Zag has been looking across Europe this week in order to understand how large the shared e-scooter market is on the continent.
Our snapshot includes all the major pan-Europe operators, as well as one-country operators that have a large nationwide market share.
We have generally not included one-city operators because there are a great many of them, they are often small, and often the information on them is unreliable.
Key findings:
- Our research has uncovered over 600 fleets in Europe across more than 300 urban areas in 26 countries.
- We estimate there are over 360,000 e-scooters available for hire on European streets.
- E-scooter share coverage in Europe stretches from Rejkjavik in Iceland where Wind operates scooters, to Odessa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, where Bolt Mobility offer e-scooters as a complement to their taxi service, and from the Canary Islands where fleets are run by LINK and Wind, to Trondheim in central Norway, where both Tier and Voi have fleets, along with single-country operator Ryde.
- The biggest five operators in Europe are TIER with around 75,000 e-scooters, Voi with 65,000, Lime with 63,000, Bird with 47,000, and Bolt with 42,000. Smaller multi-country companies include Dott with 18,000, Wind with 13,000, LINK with 7,000 and Spin with 5,000. All these numbers are modelled estimates and may significantly vary from day-to-day.
- The biggest single-country operators are Helbiz with approximately 8,000 e-scooters and Bit with 6,000. Both are Italian-only operators but Helbiz is due to launch in Belgrade, Serbia soon.
- TIER is also the largest operator by numbers of fleets, with 115 in Europe. But Bolt is not far behind with just under 100 and is expanding at a rapid rate.
- Berlin and Oslo are the two largest cities for scooters in Europe, each with more than 20,000 available, from multiple operators. Stockholm, Frankfurt and Rome round out the top five.
- The biggest single fleet is Voi in Berlin, who have nearly 10,000 scooters there.
- Germany has by far the largest numbers of shared e-scooters, with over a third of Europe’s total being in that country. Italy is a distant second with around 10 per cent.
- The UK, currently mid-way through a trial programme, makes up less than five per cent of Europe by e-scooter numbers.
- Forty cities in Europe have larger fleets than the UK’s biggest which is Liverpool.
- A small number of European countries have no shared e-scooters currently, including Ireland and the Netherlands, but the transport mode is seemingly ubiquitous across much of the rest of the continent, with over 300 distinct towns/cities with at least one fleet in them.
- We didn’t include e-mopeds (sit-down scooters) in our analysis but this mode is quite widespread across continental Europe.
- Most operators started out just as pure e-scooter providers but many are starting to experiment with e-bikes too, such as TIER and Voi. Bolt started as a ride-share platform and more recently introduced e-scooters and now e-bikes too. Conversely, Lime and Spin started with bikes and the former, at least, maintains both bikes and e-scooters in many of its cities, as does single-country operator Beryl. Bird has just this week announced its first e-bike product although it is not destined for Europe yet.
