200 brands of electric scooters but industry shadowed by bad reputation

Despite all the attention they command, e-scooters are used for only about one one-thousandth of all trips made in the world's cities.

At first, it seemed as though nothing could go wrong. Dockless shared electric scooters began showing up on the streets of the world’s cities in 2017, and the vanguard--techies, baristas, twentysomething daredevils--hopped on and rode, confident that they were tilting against two looming threats, urban congestion and climate change. The future of scootering seemed so bright that the valuation of the largest manufacturer, Bird, went from $300 million in March, 2018, to $2 billion three months later, an astronomical leap, even by Silicon Valley standards.

But Bird’s earliest scooters were so flimsy that, in one 2018 study, their average life span