Tag: skip

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Inside Skip’s plan to appeal San Francisco’s scooter permit decision

Electric scooter operator Skip is gearing up to appeal San Francisco’s decision to not grant it a permit to operate in the city. When the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced the permit grantees in September, it came as a surprise to Skip, which had previously received a permit to operate as part of the city’s pilot program.

Ahead of the appeal hearing last Thursday, TechCrunch caught up with Skip CEO Sanjay Dastoor to learn about the company’s game plan and why he thinks it can prevail in a battle that other electric scooter providers have lost.

Prior to the city’s decision last year to grant permits to Lime, Uber’s JUMP, Bird’s Scoot and Ford’s Spin, Skip was one of only two companies operating shared electric scooter services in San Francisco. Leading up to the new permitting application process, Skip said it had been working to ensure its electronic locks would be fully integrated by the beginning of the new permit period, Dastoor told TechCrunch. The company did this with guidance from the SFMTA, so when Skip was denied a permit, the team was caught off guard.

“It was a huge surprise,” Dastoor said. “We found out basically the same time as the press did that we didn’t get that permit, so it was pretty surprising to all of us.”

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Inside Skip’s plan to appeal San Francisco’s scooter permit decision

Electric scooter operator Skip is gearing up to appeal San Francisco’s decision to not grant it a permit to operate in the city. When the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced the permit grantees in September, it came as a surprise to Skip, which had previously received a permit to operate as part of the city’s pilot program.

Ahead of the appeal hearing last Thursday, TechCrunch caught up with Skip CEO Sanjay Dastoor to learn about the company’s game plan and why he thinks it can prevail in a battle that other electric scooter providers have lost.

Prior to the city’s decision last year to grant permits to Lime, Uber’s JUMP, Bird’s Scoot and Ford’s Spin, Skip was one of only two companies operating shared electric scooter services in San Francisco. Leading up to the new permitting application process, Skip said it had been working to ensure its electronic locks would be fully integrated by the beginning of the new permit period, Dastoor told TechCrunch. The company did this with guidance from the SFMTA, so when Skip was denied a permit, the team was caught off guard.

“It was a huge surprise,” Dastoor said. “We found out basically the same time as the press did that we didn’t get that permit, so it was pretty surprising to all of us.”

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Voyage’s driverless future, ghost work, B2B growth strategies, and Black Hat takeaways

Inside Voyage’s plan to deliver a driverless future

In the autonomous vehicle space, startups have taken radically different strategies to building our AV future. Some companies like Waymo have driven all across different types of environments in order to rack up the datasets that they believe will be needed to effectively maneuver without a human driver.

That’s the opposite strategy of Voyage, where CEO and founder Oliver Cameron and his team have focused on driving safety in the incredibly constrained context of two retirement communities.

Our transportation editor Kirsten Korosec talked with the company and analyzes their approach in a new profile for Extra Crunch, and also drops some news about a partnership the company has brewing with a major automotive manufacturer.

Cameron, who shies away from discussing timelines, describes the company as inching toward driverless service.

Its self-driving software has now reached maturation in the communities it is testing in, and Voyage is now focusing on validation, according to Cameron.

Voyage has developed a few systems that will help push it closer to a commercial driverless service while maintaining safety, such as a collision mitigation system that it calls Rango, an internal nickname inspired by the 2011 computer-animated Western action-comedy about a chameleon.

This collision mitigation system is designed to be extremely fast-reacting, like a reptile — hence the Rango name. Rango, which has an independent power source and compute system and uses a different approach to perception than the main self-driving system, is designed to react quickly. If needed, it will engage the full force of the brakes.

Startup ads are taking over the subway

Public transit is just swimming in startup ads. From complete Brex takeovers of the San Francisco Caltrain station to the sleep puzzles posted by Casper across the New York City subway, startups have been taking advantage of this unique out-of-home advertising space. What’s the full story though? Our reporter Anthony Ha takes a look at how the subway ad market came to be in the past few years, and what the future holds for other marketers.

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Local governments are forcing the scooter industry to grow up fast

Gone are the days when tech companies can deploy their services in cities without any regard for rules and regulations. Before the rise of electric scooters, cities had already become hip to tech’s status quo (thanks to the likes of Uber and Lyft) and were ready to regulate. We explored some of this in “The uncertain future of shared scooters,” but since then, new challenges have emerged for scooter startups.

