Q&A: How e-scooter racing is aiming to improve road safety

“You work from scratch. There just isn’t enough data. When you look around the world, we see micromobility is coming – it’s happening. It’s already overwhelming existing legislators and regulators, the police and medical care. In some countries when you go to fill in a motor vehicle accident report sheet e-scooters don’t exist as an option

“There’s so much to do to connect people, there’s no real best practice at the moment. So we have to establish best practice, so we’re looking around the world at which countries are being clever in terms of legislation - and then we want to be the platform to connect them together.

“That means we have to go out and do our own research. So we’re going through existing data, peer-reviewing it to see if it’s really independently done and is clean, and working out what’s application to other jurisdictions. It’s a very systematic approach to developing safety on track – and, more importantly, safety on the road.

Have you been surprised at how fragmented global micromobility regulations are?

“It’s not really a surprise. You can only really compare it to when the automobile was invented at the end of the 19th century. The horse was the main form of transport, and then suddenly you had cars, and there were overwhelming road safety issues because nobody knew what to do with them.

“Hopefully we can do it faster and better. We have to, because people are already using micromobility and e-scooters are means of transport – and it’s a very, very sensible and clever form of transport with many benefits. So we have to engage about education, and about law enforcement, and about the physical environment, such as separating roads for different users.

“It’s engineering. Can we use internet connected scooters as part of a smart city? Can we use technology both to make it safe and for enforcement? The policing needs to be strict in terms of enforcement, and for that it needs thew right legislation. We all need to combine our efforts to achieve sustainable and safe transport.”

How can the ESkootr Championship impact road safety?

“The same was motorsport aids car safety. We’re a high-speed laboratory, and we’ll push safety and performance technology. And we can be innovative in other areas. For example, some of our circuits will have narrow sections that might be dangerous to tackle at speed. In car or bike racing, you’d have to have a yellow flag there, but we’re looking at using GPS geofencing to limit the speed of the scooters in certain areas. So we can have a higher top-speed where it’s safe, and limit thing where it’s more dangerous. And that technology can be applied to road-going e-scooters.”

Are you talking to micromobility companies?

“Of course we’ve talked to them, but we do need to be careful to make sure the data we use is properly independent and fact checked. So we go to the individual countries we want to have our engagement with, connect with local legislators and stakeholders, universities and research bodies, so that we can be completely independent, to come up with very clean and evidence based data.”

How fast will you develop from the global championship down to the grassroots - and how involved will ESC be at that level?

“The idea is to create these five different categories with the same e-scooter and then give that to kart circuits. Well, we’ll start with kart circuits, but the dream and ideal is that there can be specific ESC venues, perhaps in local parks. There’s endless opportunity to create a new urban environment where sports and lifestyle can meet.

“From a business perspective, the grassroots is where the scalability is. Like everything nowadays, we’re a business so we can invest and grow and be successful. So we start with the pinnacle to out out footprint in the space, and start walking. We’re already then working to find way to reach out to the grassroots with our existing partners, and that will involve over the new few years.”

Will the pace alter depending on country, and how developed it is for e-scooters?