Bird is transferring past scooters and into the bikesharing market. The firm has revealed its personal e-bike, which it plans to roll out in a number of nations this yr.

The Bird Bike’s motor will help you glide up hills with as much as a 20 p.c grade. It can hit a prime pace of 15.5 miles per hour and it has a variety of as much as 56 miles on a single cost. Other options embrace a storage basket on the entrance, an LED headlight and taillight, a digital show and voice prompts, a built-in cable lock and a step-through design.

The bike additionally has Bird’s geofence know-how, which can cease or sluggish the motor in designated areas. An onboard diagnostics system will monitor every bike’s situation, whereas there is a twin kickstand and a tip detection function.

Bird founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden stated the bike is designed for longer journeys of round three to 5 miles and that the Bird Bike program will increase the corporate’s “serviceable addressable market size by 5 billion trips per year.”

“Shared scooters helped lay a critical foundation for a transportation future that’s both electric and multimodal,” he stated in a press release. “Together with our new, comprehensive bikeshare program that pairs our state-of-the-art vehicles with custom local integrations, Bird is uniquely equipped to meet the eco-friendly mobility needs of cities, riders and small businesses alike, both now and into the future.”

The firm will convey the Bird Bike to sure cities in North America, Italy, Spain, Germany, Ireland and France in 2021. Each bike has a QR code you could scan to unlock with the Bird app. Pricing hasn’t been revealed, however it is going to differ by market.

As with the scooters, Bird’s community of fleet managers will handle care and operations for bikes in every locale. The firm plans to workforce up with cities that do not have already got a shared bike or scooter community or that wish to complement their present applications.

It’s a wise time for Bird to maneuver into bikesharing, the place it could compete with the likes of Lime and Lyft. The world is opening again up as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, and persons are beginning to transfer round way more than they’ve over the previous yr. Having extra mobility choices will come in useful for a lot of commuters.