Let’s take two evident contemporary trends:

• The future of bike-share will include more and more E-bikes!
• The economic situation implies that bike-share schemes will get less grants or subsidies, and will therefore have to become more financially efficient.

The equation seems hard to solve as E-bike fleets operation is of course more expensive than classic fleets one. So for E-bike-share operators to be sustainable, they have to focus on optimising their vehicle use and operation. Thinking of your vehicle first when you speak about vehicle-sharing seems fair, right?

The electrification system (motor + battery + electronics) is a major extra-investment for E-bike share schemes, and a major extra-cost during operation. While there is not much to do for stakeholders to lower the investment costs, there is much to do on the operation side by optimising usage and monitoring of the fleet.

The hazard of professionnal social-networking brought eBikeLabs to light: as an handful of companies, the Grenoble-based french start-up, first specialised in E-bike monitoring understood the raising need in E-bike-sharing to improve its operation. Providing  internally-developed controller, apps and software, the eco-system offers great benefit for both the rider and the operator.

• The bike or fleet become fully customisable, as bike power adjustments (torque, speed, RPM), speed limit settings, Power-generating braking system are easily managed through a completely wireless technology.
• The controller allows an optimized predictive and corrective maintenance, as it allows battery management, breakdown detection and remote diagnosis on battery cells, controller and drive system
• The controller turns any motor system into a real lock with no additional components. The controller has a GPS-enabled system allowing to track the bike all along the rides, and allows to block the motor to turn the bike into a dead weight.
• The system also allows a deep remote monitoring of the life of the batteries. Cell-to-cell permanent diagnosis (temperature, state of charge, balancing), possibility to cure and reboost any battery in-house, control of correct battery loading/unloading are efficient tools to optimise battery usage.

The E-bikes become fully adaptable to each user, providing a smooth and safe user experience: the sytem learns the user habits and set the assistance according to the rider’s history.

The operator will optimise the bicycle life-span on different parts. First, the power-generating braking system will lower the need to use the brakes, and therefore lower the maintenance and replacement needs. The battery is monitored at cell-level, allowing to optimise its usage, charging, and maintenance. Once again, good usage = longer life with a huge effect as the batteyr is the most expensive part of an E-bike. Operators will also lower the operation costs thanks to the remote monitoring as it will cut the need for maintenance shifts.

The world of mobility is mainly speaking about disruptive technologies, business moves at a scale that few people can undestand. It is quite refreshing to see that companies can still work to improve existing products, and therefore user experience, the best way to bring people on the saddle, along with optimising the operation cost, the sinews of war for operators to survive. It seems that operators agree: eBikeLabs is already equipping E-bikes fleet, and is in talks with different bike-share operators to integrate their solution on their E-bike solution.