High-Rise EV Share Service Expands into E-Bikes

Sydney, NSW

A leading mobility as a service provider, putting shared electric cars into large residential and corporate buildings in Australian cities, is expanding its offering this month to include e-bikes.

Sydney-based company OhmieGO is preparing to announce a partnership with a large Dutch e-bike manufacturer, to incorporate micromobility to its shared mobility service to developers and operators of high-density residential buildings, large corporations, holiday resorts and retirement villages.

The announcement comes as the company prepares to share its background and ambitions at this month’s 2022 Micromobility Conference & Expo, being held at Sydney’s Royal Randwick Racecourse on 25th and 26th November.

“We want people to be able to go downstairs in their building and grab a bike when their journey is best served by a bike, use an EV when they need a car, or book an electric van if they need more carrying capacity for that trip.”

OhmieGO founder and CEO Kyle Bolto will be among the presenters at the inaugural event, outlining how the company has become a market leader in the MaaS sector.

Kyle says the introduction of e-bikes and planned future inclusion of e-scooters are important transitions to establish the business as a multimodal solution.

He said two of the company’s prime objectives – to move people to away from traditional car ownership and to change the relationship between mobility and buildings – are both substantially enhanced by providing multimodal options.

“At the moment, the only relationship between buildings and transport is how big the hole needs to be under a building to accommodate the tenants’ cars.”

“The more we can push people between micromobility and EVs and electric vans, the richer the experience it will be for users,” Kyle said.

“We want people to be able to go downstairs in their building and grab a bike when their journey is best served by a bike, use an EV when they need a car, or book an electric van if they need more carrying capacity for that trip.”

He said that range and flexibility of options also helped transform the relationship between buildings and mobility, by making fit-for-purpose mobility part of the service building managers offer to their residential customers.

“At the moment, the only relationship between buildings and transport is how big the hole needs to be under a building to accommodate the tenants’ cars,” he said.

“There’s a tension between developers and city planners. Developers want as many carparking spaces as possible because that’s part of the value required to sell an apartment.

“Planners don’t want another 200 cars on their suburban streets because there’s another 200 apartments built in the neighbourhood.

“If you’re able to provide mobility as an amenity, there’s a strong argument for instead having 50 carparks for 200 apartments and providing an e-mobility hub that comes with three Teslas, 10 e-bikes and all the other amenities available on demand.

“That’s a substantial cost saving for developers because one of the most expensive things a developer can do is dig a great big hole for a carpark.”

He said planning officials in Australia’s major cities were also driving that change by implementing tighter ratios between parking spaces and apartment numbers.

“For new buildings expected to be available in two or three years’ time, the average provision of parking spaces is 50 or 60% of the number of apartments,” Kyle explained.

“We’re talking about putting hundreds of cars, hundreds of bikes and scooters into these precincts, as a complete car ownership substitution model.”

“Places like City of Sydney and City of Melbourne are going as low as 15%. That’s a fundamental change.”

Kyle said while the ratio of EVs and e-bikes would vary from building to building, the rule of thumb as a starting point is three cars, 10 bikes and 10 scooters for every 100 apartments. Once residents get used to the service, some will then sell their private vehicles, creating potential for a greater ratio of share vehicles to apartment numbers.

“We’re working with some developers creating very large precincts, eventually around 2000 apartments, like whole suburb redevelopments within a precinct,” he said.

“We’re talking about putting hundreds of cars, hundreds of bikes and scooters into these precincts, as a complete car ownership substitution model.”

He expects e-bikes will meet distinctly different needs for residents.

The EVs are used for special journeys such as weekends away, picking up people from airports or collecting bulky items from stores.

“The buildings we work with are typically around 10km from a city centre and are well serviced by public transport, so residents don’t use our cars for commuting,” he said.

“However, we believe the e-bikes and scooters will be utilised for commuting. That includes connections to public transport, which is another important part of those multimodal options.”

Kyle said the introduction of e-bikes also creates the opportunity for OhmieGo to move into retrofitting buildings.

“Telcos were big incumbent players who owned all the customers and decided what products people had … the internet really changed everything and I see the same movie playing out now with mobility.”

“We get asked to retrofit buildings all the time but we’re not offering that option yet, largely because the logistics of retrofitting the electrical infrastructure for EVs is a little difficult to deal with,” he said.

“Offering a bike-only and scooter-only solution really opens that up for us because it requires much less critical infrastructure and it’s easier to deploy.”

Kyle previously worked in the telecommunications industry, when it was transformed by the mainstream uptake of the internet, and says e-mobility has the same potential to revolutionise transportation.

“I was in that sector when telcos were big incumbent players who owned all the customers and decided what products people had and how they worked,” he reflected.

“The internet really changed everything and I see the same movie playing out now with mobility.

“Only this time I’ve gone from being with the incumbents, to being a disruptor.”

He formed OhmieGO in 2018 and it now has a team of around 12 members, including eight core staff in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and a number of interns.

“We have four client types: new residential buildings, large office towers, hotels and resorts, and retirement villages, which is a sector that has really surprised us,” he said.

“We certainly don’t think this is a one-player market. It’s going to take a couple of business doing the same thing to move the needle.”

Kyle said OhmieGO expects to be providing vehicles to a total of more than 100 buildings by the end of next year, and 50% of those are already pre-committed.

As part of that, the company is aiming to have our first bike charging stations in place and the first bikes on the road by the end of this month.

After Covid decimated business for resorts and hotels, OhmieGO is now moving towards launching our first service in this sector early next year.

“We’ve been doing it three or four years longer than any other players offering a similar service in Australia. We’ve done the hard years and as far as we’re aware, our main competitors only have one site each,” he said.

“One thing I learnt in my Telco career is it’s very important to be able to own, understand and have influence over the whole tech-stack.”

“We certainly don’t think this is a one-player market. It’s going to take a couple of business doing the same thing to move the needle. But we’re quite comfortably a long way ahead.

“One of our main advantages is we have each of the necessary solutions in place, both hardware and software, while other players in the market are all using outsourced technology that has been retrofitted to this model.

“We’ve developed everything from scratch. We build the physical hardware, the metalwork, the electronics, the software.”

The docking solutions OhmieGO uses for both bikes and scooters are 100% designed and built by the company in Sydney.

“One thing I learnt in my Telco career is it’s very important to be able to own, understand and have influence over the whole tech-stack. The minute you outsource something is the minute you slow your ability to create customer experience,” he said.

“The buildings basically give us space and we specify the power we require. Then we do everything else: the booking app, charging and docking infrastructure, servicing and roadside assistance.

“A premium solution has to be premium in every regard. Customer experience begins the moment they open the app to book a vehicle, to the moment they close the app after they’ve returned the car, bike or scooter. There are many factors in that experience: how easy it is to make a booking, remove the vehicle from the docking station, access pricing information, lock the vehicle during a trip, how the vehicle feels and performs, how you get the receipt?

Global Expansion

“We most certainly have global ambitions. With the entire model we’ve put in place, we’ve always had other markets in mind.

“We have a lot of big global players as clients and they are very keen to take us to their other markets, which is a great way to enter another market.

“They have operations in Singapore, Hong Kong, the US, London, the Middle East, all places even better suited to our business model that it is in Australia.

“We know there are other operators in those markets that are just car solutions and just bike solutions.

“There certainly isn’t one that does cars, bikes and recharging in the same way that we do.”