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Rollersharing: Coup discontinues business with rented scooters

2019-11-25T19:11:03.860Z


The Bosch subsidiary Coup completes the rental business with electric scooters and takes all models off the road. The rental is no longer economical.



The electric scooter provider Coup completes its sharing business. In the middle of December, the vehicles will be withdrawn from Berlin and Tübingen, soon also from Paris and Madrid, as the company belonging to Bosch announced in Berlin.

In view of the strong competition and high service costs, it was economically not feasible to operate a coup permanently, it was justification. Unused credits should be paid to the customers. The closure affects 120 employees, 75 of them in Berlin. There are around 1500 e-scooters in the capital alone, and there were as many as 5,000 throughout Europe this year.

Market for rental scooters is growing strongly

The number of motor scooters increased by 164 percent in 2019 worldwide. In Germany too, the market grew by around 42 percent. Experts see scooter sharing as a good alternative to driving to bigger cities. "If there is an ideal vehicle for the electric drive in the sharing mode, then it is the scooter," says Andreas Knie, traffic researcher at the Berlin Science Center. "It's affordable, the batteries can be easily exchanged and are big enough for a decent range." The scooter closes the gap between bike and car, so knee.

Coup started with the black and green scooters in 2016. Since then, the market is increasingly competitive: According to a research by the Berlin competitor Unu, the number of electric scooters in Germany alone in this year by about half grown to just under 4200 vehicles. Accordingly, the operators registered per scooter 8-10 rentals per day, the respective rental period is about 15-20 minutes.

Sad #news: We plan to discontinue our service in Berlin & Tübingen by the middle of December 2019. We deeply regret this. Important: You can continue to use COUP in the usual way until the service is discontinued. pic.twitter.com/WXa2dyBEGW

- Coup Berlin (@joincoup) November 25, 2019

In Germany remains as a large provider only the competitor Emmy left. Its red electric scooters are currently driving in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Dusseldorf and Vienna. However, the provider had last taken in Hamburg all scooters from the street. The reason given by the company is a fire in a warehouse in which the batteries of Emmy scooters were stored.

What happens to the canceled coup-rollers now is still unclear. A sale to private customers, such as recently at the bankrupt bike-sharing provider Obike, Coup does not consider. "We can not sell coup e-scooters to end users in Europe because there is no charging infrastructure, such as in Taiwan," the company writes on Twitter.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2019-11-25

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