Chronology of the electric scooter: 2010–2020 — lithium-ion, the Xiaomi M365 and dockless sharing

17.05.2026 Scootify 9 min read

The previous section closed in 2010: the technological base of the electric scooter already existed, but a mass-market urban product did not. The 2010–2020 decade changed that completely — in ten years the stand-up electric scooter travelled from an enthusiast’s niche to a distinct category of urban transport with its own sharing infrastructure, regulations and global operators.

This section walks through the key milestones of that transformation.

The decade’s precondition: lithium-ion batteries get cheap

The single most important backdrop, without which none of the rest would have happened, was the collapse in lithium-ion battery prices. According to BloombergNEF, the volume-weighted average price of a lithium-ion battery pack fell from over 1,200 USD/kWh in 2010 to 140 USD/kWh in 2020 in real terms — roughly a 9× drop over the decade.

For electric scooters this meant that a 250–500 Wh battery (typical for an adult model) stopped being a critical line item on the bill of materials. Manufacturers could now use lithium-ion in place of heavy lead-acid even in the budget consumer segment — and still deliver a realistic urban range of 20–40 km rather than 10–15 km.

Source: BloombergNEF: A Behind the Scenes Take on Lithium-ion Battery Prices.

2010–2014: niche manufacturers prepare the platform

At the start of the decade, adult stand-up electric scooters were the preserve of small brands.

2010 — MyWay (Israel). Industrial designer Nimrod Sapir founded the brand MyWay in 2010, built around his 2009 patent on a wheel-folding mechanism. The first model — the Quick1 — was one of the first genuinely light folding electric scooters for adults. In 2014 the brand was renamed Inokim after a manufacturing partnership with China; it was under the Inokim name that Sapir reached the global market.
2014–2015 — Ninebot buys Segway. On 1 April 2015 the Beijing start-up Ninebot (previously known for Segway-style self-balancing scooters) announced its acquisition of US firm Segway Inc. The deal was financed by Xiaomi and Sequoia Capital. The merged Segway-Ninebot company would later become one of the world’s largest manufacturers and an OEM supplier to the sharing industry.

Sources: Inokim: History; Wikipedia: Segway Inc..

2016: Xiaomi M365 — the hardware platform of the decade

On 15 December 2016 Xiaomi released the M365 — a folding electric scooter with a 250-watt front-wheel hub motor, 8.5-inch pneumatic tyres, a lithium-ion pack of thirty LG 18650 cells (~280 Wh), a mass of 12.5 kg and a top speed of about 25 km/h.

The point was not the specifications themselves but the combination: a respectable urban range (~30 km), a mass under 15 kg, regenerative braking, a consumer-grade price (starting at around 300 USD in China) and the reputational weight of the Xiaomi brand. The M365 was the first electric scooter that it was commercially reasonable to buy “for yourself” in Europe and North America.

One historical detail deserves separate emphasis: the M365 was the model Bird used for its first dockless-sharing fleet. That is, the very same product was simultaneously a consumer best-seller and the hardware backbone of a new service market.

A detailed history of the M365 — from the Xiaomi–Ninebot partnership of April 2015, through the launch on the Mijia crowdfunding platform on 15 December 2016, the device’s role as the hardware base of the first Bird (September 2017) and Lyft (2018) fleets, the Zimperium vulnerability CVE-2019-7367 and the ScooterHacking community, all the way to modern generations M365 Pro (2019) → 1S/Essential/Pro 2 (2020) → 3 Lite (2022) → 4 Ultra (2022) → 4 Pro (2023) → 5 Pro (2025) — appears in the dedicated profile Xiaomi M365 and the canonisation of the consumer electric scooter.

Sources: Wikipedia: Xiaomi M365; Rider Guide: Xiaomi Mi M365 Review.

In September 2017, in Santa Monica (California), Travis VanderZanden — a former senior executive at Uber and Lyft — launched the Bird service. The model is simple: the user opens an app, scans the QR code on a scooter parked on the pavement, pays 1 USD to unlock plus 15 cents per minute of riding, and leaves the scooter wherever the ride ends. No docks. The fleet is charged overnight by contractor “birds” at a fixed rate.

This was a direct copy of the Chinese bike-sharing model (Mobike, Ofo) but applied to far more compact transport — and made hardware-feasible at workable unit economics from day one thanks to the M365.

Bird grew at extraordinary speed: by some accounts it became the fastest US company ever to reach a 1 billion USD valuation from founding. That set the pace for the entire decade.

In parallel, in January 2017 Brad Bao and Toby Sun founded LimeBike — initially as an ordinary bike-rental service. The first launch took place in June 2017 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In January 2018 the company announced Lime-E electric bicycles at CES, and in February 2018 it announced Lime-S electric scooters.

Sources: Inc.: This $118M Electric Scooter Company Created a Phenomenon in Los Angeles; Wikipedia: Lime (transportation company).

A detailed history of Bird — from the launch in Santa Monica and the city’s criminal complaint (December 2017) through the peak valuation of 2.5 billion USD (January 2019), the in-house hardware iterations (Bird Zero, One, Two, Three), the SPAC merger with Switchback II, the financial restatement of 2022, the NYSE delisting and the Chapter 11 filing in December 2023 — appears in a separate article: Bird Inc. and the pioneer’s trap of the sharing class.

2018: the explosion, M&A and cities push back

2018 was the peak moment of the “scooter chase” among investors and large transport platforms.

