As the summer winds down across much of the world, masses of shared micromobility executives descended onto the Chinese city of Changzhou this week where the air is still humid and the sun full blown.
A city of more than five million, Changzhou and the wider Jiangsu Province has become a beacon of manufacturing in China, renowned for its R&D in new energy, automotive, industrial equipment and AI innovation. The city is where automotive giants like BYD and Li Auto have chosen to plant manufacturing bases alongside lithium battery makers, solar and hydraulic players.
The city is also where the micromobility solution provider Segway has homed two of its major production plants, one of which – the Changzhou Super Factory – is said to manufacture more than 5,000 e-scooters per day.
It was for Segway that the global micromobility industry convened in Changzhou. Operators, media and Segway’s network of global partners traversed the earth to catch a first glimpse of three brand new product lines from one of the industry’s largest vehicle solution providers and a strategy that it believes will completely rewrite the functioning of shared fleets.
We were on the ground in Changzhou for the first look.
Three new vehicle lines take the stage
From Dott, Voi, Bird, Ryde and Jet to Whoosh, Yandex, BinBin and hop, masses of operators gathered in Changzhou for the exclusive reveal of a fresh lineup of shared micromobility vehicles developed by Segway.
Three new lines unveiled at once: a shared e-scooter, a shared e-bike series and a delivery e-bike.
For now, the technical details of each model remain confined to those in the room with Segway to publicly announce more on the new vehicles in the coming weeks.
What can be said is that the launch went far beyond the vehicles themselves with Segway unveiling a shift in strategy expected to ripple across the industry.
“TCO 2.0”
At the core of the strategy shift is what Segway dubbed ‘TCO 2.0.’
TCO – Total Cost of Ownership – is the total cost that combines the initial purchase price of the product with the indirect costs from operations, lifespan and disposal. With ‘TCO 2.0’ comes an emphasis on driving lifetime costs down through design, build and technical capabilities rather than a sole focus on the upfront purchase price.
“TCO is never just about building a cheaper vehicle. It’s about designing fleets that deliver stronger returns year-over-year,” Alan Zhao, General Manager of Segway-Ninebot’s Commercial Mobility Business Division, tells the audience.
“We have to look at the complete value chain from hardware planning to daily operations to refurbishment to recycling to end of life. Every single step consumes labour, energy and material. Profitability doesn’t depend on one-off purchase prices. It all comes down to how efficient your internal processes are.
“This operational reality is exactly where we start. And that’s why we are evolving from a hardware solution provider to a full solution partner.”
From low-power standby which aims to preserve vehicle energy and high precise positioning which plans to make vehicles easier to locate, Segway unveiled a suite of features and capabilities for its new lineup which all work towards common goals – greater availability, less downtime and the understanding that every single second counts towards improved profit margins.
Repairs, spare parts and maintenance make up a large part of this direction. With modular vehicle design, Segway aims to make the fitting of spare parts simpler and the company also launched an extended, multi-year warranty period alongside end-to-end technical support.
This includes service manuals, troubleshooting and engineer guidance during the pre-delivery phase and on-site engineer support for fleet launches during deployment. Post-delivery, Segway is committing more than 20 engineers to be on standby for operational teams 24/7, local technical support across the EU, Russia and South Korea and more than 100 on-call senior experts for when issues arise.
“Five years from now, will your suppliers still be there to support your fleet?” Jasper Luan, Head of Segway-Ninebot’s Marketing and Solutions Department of Commercial Mobility Business Division, asks the audience. “Think back to the vehicles you bought five years ago. Can you still get the spare parts you need today? Can you still get technical support when a problem occurs?
“The question is not only who can deliver vehicles today. It is who will still be there to support them tomorrow. A commercial vehicle is a multi-year asset. The support behind it should last just as long. In this industry, many suppliers can just sell the vehicle. But not every supplier can support that vehicle for its full operating life.”
Segway’s first delivery-built vehicle
The new lineup includes Segway’s first-ever e-bike built specifically for delivery.
Until now, Segway has been adapting its shared models with delivery features like cargo baskets and delivery boxes to serve couriers. This approach has seen models like the Urban A200 come alongside their own food delivery versions.
The latest delivery model, however, takes an entirely new approach.
“A consumer vehicle may be suitable for a short personal trip,” Zack Yan, Vice General Manager of Segway-Ninebot’s Commercial Mobility Business Division, says. “But a delivery vehicle faces long hours, heavier loads, different weather conditions and a constant pressure to remain available. We see delivery as a new area of growth and we’re beginning to explore the sector more actively.”
Yan called the delivery e-bike “only the beginning”, telling the audience that different delivery jobs require different vehicles and different solutions. Behind him on stage, the projector screen displayed a roadmap of several different delivery form factors that Segway plans to develop in the future.
“Our target is a delivery platform that supports different use cases from urban logistics to light-duty and heavy-duty optimised deliveries,” Yan says. “The platform must connect to the vehicle, using infrastructure that keeps operations running. We are building a portfolio rather than asking everyone who completes deliveries to use only one product. The roadmap will grow with the needs of the market.”
Live from Changzhou
As the camera crew panned the room, Segway’s executives spoke to an audience utterly enthralled with what the company had to say.
Segway is one of micromobility’s largest vehicle suppliers, having cooperated with over 250 shared operators globally and shipped more than 2.5 million vehicle orders. When a company has this scale backing it, what it does and what it says matters.
The stage showcase was followed by attendees filing to the test track, warmly murmuring as they lined up to ride the e-bikes and e-scooter on the mapped route. Zag floated amongst them, testing the stability of the e-scooter up and down the route’s ramps and observing the blind spot detection capabilities when an e-bike rode behind.
The Changzhou summit went beyond the market-facing. Over two days, attendees were invited to go inside Segway’s two manufacturing facilities in the city, as hundreds of employees on the production line took a bundle of parts, subjected them to extraordinary thermal and testing pressures and transformed them into a packaged product ready for shipping.
An e-bike with one operator’s branding here, an e-scooter with another logo there – all a reminder of the hidden scale that Segway has built, disguised under the branding of masses of its global clients.
It’s this scale that Segway-Ninebot’s CEO and Co-Founder Cid Wang spoke of during his keynote, now positioning the company as the platform for collaboration to tackle shared micromobility’s most pertinent challenges.
“We are engineers. What is an engineer? We find the problem. Another problem. Operation problems. Property problems. Experience problems. Financial problems,” Wang says.
“We do products, we do services, we do solutions to solve those problems. Problem solving. How to define problems? How to solve problems? We want to solve those problems together for mutual better operations. We hope this is a summit where we can exchange ideas, find new problems, find how to fix the problems and how to face the challenges together.”
