Daimler’s Mytaxi looking into electric kick scooters

It is becoming quite a run to offer rental electric kick scooters. Daimler subsidiary Mytaxi is the latest company to jump on the floorboard. They plan a pilot project in southern Europe with a fleet of up to 500 electric scooters.

In this Mytaxi, essentially a ride-hailing app, is following their U.S. American counterparts such as Lime Bike or Bird. Lime has received a financial push from both Uber and Google’s Alphabet. Mytaxi too believes the last mile electric vehicles will mean good business.

Mytaxi CEO Eckart Diepenhorst considers the electric kick scooters “a very useful addition to urban mobility and our own portfolio”. The electric scooters will be made by Segway. The gyroscope specialist has lately expanded into human-balanced vehicles.

Mytaxi has not disclosed where the pilot will start but Diepenhorst revealed that there will not be snow on the streets. This means a town in the south of Europe is most likely.

They have not said anything about pricing either. Comparable services such as Lime in Paris start at a minimum 1 euro though. Every minute thereafter cost 0.15 euro so that a half an hour ride adds up to almost 5 euros. The electric scooters can be left anywhere and it is likely Mytaxi will free float their fleet as well.

The company had observed their Californian counterparts closely and thus expect the pilot to be a runaway. Diepenhorst told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung that the electric scooter market was “very dynamic”. He imagines to expand the offer to other European cities and to potentially combine it with their taxi service. Perhaps even Germany could become a market. Here however, Mytaxi or any other company offering rental electric kick scooters will have to wait. Existing regulation forbids the use of such electric vehicles but a change of law regarding Personal Light Electric Vehicles (PLEV) is underway and will kick in latest early next year (we reported).

sueddeutsche.de (in German)