A New Way To Uber

The company is designing a scooter to keep up with the latest tech industry craze

- Joshua Brustein

This spring, Uber moved into a cavernous brick building at San Francisco’s Pier 70, along a postindustrial stretch of waterfront. Shipbuilders occupied the 130,000-square-foot facility in the late 1800s, but today Uber uses it to tinker with self- driving cars, flying taxis, and, most recently, scooters.

In the past several months, Uber has announced plans to integrate bike- and scooter-sharing services on its app, an acknowledgment that cars aren’t always the best form of urban transport. Now the company has quietly begun engineering its own scooter, say people familiar with the plans, which haven’t been previously reported. Jump Bikes, which Uber acquired in April for more than $100 million, is overseeing the project.

A year ago the idea that Uber Technologies Inc. would dedicate resources to scooters would have seemed ludicrous. But the little two-wheelers have become a tech industry fixation since Bird, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup run by a former Uber employee, launched a scooter-sharing service there last fall. Bird Rides Inc. and its main competitor, Lime, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars at valuations of more than $1 billion, figures reflecting the excitement around alternative transportation startups that began with the explosion of bike- sharing in China.