What it takes to put an ex-rental fleet back on the street

Buying a few hundred ex-rental scooters is cheap relative to buying them new. Getting them earning is the part that decides whether the deal was good, and most of that work is not visible in the listing.

First: can you unlock them?

Shared vehicles are tied to an IoT unit and the platform behind it. The previous operator controls that platform. Until the vehicles are released from it, they will not start for you.

There are three situations, and they are not equally recoverable:

• The operator releases them. Normal, and usually just paperwork and a scheduled job on their side.
• The IoT units stay, the platform changes. The hardware is often reusable across platforms, depending on vendor. Ask who made the unit, not just who ran the software.
• The operator is gone, or will not cooperate. Then you are replacing IoT units, which is a per-unit cost and a per-unit labour cost on a fleet you have already bought.

Settle this before price. It is the one thing that can take a fleet from a bargain to scrap.

Second: what is your market's legal configuration?

Power and speed limits are set by market, not by manufacturer. EU pedal-assist bikes are capped at 250 W and 25 km/h under EN 15194. Scooter limits are national - 20 km/h in Germany, 25 in most of the rest.

On shared fleets these are usually firmware settings rather than hardware, which is good news: the same vehicle can often be reconfigured. But "usually" is doing work in that sentence. Ask what the fleet is currently configured to, and what it can be set to for where it is going. A fleet built for a market with different limits may need more than a settings change.

Third: parts, before you need them

The refurbishment budget that goes wrong is the one built on a parts list that turns out to be unavailable.

Batteries, motors, controllers, IoT units and chargers are the components a budget is actually built around. For a model that is still in production, availability is rarely the problem. For a model the manufacturer has moved on from, it is frequently the whole problem, and it is worth checking before you commit rather than after.

Cosmetic parts - decks, stems, grips, lights - are cheap individually and add up fast across several hundred units.

Fourth: freight, customs and the battery paperwork

This is the line most first-time buyers leave out entirely.

• Batteries are dangerous goods. Every shipment needs UN38.3 test documentation, and packaging and state-of-charge rules apply.
• Import duty and clearance depend on the vehicle classification in the destination country, which is not always the classification in the country of origin.
• A price quoted per unit at the seller's yard is not a landed cost. When we quote a landed cost we say so explicitly and tell you what is inside it.

What a realistic plan looks like

Work backwards from the street:

• How many units do you need earning, by when?
• Of the fleet on offer, what share is deployable as-is, what share needs work, and what share is parts?
• What does the work cost per unit, and do you have the people to do it?
• What is the landed cost, not the yard price?

A fleet that is 70 percent deployable at a fair price usually beats one that is 100 percent deployable at a premium, because the remaining 30 percent has salvage value. But you have to know which you are buying, and that is what an inspection at the seller's site is for.