A Beijing based electric scooter manufacturer named Segway-Ninebot Group which is one of the largest suppliers for scooter-sharing companies such as Bird and Lime. has revealed the recent scooter that they have been working on. On Friday the company unveiled information regarding a scooter that can return itself to the charging stations without the driver. The scooter is named as KickScooter T60.
At a Segway-Ninebot product launch event in Beijing on 16th of August, Ninebot president Wang Ye unveils semi-autonomous scooter KickScooter T60 that can return itself to charging stations without a driver. The company also said that Uber and Lyft services are expanding into scooter sharing and will be available among the customers in the form of new semi-autonomous vehicles. These vehicles are expected to hit roads early next year. Adding up to this, Ninebot chairman, Gao Lufeng said that these autonomous scooters will be AI-driven and will be controlled remotely from the cloud and this could eventually improve the economics of the scooter-sharing. The chairman also said that the pain point or the major difficulty faced by the scooter operator is to maintain the scooters at a lower cost as for now the operators of the scooter sharing fleets have to collect the machines manually for recharging. With the arrival of semi-autonomous vehicles, the scooter operators work will become less hectic.
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As per the information available, the new scooter will be priced at close to 10,000 yuan ($1,420), more than the company’s traditional scooters, which it sells to scooter companies for $100-$300. The new vehicle will start road testing next month and will be commercially launched in the first quarter of 2020.
Gao Lufeng, Ninebot chairman and chief executive said that according to him semi-autonomous scooters will replace bicycles as the prime solution for micro-mobility. Apart from semi-autonomous vehicles, the company has also launched two robots. One for outdoor delivery and the other one for indoor services.
