If you are keeping up with what is happening in the startup capital of the world, San Francisco, and by extension the Bay Area, you know that the place is under the grips of a fad that very few saw coming — electric scooters. What was a toy less than a generation ago, is now the magic bullet that is believed to be capable of solving the tricky problem of last mile connectivity for urban commuters the world over. And of course, in this ‘ride sharing’ economy, you are not expected to buy these electric scooters.
It is the Uber model, just that there is no driver. You locate a scooter closest to you. Your app tells the scooter who you are and where you have picked it up. You use it to get where you wanted to get to. You get off the scooter, end the trip. It knows where you have gotten off. Whatever needs to be charged to you shall be charged. You pay in a manner that is most convenient to you. You do not mind, for you are sure that it is going to be way cheaper than any other way of having travelled that distance without breaking into a sweat. And when millions of commuters the world over adopt this behaviour, the company operating these scooters will make a killing.
At this point, a lot of Silicon Valley investors are completely sold on this utopian vision. It does not, at least not as long as you do not worry about where electricity really comes from, consume fossil fuels that are rightfully going out of fashion. And it seems perfectly suited for millennials and post-millennials, whatever they are called, who consider any energy spent outside of their fancy exercise regimens, completely unnecessary. Two companies that are into electric scooter sharing are already unicorns, Lime and Bird. And sooner than later, I am sure there will be many more.
The thing about Silicon Valley unicorns is that they are often considered bellwethers for what is going to happen elsewhere. By elsewhere, people are almost always looking at China and India, because clearly that is where the scale is, for that is where the weight of the population exerts enough pressure. And for the first time, of an overwhelming Silicon Valley trend, I feel confident enough to laugh it off.
I will start with China. It was not too long ago when Communist China was acknowledged as a place where everyone bicycled everywhere. When China made its first overtures towards capitalism, one of the earliest sort of companies that came about were those that enabled bicycle sharing. In a model that was not actually all that different from the current model followed by Lime, Bird, and other such electric scooter sharers.
But when this bicycle sharing was tried in China, as a business, as opposed to the positioning as cool that European cities such as Amsterdam and Paris were trying, it was a disaster. Fire up your favourite search engine, and finding images of heaps of bicycles dumped haphazardly enough to cause a nuisance turns out to be a common sight from back then. And because Beijing would then get compared to a Paris or an Amsterdam, it was easy for global media to paint this as a failure of the uncivilised East.
Funnily enough, if you look up photos of electric scooters in San Francisco today, it is pretty much a similar sight. Electric scooters haphazardly dumped all over sidewalks. Or footpaths, as we call sidewalks in India. Even in the Bay Area, there are already loud and righteously vociferous complaints about these scooters taking over sidewalks. Imagine what would happen in India, where there is hardly space on the footpaths to walk. I will leave the idea of electric scooters succeeding on the footpaths of India as an exercise to the imagination of the reader. I take no responsibility for the chaotic nightmare that may result.
The author heads product at a mid-sized startup in the real estate space