And for scooter startups, city regulations can make or break their businesses across nearly every aspect of operations, especially two major ones: ridership growth and ability to attract investor dollars. From issuing permits to determining how many scooters any one company can operate at any one time to enforcing low-income plans and impacting product roadmaps, the ball is really in the city’s court.

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Skip unveils its first custom electric scooter

Skip is beginning to test the first electric scooter that the startup built entirely in-house. They’re not quite ready for primetime, but Skip expects to deploy them in San Francisco this October.

That’s notably when San Francisco plans to allow service providers to deploy electric scooters as part of the city’s first permanent permitting program. Skip’s current permit expires on October 14, but the company plans to reapply for a permit, Skip CEO Sanjay Dastoor told TechCrunch.

For riders, they will likely notice the sheer difference in the size of this scooter compared to Skip’s previous models. Skip’s S3 is much larger than the company’s previous models in order to help riders feel more stable and secure on the scooter. The S3 also ditches the regenerative brake for a traditional hand brake and rear foot brake.

This comes shortly after Skip announced it would bring back its scooters to Washington, D.C. following some battery-related issues that led to fires.

The scooter fire in D.C. was caused by a damaged battery, though, it’s not clear if it was intentional or accidental. With this new scooter model, the battery was custom built for the shared electric scooter service use case and is also completed enclosed, which should help prevent it from getting damaged, Dastoor said.

This swappable battery should also help with unit economics, given that it won’t need to be replaced as often. The battery pack, Dastoor said, can last for about 20 rides with a range of 35 miles per ride. The custom battery also features diagnostic capabilities that can detect if it’s wet. Though, the battery is designed to be able to survive submerged in 1 meter of water for up to 30 minutes.

“What we’re looking at now is how do we actually do the swap,” Dastoor said. “We’re changing the model from taking vehicles off of the road to taking swapping out the batteries.”

Dastoor said he currently envisions a warehouse with a bunch of electric vehicles lined up charging the batteries. Given that the current model relies on independent contractors to take vehicles home to charge them, you could imagine a world in which the independent contractors instead are responsible for picking up fresh batteries at the warehouse and then swapping them out with the depleted ones.

Previous models of Skip’s scooters had swappable batteries and even cameras, but the cameras didn’t make it into the version.

“We are testing a variety of sensor systems to solve some of our key priorities, like parking compliance, rider safety and etiquette, and reliable location tracking,” Dastoor said in a follow-up email.

And thanks to the modular design of the scooter, Skip can easily add and remove elements, such as cameras, locks and even regenerative braking.

Bird, Uber and Lyft get another chance to apply for electric scooter permits in SF

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Skip scooters are returning to Washington, D.C. after battery fires

Following battery issues and a single-alarm fire caused by improperly disposed of batteries in Washington, D.C., Skip has been given the green light to resume operations in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding areas of Alexandria and Arlington. The plan is to redeploy the scooters in the coming weeks.

In June, a battery on one of Skip’s scooters caught fire in D.C., prompting the company to ground its scooters in both D.C. and San Francisco. The scooter in question was found with its external battery on fire, which caused “minor damage” to a wall nearby. In light of that incident, Skip identified other potential at-risk batteries and quarantined them in its warehouse.

“In DC, they weren’t disposed of properly, which helped create the right conditions for a single-alarm fire,” Skip wrote in a blog post. “After the incident, DDOT asked us to suspend operations. Frankly, that was the right call. We didn’t just let our cities and riders down, we let ourselves down.”

Since then, Skip says it has consulted with battery experts and OSHA compliance firms to put in place new procedures and operations around handling and disposing of damaged equipment. Now, Skip has real-time monitoring and alerting for battery and vehicle issues to ensure batteries are disposed of before exhibiting any safety issues. Among other steps, Skip is now reporting its handling of batteries and employee injuries to the District Department Of Transportation.

Skip is not the only micromobility company that has experienced issues with battery fires. Last month, a couple of Lyft’s electric bike batteries caught on fire in San Francisco, prompting the company to pull its bikes from the streets. Late last year, Lime recalled some of its Ninebot scooters due to fire concerns.

And battery fires do not only affect electric bikes and scooters. You may remember the year of the exploding hoverboards, as well as exploding smartphones and laptops. What all of those have in common are lithium-ion batteries, which are very commonly used for portable electronics and now, personal electric vehicles. The downside to these types of batteries is potential overheating, which can lead to a failure mode called “thermal runaway” and result in a battery fire.

Other potential issues that can lead to battery failure is a bad design and the mere fact that scooters can be banged around by users. In the case of Skip, the issue seemed to fall on the latter.

