Slow progress for e-scooters: ‘Anything new that comes in any sector, there is always going to be pushback’

Very little moves quickly in Irish policymaking. That is something Damian Young, founder and chief executive of Irish electric scooter and e-mobility group Zeus Mobility, has learned through tedious experience.

A “missed opportunity” is how the 53-year-old former banker describes the slow process that eventually led to the adoption of new regulations last month that will allow Zeus to make its three-wheel e-scooter available to rent for commuters in Dublin and other cities and towns. Local authorities across the country had been waiting for the new rules to be signed into law before granting Zeus and others permission to operate schemes in their localities.

“We believed that Eamon Ryan, with the green agenda, would embrace micromobility as a form of urban transport and therefore legislate for it more quickly,” says Young, who is taking time out of a half-holiday, half-business trip to Japan’s Izu peninsula to discuss all things Zeus. “Unfortunately, it was a good four years before that legislation was in place, which was disappointing.”

Now that the rules have been codified, we can expect to see shared e-mobility schemes in operation in Ireland in 2025, says a typically breezy Young. But he can’t hide his dissatisfaction with some aspects of the new regime.

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“It’s a bit like when you were like six years old on Christmas morning and you opened your presents, and there’s that slight air of disappointment,” says Young. He quickly corrects himself. “I’m not saying Santa didn’t give me lovely presents.”

Under the rules as adopted by the Government, scooters can weigh a maximum of only 25kg. The trouble for Zeus – its core product being a slightly larger three-wheel scooter that maximises stability – and other operators is that the typical sharing scooter weighs about 32kg. “The reason for that is safety,” says Young. “They get more use than the average scooter, so they need to be more robust. They need to be solid. They need to be strong.”

That presents problems for the “sharing market”, he says. “We have two choices. We can either implement the 25kg scooter, or not. We spent the last month working on our kind of strategy, deciding whether or not to do this. There are also the local councils that will have to make decisions themselves on whether to have scooter-sharing schemes in the towns and cities. That will take some time – internal discussions, stakeholder engagement. If they do decide that [will] happen, [we have to] go through a tendering system for a number of months.”

[ Irish e-scooter company Zeus ramps up UK presence ]

Ireland is only one part of the jigsaw puzzle, however. Since its foundation in 2018, Zeus has rolled out its shared scooter scheme in some 60 locations across Europe, starting in Germany in 2020, and most recently inking an agreement with Slough Borough Council in the UK. It boasts a fleet of 10,000 e-scooters and e-bikes available for commuters to rent through its app.

In 2021 the company raised €2 million in investment in a funding round led by former Europcar Ireland chief executive Colm Menton, who now owns a roughly 7 per cent stake in its parent company, Eco Urban Scooters, according to its most recent annual return. Last year it acquired rival Irish firm Zipp Mobility for an undisclosed sum.

Young – who for his efforts has been nominated in the emerging category of this year’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards – says the group is hungry for more investment.

“Funding is key,” he says. “It’s a capital-heavy business so you need to invest in the assets. Now, the assets pay for themselves fairly quickly. But in order to get them on to the street, you need to purchase the assets. For that, if you’re not producing sufficient free cash flow, you need investment.”

Zeus can double its fleet over the next two to three years with only a minor increase in its operating costs, Young believes. But it requires investment, and the market remains challenging, he says, with interest rates high and risk appetites fluctuating.

Eco Urban Scooters had accumulated losses of €2.1 million in the year to end of December 2022, according to its most recently available set of accounts. Last year was “ebitda-positive” for the group, with revenues of around €5 million, a good performance in a tough market, says Young. He expects to replicate that performance this year.

Yet, e-scooters remain divisive, as Ireland’s own path towards regulation and roll-out has demonstrated. In San Francisco and other locations in the US, as well as some large cities in Europe, the defacement of the vehicles was a widespread issue when companies such as Lime Bike entered the market in 2017 and 2018. Partly this was down to antisocial behaviour. But partly there was a sense of protest surrounding the vandalism.

