Unu almost ready to enter scooter-sharing game

The Berlin-based electric scooter manufacturer Unu is about to enter the sharing business. According to a media report, the Dutch company Check wants to make Unu scooters available to customers by April at the latest.

The start is to be made with 400 electric scooters in Rotterdam, according to the local Berlin newspaper Berliner Zeitung. Further cities are already planned. Unu also wants to supply other suppliers and is already holding talks to that effect. More than a dozen are apparently quite concrete.

The move into the sharing business had been on the horizon since October 2018, when the Berlin company announced in a financing round that they wanted to focus more on the mobility service market in the future. The technical basis for this is provided by the second scooter generation from Unu presented in May 2019, which is prepared for the sharing offers with its networking technology.

Concrete reports on sharing in the Netherlands have been available since last August, but specific cities were not named. At least for the project in Rotterdam, Unu is supplying not only the scooters including telematics box but also the software for controlling the fleet and invoicing the trips. The information gathered by Berliner Zeitung does not indicate what Unu will supply for the other planned projects.

As Unu founder Pascal Blum told the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, “two to three companies” are to start a rental service with Unu scooters this year. Blum did not mention names or cities, but he did not want to exclude Berlin when asked. This would allow Unu or the sharing partner to close the gap left by the Bosch Service Coup since its discontinuation at the end of 2019.

To ensure that the services can also start as planned, series production of Unu’s second generation of scooters is apparently also currently underway. For this purpose, the Berlin company has gained the major Asian corporation Flex as a production partner.

With reporting by Sebastian Schaal, Germany.

berliner-zeitung.de (in German), share.unumotors.com (sharing technology, launch November 2019)