This scooter can go to a charging station – News

The Beijing-based Segway-Ninebot Group electric scooter manufacturer unveiled a scooter capable of driving at driverless charging stations, a potential advantage for the booming scooter sharing industry.

Ninebot said that Uber and Lyft, the famous giants who are developing in scooter sharing, would be among the customers of the new semi-autonomous vehicles that are expected to arrive on the roads in early 2020.

In an interview with Reuters, Gao Lufeng, chief executive officer of Ninebot, told Reuters that AI-controlled scooters, remotely controlled from the cloud, could radically improve the economic conditions of scooter sharing.

"The problem for scooter drivers is to better maintain scooters at a lower cost," he said. Currently, fleet operators sharing scooters must manually retrieve the machines to reload them.

Founded in 2015 by Chinese group Ninebot and US transport pioneer Segway, the company has quietly become the leading supplier of scooter sharing companies such as Bird and Lime.

"I think scooters will replace bicycles as a preferred solution for micro-mobility," Gao said. "It's human nature to save energy while traveling."

The craze for sharing scooters began two years ago with the launch of Bird in California. Venture capitalists have since poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the sector and electric scooter parks are now operating in US and European cities.

The Segway-Ninebot group has requested the listing of its shares on the new Nasdaq-style Chinese management board aimed at local technology companies, the Star Market. The company sold 1.6 million scooters in 2018, according to a prospectus filed in April.

Julie Wood, a spokeswoman for Lyft, said the company was still interested in the latest innovations from potential partners such as Ninebot. "But we have not yet made any commitment to this product," she said in an email.

Uber did not immediately respond to requests for comments sent via email.

The new scooters will cost nearly 10,000 yuan ($ 1,420), more than the traditional scooters of the company, sold to scooters for $ 100 to $ 300.

The new machines will begin road testing next month and will be widely commercialized in the first quarter of 2020.

The company has also launched two self – driving delivery robots – one for outdoor delivery, the other for indoor services.

Ninebot said the unmanned delivery robots would initially serve the food delivery sector in China.

The company is in talks with food distribution operators, including Meituan Dianping and Ele.me of the Alibaba Group, for commissioning by the first half of next year.

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