Green Pioneers: Electric scooter leads pack

James South of Econogo has exploited user-friendly batteries to fill a gap in the market for urban vehicles
Tom Bawden
With £100,000 burning a hole in his pocket, James South was on the look-out for a business opportunity. It was late 2007 and in the few years since he had graduated from university, he had done well as a professional poker player. Now South wanted to turn his winnings into something more useful.

Having travelled round Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, blogging about his poker experiences along the way, he thought about making rucksacks, but the numbers didn’t add up.

After returning to London, he had a brainwave about an electric scooter. It went on sale this year at a shop he opened in Kensington, west London. The novelty of the Yogo scooter is that the battery comes off, allowing you to recharge it almost anywhere.

“I had a car and kept getting parking and bus-lane fines and the congestion charge had come in, so I just thought, I want to buy a moped,” said South, who is still only 28. “At the time there was a huge shift towards green technology — it was around the time the Toyota Prius [hybrid car] came out. This got me thinking about electric scooters.”

A Google search for “electric motorbike” yielded only one UK result — a solitary shop — and it began to dawn on South that he had spotted a gap in the market. He tracked down a factory in China that made an electric motorbike (with heavy non-detachable lead-acid batteries) and in January 2008 placed a mock advertisement for it on eBay to determine the likely demand in Britain.

“I took a stock photo from the Chinese factory and advertised it for sale. It generated lots of interest and people seemed particularly interested in whether it used a lithium battery,” said South.

At this time rechargeable lithium batteries were being used widely in laptops and mobile phones and were starting to appear in electric cars. However, electric scooters were still using traditional lead-acid batteries, which weigh about three times as much. This made them too heavy to be removed and meant they could be recharged only by taking the scooter indoors or by running a cable from the mains out of the door.

South believed he had found a winning solution. By using a lighter, detachable lithium battery, charging would become much easier.

At the same time, the ability to detach the battery would deter thieves because they would be unable to ride the scooter away. Furthermore, while lead-acid batteries typically expire after about 300 charges, lithium batteries can go on for up 2,500 charges, said South. On the downside, lithium batteries are much more expensive.

As soon as South decided lithium batteries were the way to go, he headed off to Shanghai, hired a translator and spent three months travelling round China hammering out sourcing deals for the wheels, steel frame, plastics and batteries.

What emerged was, South claims, the first scooter in the world with a detachable battery, available in two retro-style models — a smaller, moped-like vehicle, with the equivalent of a 50cc petrol engine, giving a top speed of 27mph and a larger scooter that goes up to 38mph. Both models can travel 22 miles on an 11kg battery, which takes an hour to charge. The journey distance can be doubled by switching to a second battery under the seat. Both cost £2,000, which compares with about £1,000 for a lead-acid powered equivalent, said South.

With the launch of the Yogo behind him, South, whose company is called Econogo, now has to keep ahead of the game. Already E-max, a German company, has launched its own version of an electric scooter with a detachable battery and it is likely other competitors will emerge.

“We have to keep ahead,” said South, who is in discussions with several potential investors about expanding the business domestically and abroad.

“Ideally, we would love to sell our models in China, which would complete the circle, but lithium batteries are still too expensive for most Chinese consumers,” said South.