Shared micromobility operator Dott has today announced a new refurbishment programme to double the lifespan of its e-scooters.
More than 2,000 of Dott’s e-scooters will be fully refurbished in Lyon, extending their current three years of service to seven years, according to the company.
This programme will avoid the manufacturing and transporting of new vehicles and is expected to help cut Dott’s carbon emissions by nearly 50%.
Each e-scooter will be completely dismantled by a dedicated team of 29 mechanics and sorted into parts for either recycling, repairing or reusing. They will then be painted and fitted with a more accurate GPS system and a phone holder. Parts that are likely to need to be recycled will be those with the heaviest use such as the tyres.
“The majority of our carbon emissions come from the manufacture and transport of new vehicles,” Dott’s COO and Co-Founder Maxim Romain told Zag Daily.
“This is because our operations are based on renewable energy and use cargo bikes for battery swaps, leading to a very small carbon footprint. By extending the lifespan of our vehicles up to seven years, we can drastically reduce our overall emissions by removing the need for purchasing new vehicles.”
Dott plans to replicate this approach to cover vehicles across all its markets, with an additional refurbishment facility established in Poland.
To date, the firm’s existing e-scooters in Lyon have now travelled an average of more than 5,000km each – equivalent to the length of the UK, France and Spain combined. The most used vehicles have travelled more than 8,000km.
Dott currently operates over 40,000 e-scooters and 10,000 e-bikes in cities in Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK.
