Perch Provides Electric Scooter Juicers With On-Demand Portable Charging Pods

Electric scooters are everywhere, you see them piled up on random street corners, sidewalks, neighborhoods… whizzing by in bike lanes all over the place in Silicon Beach. Ever wonder about the inner workings of how these scooters magically appear everywhere charged up and ready for use?

Well, we looked behind the scenes and found an amazing disruptive startup “Perch” that is taking an interesting approach to solving the logistics behind the ever-growing micro-mobility space.

Since the introduction of electric scooters in the fall of 2017, scooters have spread to over 100 US cities and 5 continents. This mode of urban movement has been adopted faster than on-demand car-sharing services.

Micro-mobility is a relatively new concept that’s evolving around new forms of transportation — e-bikes, e-scooters, and docked bikes. An affordable solution to urban transportation covering a distance of 5 miles or less.

The current landscape for charging or “juicing” up scooters is extremely time-consuming, cumbersome, logistically difficult and inefficient for both the companies that rent them and the “Juicer” community that provides the charging service. Juicers have to haul scooters to their homes at least 20 – 30 miles or more away from where scooters are used.

Perch Enable Electric Scooter Juicers With On-Demand Portable Charging Pods — Charging Station

What Are They Trying To Solve

Perch co-founder | CEO Tom Schreiber immediately recognized this and saw an opportunity to solve this problem by creating portable charging pods that can be shared and reserved on demand. Perch has been offering charging services to the Los Angeles shared mobility community since February 2018. Talk about hyper-growth, since the launch of their 2019 LA Pilot Program, they are continually sold out!

How It Works

Individual chargers locate and reserve nearby Perch Portals, equipped with Level II EV chargers and Shared Mobility Charging Plugs on the Perch Mobility smartphone app. There are 4 pods per portal with 84 scooter racks, battery swap configuration available and smart lock IoT access system.

Perch Portals are created from recycled weather-proof shipping containers and are outfitted with the ability to charge up to 185 scooters simultaneously. They can be placed in almost any weather environment.

Impact on Juicer Community

The most amazing part of this story is the impact Perch has on enabling the Juicer community to increase their earning power because now they can charge more scooters and have access to portals that are centrally located in scooter dense markets.

Thomas Lord, co-founder | Enterprise Solutions shared a story of one Juicer who had lost her job and quickly started working with Perch and was able to earn about $350/day on charging up scooters. So not only is Perch improving the logistics infrastructure within this space, but they are also creating economic opportunity to a larger population including people without a car or without a permanent residence.

Exciting Upcoming Events

Perch has been refining its process and build-out of these Portals and ultimately wants to create a cookie-cutter approach. With this amazing innovation, we hope to see these Portals in all major cities around the world!!

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