Bird announces new scooter and IPO

Bird has presented its new electric pedal scooter and is planning to go public on the US stock exchange. Both major projects are to be implemented in parallel in the summer.

Bird’s newest vehicle addition, the ‘Bird Three’ was developed specifically for vehicle sharing and is said to offer a significant improvement in durability. Thanks to the increased range (which is not quantified in the company’s announcement), more trips can be made with one battery charge. The vehicle will therefore have to be collected and charged less frequently.

The Californian micromobility company says that the greater lever for increased sustainability is not the range, but the service life of the kick scooter. Thanks to a more robust design, vehicle damage is said to have decreased by almost 400 per cent. Bird, however, does not name the data basis for this decrease, so it can only be a smaller test fleet. This is because the actual test phase for the third-generation electric scooter will first start in Berlin and Tel Aviv. From summer onwards, the new vehicles are to be introduced worldwide.

Bird is also planning to go public on the New York Stock Exchange from the third quarter of 2021 through a merger with Switchback II Corporation. Switchback is a SPAC, i.e. an already listed company that was founded precisely for the purpose of merging with another company. A regular IPO can take several years in the US, but merging with an already listed company has become a popular shortcut – and not just in the fast-growing zero-emission transport industry.

In March, Bird announced that it would invest €125 million to expand its services in Europe, doubling its presence there over the spring and summer by launching in 50 cities and expanding services in existing cities.

prnewswire.com (Bird 3), bird.co (IPO, PDF)