“The investigation found the main cause to be physical damage, but it was not able to determine whether the damage was intentional or unintentional,” a Skip spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Given the amount of scrutiny all of these companies are under, coupled with their reliance on approval from cities, the likes of Skip, Lyft and Lime need to make sure their respective safety procedures are buttoned up if they want to thrive in this space.

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Sources: Bird is in talks to acquire scooter startup Scoot

If you are among those who thought that the scooter market sounded a little overhyped and overcrowded, we’ve gotten wind of a deal that could point to some impending consolidation. The on-demand scooter business Bird has agreed to acquire Scoot, a smaller two-wheeled mobility startup, sources tell TechCrunch.

The stage of the negotiations is not clear although from what our sources tell us, it sounds like the deal is not closed. Contacted for a response, both Scoot and Bird said they declined to comment on speculation.

If accurate, it would be far from a merger of equals. Scoot was last valued at around $71 million, having raised about $47 million in equity funding to date from Scout Ventures, Vision Ridge Partners, angel investor Joanne Wilson and more.

Bird is significantly larger. Led by chief executive officer Travis VanderZanden, earlier this year the company was working on a round of financing reportedly worth $300 million at a $2.3 billion valuation. We’ve been able to confirm that this round has now closed, although we don’t yet know the final amount or who the investors are. (Backers of Bird include Sequoia, Index, Charles River Ventures, Tusk Ventures, Upfront Ventures and dozens more.) Scoot would be Bird’s first full acquisition.

Scooting toward consolidation

It’s still very early days in the scooter market in terms of consumer adoption, but that hasn’t stopped people from launching a lot of startups and raising funding to capitalise on what many believe will be a big opportunity longer term.

That promise is made bigger by the regulatory structure of the scooter market. Similar to their approach to bikes, many cities restrict the number of licenses they give out to companies to run on-street, hourly scooter services. Winning a license can give a company a near-monopoly on building a business in that city.

It also means that a combination between two companies whose geographic footprints do not overlap becomes a much cheaper and faster way of instantly creating a bigger business.

Notably, Scoot has a license to operate a pick-up/drop-off street service in the key market of San Francisco — where it competes with Skip, the only other licensed operator in the city. (Note: Bird last month did start up business again in SF, but only for the less popular offer of monthly rentals.)

What’s more, the two startups do not have any overlap in the rest of their footprints. Scoot is active in Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile. Bird, on the other hand, has launched in about 100 cities spanning the U.S. and Europe, but its list does not include any of the cities where Scoot has rolled out its service.

Bird announced its new, two-seated electric vehicle earlier this week

On the vehicle front, the story is a little different. The two are providing, more or less, the same kinds of vehicles. Scoot has built out a network focused primarily on electric push scooters, seated scooters and electric bikes. Bird, meanwhile, has mostly built its service around electric push scooters, but just yesterday the company debuted its first seated vehicle to expand into a new product class.

Bird acquiring Scoot will help the two achieve better economies of scale in terms of vehicle purchasing power and device R&D.

It also helps them compete against the big boys. The market for scooters and other two-wheeled vehicles (collectively termed “micro-mobility”) is still a relatively new one, but Lyft and Uber have also waded in early to establish market share, as part of their own strategies to position themselves as the go-to platforms for any and all transportation needs.

Bird buying Scoot is one likely M&A move, but it’s not the only one.

Sources have told TechCrunch that an Uber acquisition of Skip (the other provider in SF) could also be in the works. Skip, much like Scoot, is another small player in the e-scooter market. To date, it has secured $31 million in venture capital funding from Initialized Capital, Accel and others.

Uber is already an active acquirer in the area of mico-mobility. If you remember, it acquired JUMP Bikes for $200 million in April 2018.

Uber’s acquisition of JUMP wasn’t surprising. In January 2018, the ride-hailing giant partnered with JUMP to launch Uber Bike, which lets Uber riders book JUMP bikes via the Uber app.

Other acquisitions in the nascent micro-mobility space include Lyft’s purchase of Motivate, a deal announced roughly one year ago. Motivate, the oldest and largest electric bike-share company in North America, did not disclose terms of the deal, though reports indicated it was asking for at least $250 million.

Bird — founded in 2017 — has yet to announce any acquisitions, although a spokesperson for the company said there have been quiet acqui-hires before now.

It was itself the subject of acquisition rumors for several months in 2018, too. Prior to Uber filing to go public in what was one of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings of the decade, many expected it to shell out cash for either Bird or Lime. From what we know, Uber was in discussions to acquire Bird, but ultimately it wasn’t able to meet Bird’s steep asking price.

Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality

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Skip pulls scooters from SF after one caught fire in D.C.

Last week, a Skip scooter caught fire in Washington, D.C. In response, Skip grounded its fleet in D.C. Now, Skip has pulled its scooters off the streets of San Francisco.

The scooter in question was found with its external battery on fire, which caused “minor damage” to a wall nearby. Skip unveiled its scooters with external, swappable batteries back in December.

In Skip’s app, it notifies riders that its scooters are currently offline and have been since yesterday. Skip says it expects the scooters to return “in the next few days.”

 

In a statement to TechCrunch, a Skip spokesperson said:

A scooter in DC was discovered with its battery in flames last Thursday. There is still no reason to believe that this affects any other vehicles in our fleet after days investigating all potential causes of the incident, including foul play. Out of an abundance of caution and until we are able to share our complete investigation with regulators, we will not deploy in San Francisco. We expect our scooters to be back on the road in the next few days.

Skip is not the only scooter company to face battery issues. In October, Lime recalled some of its Ninebot scooters due to fire concerns. Skip currently modifies the Speedway Mini4 36V 21Ah, but has previously told TechCrunch it plans to design its scooters custom from the ground up.

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Skip is way more popular than Scoot in San Francisco

San Francisco has hit the mid-point for its one-year electric scooter pilot program. In a slide deck to be presented at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s board of directors meeting tomorrow, the SFMTA reports that there were 242,398 electric scooter trips between October 2018 and February 2019.

What especially jumps out is the fact that Skip accounted for 90 percent of all rides, It seems that’s a result of consistently having more scooter availability than its rival Scoot .

On the flip side, Skip’s high number of devices and 218,000 trips made resulted in 34 collisions — 18 of which caused injuries. Scoot riders experienced zero reported collisions.

Some of the promises related to electric scooter usage have touched on fewer car trips and better access to transportation for people in low-income areas. The SFMTA says 42 percent of scooter trips replaced car trips while just 0.5 percent of Scoot trips and 0.3 percent of Skip trips were part of the low-income program.

Oh, and here’s the real shocker (sarcasm): 63 percent of riders are white and 82 percent are dudes. Meanwhile, 68 percent of the riders have household incomes of more than $100,000, according to rider surveys.

In conclusion, the SFMTA says lock-to mechanisms have improved parking compliance, but that more scooters are needed to more thoroughly evaluate the program. Additionally, scooter companies need to do more outreach in underrepresented communities.

Moving forward, the SFMTA will decide this week whether to allow Skip and Scoot to increase their respective fleet sizes, as well as consider allowing operators like JUMP, Spin, Lime and Bird to deploy their own fleets.

The uncertain future of shared electric scooters

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The uncertain future of shared electric scooters

Cities all over the world have seen an influx of two-wheeled, electric kick scooters on the road over the last couple of years. Scooters from the likes of Bird, Lime, Spin, Uber’s JUMP, Lyft and others are all trying to own the first and the last mile. The first mile is often understood as the distance between a transportation hub and someone’s starting point while the last mile is the distance between a transportation hub and someone’s final destination. These companies want both, and some (Uber, Lyft) also want everything in between.

The rise of electric scooters is often compared to the rise of ride-hailing, but there are some key differences at play. For one, cities are in charge of regulation — not the states. And since these are much smaller vehicles, cities can easily pick them up and throw them in the back of a truck if they become a nuisance. Meanwhile, as part of city regulation, data-sharing is not optional — it’s a requirement in order for companies to receive permission to deploy scooters on city streets.

The startup ecosystem had become accustomed to the ethos of begging for forgiveness, rather than asking for permission. But that’s not the case with electric scooters. These companies have found their entire businesses to be contingent on the continued approval from individual cities all over the world. That inherently creates a number of potential conflicts.

It’s also unclear whether the increase in people riding scooters is indicative of people adopting shared services or simply adopting a new mode of transportation. Some industry insiders wonder if it’s just a matter of time between consumers ditch shared scooters in exchange for their own. 

Between city regulators capping the growth of operators, the vast number of companies going after the first and last miles and the threat of the shift from shared to ownership, it’s all going to come down to the survival of the fittest.

At the mercy of cities

Unlike the ride-sharing market, electric scooter operators are entirely dependent upon cities. These cities, rightfully so, have a number of concerns ranging from safety to sidewalk congestion to equal access to transportation.