Remember the early days of the computer? As a kid who wanted to play video games, I’d have to go over to the internet café and rent one of the shared computers for a block of time to play Counterstrike with my other be-pimpled friends. Very few of us had a high-performance computer at home and so we had to rent access to one. But after a while, those performance computers (and consoles) came down in cost, and before long, we mostly abandoned shared computers and began playing games at home on our own PC or dedicated console.
It wasn’t just playing video games that became possible on the PC. The PC evolved from a type of hobbyist invention into a tool of immense commercial value, fundamentally disrupting the nature of work along the way.
When ‘micromobility’ first took off in the United States in 2017-2018, it was in the form of a shared short-term rental service of e-kickscooters. Frontrunners like Bird and Lime both launched services, and within a year, the electric scooter market grew tenfold in Europe and America market. By 2019, lightweight, shared mobility services were a global phenomenon with an estimated market revenue size of over $2.55 billion US dollars. And as at 2021, almost 70 percent of people say they would be willing to use a micromobility vehicle for their daily commute, according to a recent McKinsey survey.
Interestingly though, while shared e-scooters penetrated the market quickly, we’re now seeing a key shift in demand towards private e-kickscooter ownership. That same McKinsey survey found that, among those willing to use an e-kickscooter for their commute, only 6 percent actually preferred using a shared model. Indeed, the vast majority of people (64%), said that they would prefer to own their own vehicle. On a recent episode of The Micromobility Podcast, Horace Dediu, who is credited with coining the term ‘micromobility’, shared that people are loving the optionality, even though you get lower utilization on your own device, they are loving the optionality of having [a vehicle] available at least in their home and maybe even having more than one”.
It conforms to the thesis that we’ve been developing over the last four years of doing the Micromobility Podcast together - that these new lightweight electric vehicles are like ‘smartphones on wheels’ and that they’ll follow a similar path of market development and penetration computing platforms did as they evolved from personal computers to laptops to smartphones.
So what does my experience of going to an internet cafe as a kid offer our theory? After the wave of private ownership of PCs, people began diversifying and increasing their private computing options. Now it’s normal not just to have your own computer, but also a smartphone, sometimes multiple wearables, and a work computer as well – maximizing your optionality. With the demand for private ownership on the rise, it’s not an outlandish concept that very soon having an e-kickscooter, ebike, and electric pod in addition to your car will be as normal as having a smartwatch, phone, tablet, laptop, second screen and additional computer. . And in the same way you use your home computer, laptop and smartphone for different tasks, you could soon use the vehicle that makes the most sense for you to transport yourself in.
Most trips in urban settings are less than 5km, and as a result you’ll use the best vehicle to solve the ‘job-to-be-done” of each trip, especially in highly congested and expensive-to-park cities.
We call this the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of vehicles that we’re seeing in micromobility space. It’s one that we track closely at Micromobility Industries. Our ‘Micromobility Landscape’ tracking companies in the space has increased from an initial 139 companies to now nearly 1,000 companies in the last 2 years, and we’ve covered the stories of over 100 companies on our podcast. If you want to see them in person, there’s no better place to see them all than the Micromobility America conference coming up on the 15-16th of September, 2022 in the Bay Area.