Coup launches new electric scooter service in Paris and faces off with Cityscoot

Coup is launching its second city for its electronic scooter-sharing service. You can now find hundreds of Coup scooters in Paris. The company is going to compete with Cityscoot, a similar service that has been around for a while.

While the city’s bike-sharing service has been around for a decade in Paris, scooter-sharing is something new. Coup has acquired around 600 electronic scooters from Gogoro to expand beyond Berlin. Anybody with a driver’s license can now sign up.

When you open the Coup app, you see a map with available scooters around you. You can then book and walk toward your scooter to unlock it using your smartphone. There’s a helmet in the storage space under the seat. After putting the helmet on, you’re good to go.

When you’re done, you don’t have to look for a dedicated parking space for Coup scooters. You can just park your scooter with other regular scooters and lock it for the next user.

Coup can keep an eye on the fleet of scooters as they’re all connected. When the battery level is low, the company can swap the battery for a brand new one. Coup costs €4 for the first 30 minutes and then €1 every ten minutes.

Cityscoot works more or less the same way but costs €0.20 per minute of usage if you buy a pre-paid package. It’s a different pricing strategy. Cityscoot currently has more scooters as well.

But these two services feel somewhat similar. You hunt around your neighborhood to find a scooter, you ride around the city on a silent, electric scooter and then you park it wherever you want when you’re done.

Maybe there’s enough room for two companies on this market. Uber and Chauffeur-Privé seem to be both doing well in Paris for instance. It’s always better to have more options to move around your city, so people living in Paris now have yet another transportation system.