And now come the autonomous scooters
It seems that they are the novelty of citizen mobility systems.

After the scooters have appeared in almost every city, in some with barely any control, to try to facilitate citizen mobility, they now announce a new modality of autonomous scooters.

They are similar to the previous ones but with three wheels so that they can be better kept in balance by themselves, and have the peculiarity that they can move themselves from one location to another.

There are several companies that advertise them and one of them is called Tortoise (founded by a former Uber manager) that apart from having possibilities for autonomy, is also operated by remote control.

The two main problems of rental scooters are:

- The cost of changing the batteries and their repairs

- The problem of being located in places far from those demanded by customers

And these are the problems that try to avoid this type of scooters, since they can go alone (or with remote control help) to the place where the customers are or to the place where they can change (or recharge) the battery more easily.

To give us an idea, one of the largest rental companies of this type of device is Bird, and in 2018 half of all its income was spent paying the companies that charged the batteries and 15% to the ones that repaired the devices. And as far as I know, it has not yet been able to give benefits despite having thousands of scooters in circulation in different cities.

The rental of scooters is a very difficult business, and any improvement that helps them reduce their costs can mean for those companies a good oxygen balloon in their income statements.

Until recently, many start-ups of this type found investors who put significant amounts of money waiting for a promising future.

But that is ceasing to be so. After the fiasco of Wework, Uber, and other similar ones that have been operational for years and without making money, investors are being more cautious and it seems that they begin to prioritize the results over the siren songs of a wonderful future.

We will see how the people of Tortoise and others like them are doing.

I do not see it very clearly, because the more complex an appliance is, the more expensive it is to manufacture and maintain.

But on the other hand, scooters with adequate legislation can be a good means of sustainable citizen mobility.

Time will tell.
['Amador Palacios']
['Mobility']