Not in the north.
Our winters are cold enough when you are just standing still, riding exposed on some scooter at 40mph seems like hell.
If it’s just a more efficient scooter, no one will care except for a few enthusiasts.
If you want to come up with a mass transportation device, it has to be able to:
[ul]
[li]Get people in business attire to work and back without mussing them up.[/li][li]Have some kind of cargo capacity.[/li][li]Be useful in all weather conditions.[/li][li]Be safe.[/li][li]Be easy to maintain and use.[/li][li]Be very portable. You’d better be able to carry it into the elevator and into your office.[/li][li]Be reasonably fast (at least 20-30 mph) while still being safe.[/li][li]Not cost a fortune.[/li][/ul]
A glorified scooter fails in most of those categories. There may be some new markets for downtown commuting (like the bicycle commuting couriers use now), but this is never going to solve the nation’s traffic problems, or make a measurable dent in energy use or pollution.
Now, if this ‘scooter’ were instead a small car that gets 100 mpg, carries two people, has a modest baggage area, and costs $5,000, THEN you’ll have something.
All you have to do is look at the current market for scooters and ask yourself why they don’t sell in greater numbers. They are cheap, and the gas consumption is low enough that no one really cares about that. People just don’t want to ride around on scooters. It’s a bitch when it rains, it’s hard to stay clean, you can’t pick up a couple of bags of groceries on the way home or pick up the kids from school, and there’s a high ‘nerd’ factor. All of those objections would remain if the scooter came with a perpetual power supply that got you around for free.
Like I said this is so only in the rich world. If you have ever been in a big third world city you would know instantly that a really improved scooter would be a huge deal. Many,many people ride scooters and motorcycles and they create a huge amount of pollution. So this could easily be product that could sell in the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions around the world.
IT puts the lotion in the basket or else IT gets the
hose again.
Cyberpundit: That’s true only if IT is cheaper than the alternatives. People in 3rd world countries don’t really have the luxury of worrying about pollution, which is why those countries are so polluted in the first place.
If IT can be sold for less than a conventional scooter, sure it will help. But only slowly, because many of the vehicles in 3rd world countries are dilapidated and have been handed down for years or decades because no one could afford even a cheap new motorcycle. So I’m skeptical of just how big a difference this thing could have.
Given product liability insurance and modern manufacturing costs, it’s hard to imagine any motorized vehicle these days that could sell for the kind of money that would make it affordable for mass quantities of purchasers in 3rd world countries.
Sam Stone,
I think Ginger will cost 2000 dollars which is probably not too different from existing scooter or motorcycle prices especially if there are fuel savings as well.
And remember that the people who own scooters are by definition among the better off in third world countries. Even if Ginger just replaces current scooter and motorbike sales it would be a huge market and in the long run a huge difference in pollution.
And in the next couple of decades or so the number of people who can afford two thousand dollars will probably increase massively in just China and India so the potential market is even bigger.