At Tempo, we believe everyone can have personal mobility while protecting our communities and our planet. We partner with the best electric bike and scooter brands to offer their vehicles on an affordable, flexible, subscription basis, with on-demand repairs, theft protection, and connectivity. Subscriptions expand electric mobility, and electric mobility prevents climate change.

Our first partner is electric mobility leader Äike, whose new T scooter is the best designed and most advanced scooter we have ever ridden. You can get an Äike T today starting at $75 per month in the San Francisco Bay Area by choosing Subscribe in Äike’s checkout. We will expand to other cities, and other types of electric mobility, soon.

For most people, a high-quality scooter or e-bike that costs $1000 to $3000 is a big commitment. On top of that, most electric mobility brands sell directly to the consumer, and struggle to provide after sales services like repairs. And finally there is theft - a risk unique to these valuable assets that we often leave parked outside. Taken together, many people who would love to have an e-bike or scooter choose not to own one.

Tempo subscriptions make electric mobility ownership easy by:

• Lowering the upfront cost and commitment
• Giving the subscriber an easy way to get repairs
• Limiting the risk of theft

We predict that subscriptions, and other forms of connected ownership, will become the norm in electric mobility over the next several years as more electric bikes and scooters get GPS and IoT connectivity. Brands with higher-quality, connected vehicles who can offer subscriptions and services will pull ahead of commodity brands to become the market leaders, and Tempo is here to accelerate that change.

All of the millions of shared e-bikes and scooters have IoT technology today. This allows customers to locate and activate them with an app, and allows the companies that manage them to keep them charged, repaired, and to recover them if they are stolen. This technology was pioneered by Tempo’s founder, Michael Keating, when he started Scoot, the first scooter sharing app, in 2012. This kind of connectivity is coming to retail vehicles now because new types of wireless data connections require less energy from the small batteries in an e-bike or scooter, the cost of those wireless data plans and the electronics have fallen, and customers have come to expect their vehicles and other valuable devices to be connected to their phones. 

But the biggest impact of connected electric mobility will be among the nearly 4 billion adults who have yet to buy their first motorized vehicle of any kind, because they haven’t been able to afford one. Electric bikes (and scooters and motorbikes) are now the most affordable forms of motorized transportation, if you can spread their cost, including their battery, over their useful life - about $1 per day. Subscriptions and other forms of financing, facilitated by connectivity in the vehicles, could open personal electric mobility to billions of people.

At Tempo, we are proud to dedicate ourselves to freedom of movement, the fun of riding on two wheels, the health and safety of our communities, and the stability of our climate. You can join us on this mission by becoming a subscriber, a partner, or a part of the team.