Electric scooters are flimsy, so Superpedestrian is making more robust ones to sell to operators

[NelsonG]

If you’ve been on an electric scooter from Bird, Lime, Lyft, JUMP via Uber, Skip, Scoot or others, you’re probably familiar with that feeling of impending doom. Superpedestrian, makers of the Copenhagen Wheel, is today emerging with a sturdier, safer and smarter electric scooter. But instead of operating a shared electric scooter network, the plan is to sell these scooters to the players mentioned above.

Superpedestrian’s main offering is a sturdier scooter with self-diagnostic and remote management capabilities. Superpedestrian says its scooters can maintain themselves from nine to 18 months at a time, while other scooters break down more often, the company says.

Superpedestrian’s scooters are equipped to self-diagnose issues that involve components, the motherboard, motor controller, land management system, batteries and more. In total, Superpedestrian can detect about 100 different things that could be wrong with it.

“So the system is smart enough to identify those common things that take place, common risks and hazards, and then it apply self-protection, which means it protects before damage occurs,” Superpedestrian founder and CEO Assaf Biderman told TechCrunch. “If the batteries are out of balance, and there’s a heating issue in part of the cells, it balances itself if temperatures continue to rise, it attenuates, consumes, less energy, it never lets it get to the point where it catches fire.”

These internal systems are designed to reduce failures, decrease the amount of time human operators need to spend troubleshooting scooters and ultimately increase the supply of scooters available at any given time.

Superpedestrian says it already has a big player on board, though Biderman would not disclose which one. What he would share is that the first deployment will happen in Q1 2019.

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