JUMP, the rental e-bike and scooter company owned by Uber, is getting a slew of upgrades in order to lower unit costs and make the design more complicated to avoid knock-offs.
The bikes now have features that include swappable batteries, a new and more compact front screen, a retractable cable lock, and the ability to scan a QR code to access the vehicle. All in all, the bikes will be much more accessible and easy to use, incentivizing more people to ditch conventional travel methods and perhaps begin a new trend in mobile traveling.
"We did a lot of research about how people were interacting with the bike and streamlined the whole interaction flow to be a lot simpler," said JUMP Head of Product Nick Foley.
What's more is that the bike will not be a static product; it will be dynamic, sending real-time diagnostics to its product developers and the JUMP team, improving the efficiency with which problems are fixed.
"That is a major improvement to system utilization, the operating system, fleet uptime and all of the most critical metrics about how businesses are performing with running a shared fleet," said Foley. "Swappable batteries mean you don't have to take vehicles back to wherever you charge a bike or scooter, and that's good for the business."
Moreover, the third-party manufactures that are typically used to build such bikes don't have access to this type of technology, which gives JUMP a unique first-move advantage and a greater degree of economies of scale to exploit.
"The most exciting thing about all the pieces of technology that exists is that they're all fundamentally valuable, whether on a bicycle or a scooter," Foley said. "And so we're building scooter hardware that leverages a lot of these pieces of technology."
The bike rental overhaul is a sign that Uber has plans to expand its JUMP fleet in the future, especially since costs are expected to dwindle as production increases. The current lifespan of a Jump bike is 3 to 5 years, and potential mileage is only expected to increase.
"That's the thing we're aiming for - a vehicle that can do up to 10,000 miles with only one intervention," Foley says, "a yearly check-up, so to speak."
In keeping with Uber's tendency to disrupt the transport industry, it's possible that JUMP bikes may become another fast-travel trend, especially in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, where some sort of vehicle is needed to travel long distances, but not everyone can afford a car. The trend may also catch among youngsters, who are accustomed to digitization and expect to travel light and fast.