Thursday, January 30, 2020

Bird's Scoot Launches Bird Two In San Francisco

Scoot, the on-demand scooter service which is owned by Santa Monica-based Bird, announced this morning that it has rolled out the Bird Two, Bird's next generation scooter, in San Francisco. Bird said that San Francisco will be the first city to have a fleet of up to 1,000 of the new e-scooters. The new scooters address a lot of the issues that Bird has been seeing with its earlier generation of scooter, and Bird claims that the Bird Two will be the "longest-lasting shared e-scooter on the market". Bird says the new scooter has a longer lasting battery; automatic damage sensors; machine learning for detecting scooter issues; and better safety. Bird--as well as every other e-scooter and on-demand last mile vehicle company on the market--had been facing issues with the overall lifetime and durability of their vehicles versus the cost to build them, related to overall revenues for that hardware.