Share and swap batteries instead of sharing scooters?

The convenience of shared escooters in the city is a given but what we don’t often talk about are the limitations they can have and how they can be solved.

As people have taken escooters in their lives and many use shared scooters daily the challenges they can face are quite common also: Finding a scooter that works and has enough battery left.

As we often promote here at Langfeite owning your own escooter is great not only because you can charge it yourself but also because the ride is just so much better and as it is your own you don’t need to worry about availability.

Basically owning your escooter you avoid most of the hassle but charging batteries do still take some time and you might not always be able to charge one at the office or home if you are going to have a long trip in the city or forgot to charge the scooters.

This is the problem that in practice could be relatively easy to tackle but it involves a different business model. Sell the scooter and establish battery swap stations all around the city.

Basically, this is probably the most economic and environmentally friendly way of using scooters as it has many benefits, mainly:

1. Batteries are used efficiently. People will always drop the empty battery at the station to get a new one. Empty batteries get charged quickly and won’t degrade so much as if they were left drained for possibly longer periods
2. No collecting shared scooters overnight. Every night many shared scooter companies drive around with trucks and collect scooters for overnight charging warehouse and track the misplaced ones with GPS. All this driving around is unnecessary with battery charging stations all around the city.
3. Convenient for users means that they use their scooters even more. More usage means less use of alternative and potentially more polluting methods of transport.
4. Charging networks can be optimized so that they use renewable energy and won’t stress the normal power grid.
5. The lifecycle of batteries can be managed. Battery companies will organize new batteries when needed and as a big entity, the recycling and disposal of batteries can be handled more efficiently

These are just a few reasons why a shared battery model can benefit everyone involved. Who knows maybe in the future this model will overtake the scooter sharing programs. The model is already in the works for bikes, motorbikes, and cars. Perhaps we can have battery stations for many ways of electric transport in the future. What do you think?

If you are thinking of building battery-sharing fleets contact Langfeite today! We source world-class batteries and we already have swappable battery models like Langfeite C1.