Back to the articles

Why Do All Electric Scooters Look the Same?

Oscar Morgan - Bo CEO - January 2026

Zero ai: Bo does not use Ai to write, because we believe you’ve come here to speak to humans not Nvidia GPUs. That will mean that some of our language has errors, and we feel that’s a price worth paying. 

The first electric scooters appeared around 2013 in an area of China, just West of Shanghai. Like any success it has a thousand people who claim to have been ‘the first’, but in reality it sprang up in several factories around the same time.

The Bo chassis is fundamentally different

New vehicles are not invented often, so that in itself is special. This particular vehicle was enabled by two innovations.

The first was the creation of a high power battery cell, with the un-sexy codename ‘18650’.

18650 cells on the line 

While Tesla did not invent the 18650 you can blame them for the sudden growth in availability - they took demand for battery cells into the stratosphere, and therefore helped to bring the price down and production up.

These batteries were essential because before the 18650, a battery with enough power for your electric scooter to go a reasonable distance was the size of a breezeblock. Rather than a snickety lightweight vehicle you’d be lugging around a car-battery on wheels - except even car batteries didn’t have enough juice for useful performance. 

The second innovation essential for an e-scooter had an equally nerdy name - the direct drive motor. 

This means a motor where the outer casing of the motor itself is the rim of the wheel - you mount a tyre straight onto it, put an axle through the middle and off you ride. No pulleys, gears, belts, or chains - an entire powertrain in a single 3kg lump. 

The BoPower Motor

With the invention of these batteries and motors, it was now possible to bolt two simple components to a micro scooter and zoom off into the sunset (so long as the sunset was 10-20 miles away). 

Most amusing of all, because there was no single ‘innovation’ that enabled this (the scooter was a hundred years old, and there were dozens of companies making the motors and batteries) there was no IP barrier to anyone making these brilliant little vehicles. Predictably, from 2013 to 2016 several hundred factories in China retooled one or two of their production lines to become scooter manufacturers. 

A selection of scooters

When this first happened there were only a small number of western-facing brands. The vehicles were not (initially) legal to ride in China, and the domestic market was only interested in ultra cheap products anyway.

Segway, Xiaomi, Inokim and a few others appeared as brands who could buy scooters from Chinese factories, apply a recognisable logo and retail them to western consumers. Some - like Inokim - actually worked with China to engineer their own models and designs. 

Around 2020 a shift happened. The big brands like Segway were now selling more than a million scooters a year, and in a bid to make them as cheap as possible they started to consolidate manufacturing, bringing it in-house. 

Hundreds of factories who had previously supplied them were faced with a choice: halt production, or start selling scooters direct to customers.

Combined with hundreds of entrepreneurial individuals keen to cash in on the scooter gold rush, a huge number went for option 2 and started creating their own scooter brands. Predictably over the next couple of years the prices of scooters tanked through the floor, with factories finding more and more dangerous ways to produce power, features and range at lower and lower cost.

Importantly, China is exceptional at the task of cost reduction in manufacture - and the secret is mass-scale. Make more; costs less, basically. 

As a result, the sub-suppliers who make a steerer tube, or front wheel, or a tyre or treadboard or the brakes didn’t want to make 15,000 for each tiny individual brand. 

They want to make a million pieces, which they can then crush down to the lowest possible price. 

This was the recipe that led to a market of hundreds of identical, (and therefore equally flawed!) products:

• No patent or IP protection on scooters, so everyone could do the same 

• No strong brand positions, so no incentive to make higher quality products 

• Huge competition, so a price war to make it as cheap as possible

• Sub-suppliers needing to survive, so making as many identical units as possible

• Western entrepreneurs looking for a quick buck, so not wanting to invest in tooling

It's strange how similar they all are

Mix all of that in a sector with no regulation and you get the obvious outcome: hundreds of low quality ‘parts-bin’ products made from the exact same catalogue of components, with different badges. 

Amusingly this continues to be the case - although it is a commercial bloodbath. Take any scooter you are looking at in the US, Australia or Europe and paste the photo into Alibaba - you’ll find it (or a variation of it) at a wholesale price so low it’ll make you wince. 

It is not possible to manufacture safe product at these price points

So the interesting question becomes why hasn’t this changed - why is Bo a lone unique design in a sea of identikit scooters. 

Creating the Model-M was only possible under a rare set of circumstances and with a particular group of people. The circumstances were that we were working for ourselves, in a lean startup, and therefore did not have to convince anyone else (beside a small number of heroic angel investors) that our vision was right. 

Additionally, we had all of the design and engineering skills in-house to create this unique vehicle. It is not an exaggeration to say that no other e-scooter company in the world had the previous engineering experience necessary to make Bo. 

It is one of the most difficult engineering challenges any of us have undertaken, even coming from the world of high performance race cars. 

Bo workshop in Bristol, UK 

Finally, the design choices at Bo are dictated by the ride and usability we wanted, not the other way around. Someone starting from the ‘aesthetic’ would have glued body panels to a normal scooter. 

Our aim was different, we wanted to create the Porsche 911 of scooters - something that was leagues above what any other scooter could deliver. We wanted it to be tougher, more serviceable, and with the best ride handling of any scooter in the world. 

It's an unusual box

It was only in pursuit of these exacting standards that a feat of engineering like this made sense. There are no other circumstances, in a large company or small, that this would have been possible. There is simply no way a normal product team could explain it to their finance department. 


Ride something unique

OJM. 

If you're interested in reading more - Link to Articles 

If you'd like to look at Bo M more closely - Link to Model M 

If you'd like to read about The Turbo Land-speed scooter - Link to Turbo