E-scooter, E-bike Safety, Convenience Tech Revealed

Electric scooters and e-bikes are rapidly growing in popularity as micromobility wheels of choice. That trend is leading technology companies to address two pressing issues for users—safety and convenience.

At the WCX 2022 mobility technology trade show in Detroit this week, Santa Clara, Calif.-based company Commsignia is demonstrating for the first time, its vehicle-to-everything (V2X) system for protecting e-scooter riders from oncoming traffic while warning drivers it could be on a collision course with a scooter.

Through V2X technology vehicles can communicate with each other and with a municipality’s traffic monitoring system providing information ranging from backups to potentially dangerous situations.

At its WCX display Commsignia co-founder and CEO Laszlo Virag demonstrated for Forbes.com how it would work with e-scooters. On an animated map of a hypothetical city street layout, icons represented both a car and an e-scooter moving toward each other. When the two vehicles began to approach each other, warnings were triggered for both the driver and the e-scooter rider. On the e-scooter a box equipped with a sensor began to beep a warning to the rider of an oncoming car or truck.

You can see Virag’s demonstration in the video below.

“Electric motors, these things can go as fast as 25-30 miles per hour,” said Virag. “Inexperienced, vulnerable users riding in between cars is a pretty dangerous situation.”

Indeed, according to a study released last fall by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission emergency room visits due to e-scooter accidents soared from 7,700 in 2017 to 25,400 in 2020. Most often injuries occurred to upper and lower limbs, as well as the head and the neck, according to the CPSC.

Commsignia’s V2X technology is also being applied to e-bikes and other so-called vulnerable road users (VRU) in conjunction with safety experts Spoke, the companies announced in February.

Virag hopes his company’s V2X system will be available for micromobility vehicles in two or three years depending on interest from manufacturers. The e-scooter system being demonstrated this week in Detroit represents a first look.

“This is an introduction and proof of concept so it’s not in production yet but the technology is in production for vehicles and just getting started for the micromobility users such as e-scooter companies, ride sharing companies, but we are at the very, very beginning of that relationship,” Virag said.

Pocket-Sized Power

U.K.-based Swytch Technology is giving users of its newest e-bike conversion kit a way to tote along a little extra juice. The company announced this week the new version of its conversion kits will launch in May. A key feature is a pocket size battery that, yes, fits in one’s pocket. It’s about the size of a large smartphone, the company said.

The small battery Swytch calls a Power Pack provides 250 watts of power and a riding range about 15 kilometers or a little over nine miles. A bigger version doubles that.

The standard version weighs about 1.5 pounds, can be recharged in around an hour and is “airline safe,” according to the company.

“Our new improved Swytch Kit is a game-changer. It is going to totally disrupt the eBike industry because it is so much lighter, smaller and more affordable than anything else out there,” said Swytch CTO and Co-Founder, Dmitro Khroma in a statement.

Pricing will be announced when the new Swytch Kit launches in mid-to-late May but a company spokeswoman said the current version starts at $1,200 plus tax. The new kit will initially be available by pre-order only at a 50% discount. Delivery is expected by late summer, after which the discount ends.

Swytch says it sold 40,000 units of the original kit but expects the pocket-sized Power Pack to drive up annual sales of the new kit to 50,000.