Bird, recognizing the growing possibility that people will want to own electric scooters rather than share them, is launching a new scooter model available for purchase. Called the Bird One, it will be available for ownership and shared use cases. Bird is also ditching the Ninebot ES and relying on its own M365 model for monthly personal rentals.
“Bird One builds on the benefits and learnings of Bird Zero and is forecasted to last in the sharing environment for well over a year,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden said in a statement. “Given the excitement and demand for our next generation e-scooter, we are also making a limited supply of Bird Ones available to own. Now, whether you want to share, rent, or own, Bird provides an option for everyone.”
Bird One has a battery designed to last twice as long, cover a longer range and last more than 4x longer in the shared space. That’s an important detail given how it’s notoriously hard to achieve good unit economics with shared electric scooters.
Bird One will cost $1,299 and come in three colors. People can pre-order the scooter now and receive it this summer. Bird’s announcement comes ahead of Boosted’s anticipated electric scooter on May 15.
Over the last few months, Bird has been aggressively trying to capture more parts of the electric scooter market. Late last month, Bird introduced monthly personal rentals in San Francisco and Barcelona. The program enables people to rent a scooter for $24.99 a month with no cap on the number of rides.
Scooter-sharing in SF and Barcelona is highly regulated, so Bird’s delivery program is a very neat way to not be hindered by regulation. By dropping off the scooters directly to individuals, it’s akin to simply owning your own scooter — from the city’s perspective, that is. The bigger barrier for Bird, however, may be how many people have already decided to simply by their own scooters.
Whether it’s the traditional shared model, monthly rentals or selling direct to consumer, Bird is clearly trying to be the go-to provider of electric scooters — no matter how often people want to use them.
The uncertain future of shared electric scooters
