Electric Scooters to replace taxis?

We have already written about how electric scooters are the way of the future and in the previous blog, it’s the bikes that were under the threat of getting replaced by electric scooters due to their convenience to park and charge. This time it’s … taxis?

Recently Bolt a ridesharing and scooter operator company in Europe tested promoting switching to electric scooters for shorter trips in their ridesharing app. The result in short was that as many as 60% opted for ditching the taxi and switching to an escooter.

This is a very promising result as a large part of taxi rides are for short distances under 5 kilometers. If all those riders would be replaced by electric scooters the resulting CO2 and environmental impact would be huge.

The magic of escooters is that they can be personal transport methods and give you the same freedom of movement as cars can give but the limited distance they can cover is one of the key issues when people consider all their transport needs.

Typically taxis are used for medium and short distances by themselves and not combined with other transportation methods unless it is a long-distance trip to the next city for example. Considering the results of Bolt’s results many of these medium and especially short-distance trips could be replaced by escooters completely.

The future case for transport then could be a mix of personal/shared scooters used in combination with metro’s and buses to reach mid-long distance destinations and the only car traffic would be from a few taxis, delivery trucks, and shared cars for those who need the larger carry and load capacity of a car.

Tesla’s visionary CEO Elon Musk has already said that in the future if you buy a car you can choose to use it just for yourself, rent it through the app full time or part-time. Who knows, in the future a family of four could have just electric scooters, wake up in the morning and hail a shared autonomous car to the city, load the scooters in the trunk and everyone gets off at the same place once they have reached the city and continue with their personal escooters. Perhaps come back in the evening individually using escooter + metro combo.

This kind of situation is completely plausible as many people living in cities with good public transport already opt not to own a car due to expensive parking, fees, and the inconvenience of being stuck in the traffic while metro, bikes, and scoots fly on by.

Combined with the climate change goals, public opinion, and rapidly developing technology we might see this kind of tomorrow come earlier than expected.

Want to get ready for the transport of tomorrow? Contact Langfeite today and let’s ride to the future together.