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Lyft removes his pink electric bicycles from the streets of San Francisco, barely two months after their deployment, as some of these bikes caught fire during use.
The bikes, officially labeled Lyft and accessible under the new Bay Wheels platform (formerly Ford GoBike), are one of the unmanned surveillance company's new no-docking mobility options, all operated by the company's Bikers Lyiv, Motivate. Lyft had already removed its electric bikes from city streets in April, after a malfunction of the brakes that was extremely dangerous for the bikers.
Lyft has spent months redeploying the park so that he can handle non-electric bikes and electric bikes without a dock. (The electric models are similar in style and operation to Uber & # 39; s Jump bikes and feature pedal-badisted motors powered by built-in batteries.) E-bikes are locked on public bike racks located in a car. Large enough area allowed in San Francisco and can picked up on the street. The new bikes have been in service in San Jose since June and in Oakland since July 12, shortly before San Francisco's debut.
But on July 27, a runner named Zach Rutta posted a photo on Twitter of a carbonized Lyft bike. It is not known how many other cases of battery malfunctions or bicycle fires have been reported, but the San Francisco Examiner reports that a second case has occurred today. This second case may have motivated the immediate action of Lyft.
The company is pulling the bikes to investigate the problem, although Mr Lyft says there have been no injuries to the origin of the e-bikes. Lyft will not rule out possible vandalism either. "As a precaution, we are temporarily making the electric bike park inaccessible to bikers while we study and update our battery technology," said a spokesman. The edge. "Thanks to our runners for their patience and we are looking forward to making the electric bikes available again." The bikes will also be pulled from San Jose and Oakland.
Right now, Lyft is trying to badert that it has the exclusive right to deploy e-bikes without a docking station in the streets of San Francisco, which could eventually make its competitors, such as bicycles, forget about it. Electric jump without dock of Uber. The company sued the city in June to prevent San Francisco from soliciting other contracts with third parties. Lyft claims to have a 10-year contract giving it exclusive control of the shared bike market without a dock.
The city responded by saying that Lyft had misinterpreted the terms of its contract with the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (a contract initially obtained by Motivate, which Lyft had acquired last year). The city maintains that Lyft's exclusivity only concerns moored motorcycles, such as its existing Bay Wheels (formerly Ford GoBike) stations, where you have to remove a bike from one rack and put it in another at the end of your course .
Lyft was to redeploy its fleet of electric bicycles in July. After a court battle that resulted in a preliminary injunction against the city, preventing him from seeking out contracts, Lyft got a temporary license to install his e-bikes in the streets of San Francisco. But bicycles in flames could compromise Lyft's ability to have potential exclusivity over shared bike options in San Francisco.
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