Scooters haphazardly left on street corners in between trips were seen as symbolic of capitalism’s disregard for public spaces and a rapacious tech industry’s desire to infiltrate and monetise them. Accordingly, they were treated as an invasive species, rejected by the ecosystem, with disaffected citizens registering their disapproval in different ways. Some launched the vehicles into bodies of water, much to the chagrin of conservationists in Oakland, California. Others set them on fire while others still defecated on them. As recently as last year, Parisians were adding scooters to pyres during protests across the French capital.

Antisocial behaviour, meanwhile, is a problem in every city, says Young. Dublin is no different. “That would be our number one concern,” he says. “That’s not necessarily just Dublin, though. But you tend to see that behaviour at the start of the scheme, and then people get bored.”

Crucially, Young says Zeus has safeguards in place to prevent damage and ensure the proper use of its vehicles. “We generally create what we call no-park zones,” he says. “So you can’t stop an e-scooter within 100m of a body of water, for example, because it’s not the person who uses the scooter who throws into the water. It’s the guy walking past it.” Its systems also allow it to manually override any scooter going particularly fast in a built-up area. “We can slow the scooter down to three kilometres an hour, which effectively is less than walking speed.”

“I think with anything new that comes in any sector, there is always going to be pushback until it settles, until it kind of embeds,” says Young. “You saw it in San Francisco. You saw it in Paris – where they’ve now actually banned e-scooter sharing. You saw in locations in Germany. And what happened there was, while the scooters were regulated from a vehicle perspective, they weren’t as well managed from a city planning perspective.

“What happened in the likes of Paris was you had five or six operators, each with thousands upon thousands of scooters on what they called a free-floating basis where you could stop wherever you like, park it there and move it on.”

With the benefit of hindsight, the reaction was quite predictable, says Young. “If town planners had thought, ‘Okay, if we have 20,000 of these scooters and there are no dedicated parking zones, what’s going to happen is you’re going to see them parked in the middle of the road on footpaths, you’ll see antisocial behaviour and all of these things.’ So, it was kind of predictable in the big cities.”

Recognition of these struggles has been an important tentpole of Zeus’s strategy. The company has focused on second- and third-tier cities early on, such as Heidelberg in Germany, where it launched its first fleet in 2020.

“Cities like that have less developed transport and a less developed market,” says Young. “So we wanted to kind of differentiate both on the vehicle and then the location of the markets.”

Fresh mountain air gives you a different perspective, as you’re thinking. I’m not a gym person. In fact, I’m the opposite of that really

Young was born and bred in Dublin, and his path to founding his own business has been circuitous. He worked his way up through Bank of Ireland, from a local branch to head of international services and eventually, between 2014 and 2016, head of innovation. After a stint as regional managing director for banking software group Nomis Solutions in London and then Australia, he left behind a 25-year career in financial services to set up Zeus in 2019.

“I travelled quite a bit over that time,” he says. “And on my travels, I started seeing the first seeds of micromobility. Cities around the world were developing more bike schemes and then we started seeing more shared mobility and more electric bikes. I just felt this is a shift-change in the way that urban transport is managed.”

Young lives far away from the urban environments he wants to help decongest with Zeus’s fleet. He is based near Bunclody on the border between Carlow and Wexford, and he manages the day-to-day pressures of running a 24-hour business with frequent mountain walks.

“I enjoy that,” he says. “Even though I might not be switching off exactly, fresh mountain air gives you a different perspective, as you’re thinking. I’m not a gym person. In fact, I’m the opposite of that really.”

And Zeus really is a 24-hour business. “We don’t close at a certain time. Our scooters are in operation 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We do two million rides a year, so there’s a lot of activity. There’s always something happening.”

Young and his company still have questions to answer about the feasibility of their e-scooter offering in the context of the new legislation. In the meantime, he says, Zeus is increasingly developing its e-bike strategy. “We’ve had only a small selection of bikes operating in the UK,” he says. “So we’ve recently designed a new model that is in production and will arrive as a test model at our Irish base in the next six weeks.”

One way or another, Young believes the Zeus branding will be visible on Irish roads by the end of the year.

CV

Name Damian Young

Job Founder and chief executive of Zeus Mobility.

Age 53 (turning 54 on Monday).

Home Bunclody.

Family Four “kids” – three in third level and one in school.

Something about him we might expect “A direct answer.”

Something about him that might surprise Has travelled on all continents except Antarctica – that’s next.

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