Lime recalling some electric scooters. They may fall apart during ride

Some Lime electric scooters, which have drawn complaints as riders zip through dense downtown sidewalks, could break up while people are riding them, according to the Washington Post. The company has recalled scooters manufactured by Okai, the newspaper reports.

Lime has the dockless e-scooters available for riders through its app in Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham and Greensboro, according to the company.

The e-scooter startup said it is “decommissioning all Okai scooters in the global fleet,” according to tech site Gizmodo.

“We are actively looking into reports that scooters manufactured by Okai may break and are working cooperatively with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the relevant agencies internationally to get to the bottom of this,” a spokesperson told Gizmodo by email.

Several weeks ago Lime said these same model e-scooters would break apart “when subjected to repeated abuse,” according to the Post.

Lime would not say where Okai scooters have been available for customers, according to the newspaper.

The new recall comes less than a month after Lime pulled about 2,000 other scooters from the streets, mainly in California, because the batteries could catch fire, according to Fortune.

There are a number of photos on social media of broken Lime scooters, many of which are cracked at about the same point, according to The Verge website, which collected a number of photos for a story.

E-scooters have become a common sight in downtown Raleigh, with people zipping around sidewalks and streets.

Riders use a smart-phone app to pay $1 to unlock the scooter and 15 cents a minute for the ride.

A heated debate over how to regulate the scooters is simmering in Raleigh City Council, according to The (Raleigh) News & Observer. Lime has only about 250 scooters in Raleigh, compared to Bird’s 1,300, the News & Observer reported earlier this month.

Raleigh City Council members want to charge scooter companies a $300 fee per scooter, compared to the $25 to $100 most other cities charge, according to a Nov. 6 News & Observer story.

In Charlotte, a recent study found uptown riders use e-scooters far more than the single-ride electric bikes that are available around town. City leaders in Charlotte allowed Lime and Bird to place 400 scooters each around the city in a pilot program in May, The Charlotte Observer reported.

City officials in Greensboro ordered scooters off the streets last week as the city council works to craft laws to regulate them, the Associated Press reported.

The City of Durham has new rules for e-scooters, and city council members say people can expect to see them on the street starting next year, according to The (Durham) Herald-Sun.

Durham’s new rules say riders must wear a helmet and be at least 16 years old, according to the Herald-Sun. The newspaper reports that scooters will not be allowed on sidewalks or greenways.

Lime competitor Bird said it hit 10 million rides on its e-scooters in September, the same day Lime announced it had hit 11.5 million scooter rides across its network, according to the website Tech Crunch.

September wasn’t all good news for Lime. A man in Washington, D.C., riding a Lime scooter was hit and killed by an SUV, the DCist reports, just a couple months after a man fell from a scooter in Dallas and died from a head injury.

After complaints about the safety of e-scooter riders in urban areas from around the country, Lime announced a new safety initiative and promised to distribute 250,000 free helmets, according to its site.

The Washington Post reported that one man, who worked for Lime picking up and charging the e-scooters, posted to Reddit about the frequent problems he was seeing with scooters cracking and coming apart.

The contract worker, known as a “juicer” for charging the scooters, sent his concerns to Lime, according to the Washington Post, but management did not respond.

This story was originally published November 12, 2018 at 3:30 PM.