The two main american dockless bike-share brands announced an upcoming service of E-scooter-share!

Spin was first, revealing on february 8th its will to develop shared E-scooter services in the US. According to Spin, it is their step “into a true multi-modal mobility platform for cities and campuses.” The scooter itself is an “electrified Razor-like one, that can go up to 15 mph and cover 18 miles on a single charge”. Rates will be 1$/usage + 0.15$/10 minutes. Spin chose not to develop the product themselves, but to ask an outside manufacturer to do so. Users will have to unlock a mechanical system in the wheel through the app to be able to use it. All scooters will be of course tracked with a build-in GPS.

LimeBike follow suite with its in-house built  E-scooters, named Lime-S. For LimeBike’s CEO Toby Sun, “the multi-modal mobility solution also helps to meet the various needs of that first and last mile transportation challenge.” They chose to use a larger battery, allowing a 37 miles range at 15mph. Rates will be 1$/usage + 0.1$/10 minutes. Unlike Spin, LimeBike is already operating a pilot program for a couple of months (where? how? strange not to have any information…).

The E-scooter-share market seems not to be that developed so far: Singapore is hosting 3 services with Popscoot, Neuron – a mixed bike/E-scooter solution- and Telepod. Los Angeles has Bird’s scooters in the streets. If you are aware of other projects, please let me know, but the market seems to be on a testing phase, so LimeBike and Spin might arrive at the good time to transform it as a must-have for cities, along with bike-sharing.