposing millions to e-bikes and e-scooters making LEVs mass market. Even though ownership will constitute a smaller percentage of the LEV market, the market itself will become a truly massive, global, multi-billion dollar industry. This is because LEVs aren’t simply walking replacements. They are quickly starting to replace car trips, as evidenced by the Uber acquisition of JUMP and a study by for Portland based National Institute for Transportation and Communities. This is classic disruption at work, which we wrote about a few posts ago.

So a smaller overall percentage of a larger market will be an absolutely stunning win for the ownership model and for brands and manufacturers of LEVs.

It amounts to a smaller piece of a much, much, much larger pie.