đź•ş Dance Launches E-Bike Leasing

Plus, Ola looks to raise up to half a billion, Bosch has big update to e-bike line, and the first US city bans gas stations.

August 31, 2021

Hello and welcome to the Micromobility Newsletter, a weekly missive about mobility, mostly mobility in cities by lightweight electric vehicles. The reason you’re reading this email is that you signed up on our website or came to one of our events.

If you’re not a subscriber and you want to keep getting the latest news and analysis from inside the micromobility movement delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday, sign up here for free. If you’d like to unsubscribe, just click that link.

Thank you for reading.

Last Chance…

Micromobility America is back, and for the next 24 hours, you can score tickets for $450 off the full price.

Join micromobility’s top founders, policymakers, investors, and technologists in the SF Bay Area on Sept 23 for a highly programmed day of talks, demos, meetings, and more, all focused on the disruptive potential of lightweight electric vehicles to get our cities moving again.

Learn more—including who you can expect to see at the event (Andrew Yang, Lauren Goode, Lucas Di Grassi)—here.

What You Need to Know This Week

  • A new report shows that the US creates 10.5k jobs for every billion dollars it spends on bike lanes, trails, and other cycling infrastructure.

  • With the rise of remote work, every hour is now rush hour. And as cars flood the freeways again, many cities are eliminating COVID-era slow streets programs, which favored pedestrians and micromobility users, to make commuting easier for drivers.

  • Ola Electric is in talks with Falcon Edge Capital to secure between $250-500m in investment at a valuation of $2.75b or more. The move comes after the Indian firm launched its much-anticipated EV moped, called the S1, earlier this month.

  • How the container shortage is affecting bike prices: “Where approximately 120 bikes can be loaded into a 20’ container, the cost previously per bike sat at ÂŁ8.33. At ÂŁ4,000.00 per container, rather than ÂŁ1,000, the price rises to ÂŁ33.33 per bike shipped.”

Segway Online Auction – Tuesday September 14th â€“ Bedford, NH

Electric Transport Equipment Manufacturer. Highlights include: Pneumatic & Hydraulic Presses; Electronic & QC Test Equipment; Inspection & Measurement Equipment; Environmental Test Chambers; Automatic Marking Systems; Assembly Stations & Sliding Pallet Assembly Line; Electric & Pneumatic Hand Tools; Segway Cruiser, Personal Transport & Ninebot Finished Product Inventory and Concept & Test Vehicles; Massive Inventory Spare & Production Parts. And More. Online Bidding ends September 14th.

  • Bosch just announced some of the biggest updates to its electric bike drive unit lines in years, including more smart features and higher-capacity batteries.

  • Petaluma, California, recently became the first American city to ban new gas stations.

  • VanMoof has released a firmware update for its S3 and X3 e-bikes that allows for manual gear shifting.

  • Electric bicycles continue to be in high demand in Germany. Sales ticked up over 9% in the first half of 2021, year-over-year. And if you zoom out even further, Germans bought twice as many e-bikes between January and June this year as they did during the same time four years ago.

Image

  • Good summary of how cyclists are treated when they break traffic laws, from a 2017 study: “Nearly everyone has jaywalked, rolled through a stop sign, or driven a few miles per hour over the speed limit, but most such offenses face no legal consequences. Society also tends to see these relatively minor infractions that almost all people make—though they are unmistakably illegal—as normal and even rational. Bicyclists who break the law, however, seem to attract a higher level of scorn and scrutiny.”

  • Here’s a fun thought-experiment: What if drivers had to follow e-scooter laws?

  • Behind the rise and fall of the world’s ride-hailing giant, Didi.

  • The Financial Times joins the e-bike party: “The physics seem mysterious, but the appeal is clear.”

Jobs to Be Done

Welcome to our jobs board, where every week we post open positions in hopes of connecting our talented readers with professional opportunities in the burgeoning world of new mobility. Find out who’s hiring below and sign up for the newsletter to view fresh listings every week.

Hit reply if you have a job that you’re interested in listing.