February 2018. Lime launches Lime-S — the electric-scooter version of its service.
April 2018. Uber buys Jump Bikes (dockless electric bicycles) for approximately 200 million USD. A signal that the big players were taking micromobility seriously.
May 2018. San Francisco issues a cease-and-desist to Bird, Lime and Spin after roughly 1,900 resident complaints about scooters dumped on pavements. The start of a long history of municipal permits and pilot restrictions.
June 2018. Lime carries out the first major European launch of scooter sharing — in Paris. Bird, Tier, Voi, Dott and a dozen others follow within months.
August 2018. San Francisco grants permits to Scoot and Skip — 625 scooters each — as part of a year-long pilot programme.
October 2018. Jump (already part of Uber) launches its scooters in Santa Monica.
November 2018. Ford buys Spin for 100 million USD — the second major automotive entrant in micromobility.

The year’s takeaway: dockless sharing went from a local California experiment to a standard service in dozens of US and European cities. At the same time it became clear that the “drop them — ride them — leave them” operational model created serious conflicts with pedestrians and would demand regulation.

Sources: TechCrunch: Uber acquires bike-share startup JUMP; Electrek: Ford takes a Spin at scooter sharing with $100M buyout; Wikipedia: Scooter-sharing system.

The full history of Lime — from the founding by Brad Bao and Toby Sun in January 2017 in San Francisco, the launch at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in June 2017 and in Seattle on 27 July 2017 with 500 bicycles, the pivot to Lime-S on 12 February 2018 on adapted Segway-Ninebot ES2 hardware, the European debut in Paris on 22 June 2018 and the hardware evolution Gen2 → Gen3 → Gen4 — appears in the dedicated profile Lime and the survivor’s model of sharing, paired with the Bird profile.

2019: European regulation becomes real

If 2018 ran under the banner of “move fast, sort the rules out later”, in 2019 the major European jurisdictions began building a legal framework.

15 June 2019. Germany’s Elektrokleinstfahrzeuge-Verordnung (eKFV) — the small-electric-vehicle regulation — enters into force. It permits electric scooters with a top speed of up to 20 km/h, a motor of up to 500 W, with two mandatory independent brakes, lighting and compulsory insurance. This created a formal legal corridor for consumer scooters in the country.
October–November 2019. Paris adopts its first local rules for electric scooters: a ban on riding on pavements, speed limits of 20–25 km/h depending on the zone, a minimum user age of 12 (later raised to 14). A reaction to the first year of sharing chaos — Paris pavements had effectively turned into a parking lot.

The regulations did two things at once: they legalised the category (it stopped being a “grey area”) and they imposed technical ceilings that manufacturers henceforth had to design to for European markets.

Sources: Library of Congress: Germany: Regulation to Allow Use of E-scooters on Public Roads Enacted; ETSC: Germany’s eKFV regulation.

2020: pandemic, consolidation, British trials

2020 closed the decade under very particular circumstances — the COVID-19 pandemic paralysed sharing services in the spring, then triggered an unexpected surge in demand for individual transport.

May 2020. Uber sells Jump to Lime as part of a larger deal and simultaneously scraps thousands of electric bicycles and scooters. The beginning of consolidation: individual sharing operators thin out, while those who remain merge.
4 July 2020. In the United Kingdom, The Electric Scooter Trials and Traffic Signs (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020 enter into force, legalising rental electric scooters for the first time within state-run pilot programmes in specific cities. The London pilot starts later, in 2021. Privately owned scooters on public roads remain illegal — a position the UK has kept even after the trials ended.
Consumer market grows. Against the backdrop of lockdowns and reluctance to use public transport, personal electric-scooter sales in Europe and North America jumped. Xiaomi released the updated Mi Electric Scooter Pro 2, Segway-Ninebot updated its MAX and F series; the first serious players in the lower segment of adult scooters from brands such as Inokim, Kaabo and Dualtron began to surface. In parallel, back in 2015 the South Korean firm Minimotors of Busan had built the world’s first dual-motor AWD electric scooter, the Dualtron, founding the hyperscooter class — a detailed profile of the OEM founder of the performance segment is in the Minimotors and Dualtron article.

Sources: CNBC: Uber sends thousands of electric bikes and scooters to the scrapheap after Lime deal; GOV.UK: Rental e-scooter trials.

What was in place by 2020

Over the 2010–2020 decade the stand-up electric scooter underwent several parallel transformations:

Technologically — it moved to cheap lithium-ion, which made 20–40 km of range realistic in a compact format.
As a product — it acquired a hardware reference platform (Xiaomi M365, Segway-Ninebot ES/MAX) that both manufacturers and sharing operators orient themselves around. Dedicated profiles: Xiaomi M365 and Segway-Ninebot as a company.
As a service — dockless sharing was born (Bird, Lime), passed through a hypergrowth phase, M&A (Jump/Uber, Spin/Ford) and a consolidation phase (Lime absorbed Jump).
Legally — it received its own category in the legislation of key European countries (Germany’s eKFV, France, then the United Kingdom) with technical ceilings of ~20–25 km/h and equipment requirements.

Entering the 2020s the electric scooter is no longer a niche gadget but a recognised category of urban transport with its own regulatory framework. The years ahead would add new challenges to the picture: safety (collisions, injuries, helmets), product maturity (suspension, hydraulic brakes, IP protection), and the split between “legal-up-to-20–25 km/h” and “powerful off-road” scooters — and that is the subject of the next chronology section.