How many vehicles should you start with?

"How many scooters should I start with?" is the question we get most from people launching their first city, and the honest answer is that most of them are about to buy too many.

Coverage beats volume

Riders do not care how big your fleet is. They care whether there is a vehicle near them when they want one. That is a coverage problem, not a volume problem, and the two come apart quickly.

Four hundred scooters spread thinly over a whole metropolitan area gives everyone a five-minute walk to the nearest vehicle, which for most trips means they take the bus instead. The same four hundred concentrated in the dense part of town, where the trips actually are, gives you a vehicle around the corner and people who open the app twice a day.

So pick the service area first. Then work out how many vehicles it takes to cover it properly. Do not start with a fleet number and go looking for somewhere to put it.

The number that decides your business

Rides per vehicle per day. Everything else is downstream of it.

A smaller fleet being ridden hard is a better business than a bigger fleet sitting still, and it is not close. The bigger fleet costs more to buy, more to service, more to insure and more to charge - and idle vehicles depreciate at exactly the same rate as busy ones. You are paying full price for the wear and getting none of the revenue.

If you are choosing between more vehicles and a tighter service area, take the tighter area. You can always add vehicles into demand you have proven. It is much harder to walk back a fleet you have already paid for.

The constraint nobody budgets for: your own operation

Here is a test that cuts through most of the modelling.

Can you physically service the fleet you are proposing to buy, with the staff and vans you will actually have?

Every vehicle needs charging or a battery swap, needs collecting when it ends up somewhere useless, and needs fixing when something breaks. That is a daily route, done by real people, in a van, including weekends. If the fleet is bigger than the route your team can run in a day, the surplus is not working - it is sitting in the street with a flat battery, being reported as broken.

Most first-time operators hit this wall before they hit any demand ceiling. The fleet size your operation can support is usually the real limit, and it is lower than the fleet size your spreadsheet allows.

Buy more than you deploy

Whatever number you land on for the street, buy more than that.

At any moment some part of the fleet is in the workshop, some is charging, some is missing, and some is waiting on a part. If you buy exactly the number you plan to deploy, your deployed fleet shrinks from day one and never recovers, because you have no float to rotate in.

The same applies to batteries. Spare packs are not optional - a vehicle waiting on a pack earns nothing, and packs are the thing most likely to fail.

Season length changes the answer

If you are somewhere with a real winter, you are not running a twelve-month business. Demand drops hard in the cold, and a fleet sized for July is a fleet sitting in a warehouse from November.

Two ways operators handle it: size for the shoulder season and accept you turn people away at peak, or size for peak and have a plan for the winter - storage, a second market, or selling part of the fleet on. Both are fine. Sizing for peak with no winter plan is the one that hurts.

Start smaller than feels right

The advantage of starting small is not just the lower cheque. It is that you find out what your city actually does before you commit.

You learn where the trips really are, which is never quite where you assumed. You learn what your maintenance rate is with your vehicles and your streets. You learn how long a battery lasts in real service. Then you scale into demand you have measured rather than demand you projected.

And scaling is easy. Used fleets are available continuously, in almost any size, because operators are constantly exiting cities and downsizing. You are not choosing between buying now and never buying again - you can add two hundred more units in a few weeks when the numbers say to.

A practical way to land on a number

• Draw the service area you can genuinely cover - the dense part, not the whole city.
• Work out the fleet that puts a vehicle within a short walk across that area.
• Check your team can service that many in a normal working day.
• Take the lower of those two numbers.
• Add a float on top - vehicles you own but do not deploy.
• Order spare packs and parts with the fleet, not after the first failure.

If you want a second opinion on the number, tell us the city and what you are planning. We see what operators actually run in comparable places, and we would rather sell you the right fleet twice than the wrong fleet once.