Uber's first electric scooters arrive in Santa Monica

Uber's first electric scooters have finally arrived. Non-docked devices arrived earlier this week in Santa Monica, California, a month after the city gave Uber and four other companies the green light to use up to 250 shared scooters for 18 months. .

The ride-hail company is catching up in a market that already has billions of dollars worth of startups. The scooters arrived for the first time unexpected last year in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Monica. Since then, they have spread to many cities in the United States and have begun to appear in Europe and the Middle East as well.

But rather than allowing them to spread unhindered, cities quickly took action to crack down on scooters by sending letters of cessation and abandonment or simply ordering them to leave the street until new regulations were passed. can be written. Santa Monica was one of those cities and she has developed a comprehensive pilot program including billion dollar startups, Bird and Lime, as well as the archival Uber, Lyft.

Scooters are available on the Uber app and can cost a dollar to unlock, then 15 cents a minute. These per minute charges only occur after the first five minutes, in order to give users time to locate their reserved scooter. Guests are asked to leave their scooter in the designated parking areas at the end of the trip or to pay a $ 25 fine. Uber is also putting its muscles in competition with a special promotion in which all scooter rentals in Santa Monica will be free until October 7th.

The scooters are manufactured by Ninebot, the Beijing-based Segway parent company, which also sells scooters to Bird, Lime, Lyft and many others. Scooter rental companies typically pay between $ 300 and $ 400 per vehicle for 25 to 40 pounds. (Bird had already touted what he calls an "exclusive" arrangement with Ninebot and Xiaomi, the other major manufacturer of electric scooters.)

Uber offers something that he calls "scooter exchanges". If customers book a scooter in the app but notice an available when walking towards their booked scooter, they can exchange their reservation against the nearest device. Uber says he's one of the few scooter operators to offer this feature.

The launch of Uber's first scooter service in Santa Monica is part of a larger attempt by the ride-hail company to expand to a range of non-car transportation solutions. Earlier this year, the company acquired the Jump Canada self-service bicycle company for $ 200 million. Since then, Uber has taken various steps to position itself as a leader in sustainable mobility. Publicly, the company is pleased that cyclists in San Francisco and other countries are choosing to replace short car trips with bikes, even though these trips are worth less.

It's a coordinated series of measures to advance Uber's goal of becoming more than just a car repair company with a sophisticated application. Since he took over more than a year ago, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has been eager to redo the company to his image. And as more and more evidence emerges about the detrimental effects of traffic jams and transit in cities, it's an attempt by Uber to be seen as part of the solution. rather than as a source of the problem.