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Harley Looks to Lime and Bird Scooters for Future of Mobility Market

More Electrics and Possible Ride-Sharing Are Coming

We all know what Harley-Davidson is focusing on a greener, electric future to help the brand pivot as it attracts a new customer base. A recent report from CNN suggests the company is seriously looking at electric scooter companies like Bird and Lime for its future. 

“It’s a huge opportunity,” Marc McAllister, vice president of product portfolio at Harley-Davidson, told CNN. “For people who are using Bird and Lime today, how do we give them a much better experience with a Harley-Davidson brand and lifestyle?”

The company doesn’t exactly have plans to roll out its own version of the scooters just yet. It seems Harley is just studying the market and trying to decide how it will fit into the sharing economy. One option for Harley-Davidson would be to just brand a bunch of the scooters that already exist. Many of the scooter ride-sharing companies out there use the same model. Harley likely won’t do that, though.

Its approach will most likely use something more like the small electric concept bikes that it showed off a while back. Instead of selling them outright, though, it could look to some kind of ride-sharing solution.

Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school and author of “The Sharing Economy,” told CNN he thinks Harley could position itself as an alternative to Bird and Lime. He said that it shouldn’t try to compete with those companies directly. I have to agree with him. Haley should let Lime and Bird do their own thing and find a path that is their own. What that path is, though is yet to be seen. However, one thing is certain, the future Harley-Davidsons will look far different from the bike’s it’s currently known for.

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Etergo Gets €10M Investment for Battery-Swapping Scooters

A Simple Solution to Range Anxiety

Etergo is a Dutch scooter company. It just landed a huge investment to the tune of €10M (roughly $11.4M) to build a modular scooter that can swap out batteries on the fly.

Range anxiety is the number one reason I would hesitate to buy an electric motorcycle or scooter. With charging stations still relatively scarce, the fear of running out of battery juice is real. However, Etergo has a simple solution: swap out the discharged battery for a fully charged one.

I’ve often wondered why this wasn’t a bigger thing. It would be like filling up your gas tank. You could pull into a service station, swap out the battery in a few minutes, and be on your way. The service station could then recharge the battery and use it on a different customer.

Anyway, Etergo’s scooter, called the AppScooter, can travel a respectable 240 km (roughly 150 miles) per charge with all battery modules installed and fully charged. It has a top speed of only 45 km/h (roughly 26 mph), which means it’s only suitable for the city.

With that said, the Etergo AppScooter would work for a lot of commuters worldwide. The company is still in the process of finding a manufacturing partner to start churning these two-wheeled electric-powered commuter machines out.

Etergo Isn’t the Only One

Etergo Appscooter
Image from Etergo

According to RideApart, Etergo isn’t the only scooter company out there with this approach. The publication points to Gogoro, which already has a scooter in production and has 750 battery swap stations spread out over Taiwan. Gogoro has also made it into the delivery service as well, further bolstering its business.

Etergo will likely find plenty of room in this market. Worldwide, scooter sales outpace cars according to Etergo, and that means there’s a huge market for an electric alternative, especially with emissions regulations becoming stricter in much of the world.

I would love to see someone put this kind of technology on a legit motorcycle. With swappable batteries comes the opportunity to essentially refuel and keep on riding. While I know there is a lot of work to do as far as building the infrastructure, it seems to make more sense than putting charging stations everywhere.

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