Carson Brown, co-founder and head of product at electric scooter startup Taur, spent four years riding a self-balancing electric unicycle to work. Today, he rides a scooter multiple times a week.
As a micromobility user, Brown has thought a lot about the design of light electric vehicles. What elements do they need to have to make people see them as valid forms of transportation, rather than toys? How might the design of a scooter incentivize a rider to replace public transit rides or car rides with the vehicle, instead of just using it for fun in the park?
Brown has a deep background in product development, which is to say, he’s obsessed with how a customer will use his product. He thinks this mentality will help Taur be the company that separates owned scooters from shared scooters, that shows people how to integrate scooters into their daily lives, that makes scooters cool.
“All scooters should have really good bike lights, should handle really well and have wheels big enough to ride over the terrain that you’re going to get in the city. But those are just the starting points.” Carson Brown
Taur has stood out in the oversaturated but largely meh scooter market by daring to design a vehicle that’s front-facing. The company is currently gearing up for its first launch in Los Angeles, which will test the mettle of this bold idea.
The startup is still very new — Taur was founded in 2019 when it launched a preorder campaign for its sleek white flagship vehicle. It’s raised about $5.2 million so far, including its recent $3.3 million seed round from Trucks VC.
We sat down with Brown to discuss why scooters should be designed to handle roads that exist today, how good design can help people adapt to use scooters in their daily lives and why Taur could be the brand ambassador that the scooter market needs to flourish.
Editor’s note: The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity.
You worked at Uniwheel for four years. What did you learn there that you’ve brought to Taur?
Carson Brown: My time at Uniwheel was very early in the electric unicycle space. Our team came from all over — some automotive, some Formula One. I had a product background. We were all designing something from the ground up that we hadn’t really seen before. In building that product completely from scratch, you learned loads of stuff about the fundamentals of electric vehicles, batteries, motors, drivetrains. But you also learn what it’s like to be a user. The most valuable thing I learned was what it’s like to commute on a micromobility vehicle every day for four years. That was how I got to work, how I did errands. It was very much an all-in attempt at understanding what the product needed to be and how the benefits of it were completely different from anything that you could experience.
When I was at Uniwheel, electric scooters barely even existed, so we were building that for essentially a niche audience. Electric scooters today represent something that both my co-founder and I have really high confidence people could learn immediately and could deliver all the benefits of any small micromobility vehicle. You get the portability aspects, the ease of use, the really low cost of operation. They’re a much better fit for a mass audience.
What has stood out to you as a micromobility commuter that you’ve brought to Taur?
The main thing was making riders feel confident on the road. It’s getting better in a lot of cities with bike lanes, but there’s typically this awful experience of feeling somewhat like a second-class citizen, whereby you’re occupying a part of the road where you’re not expected to be, and it can be quite intimidating if you’re not prepared. So from a design standpoint, there are things you can do about that. Obviously, there’s the lighting of the vehicle. There’s how it handles both in terms of stability and control. The visibility of it to other road users, which is why we designed a white scooter. All of these things can increase your confidence to ride regularly. What we don’t want is for people who love it, but don’t feel safe riding it in the back streets or for leisure on the weekend at a park but not using it every day. At the forefront of our minds was, how do we build something that people would feel confident to use every day?
Also, the Uniwheel delivered extremely well on portability. So the whole concept of being able to take a product inside instead of the default of locking it up outside. That reduces the chance of theft and opens up that extra mobility. Like if I’m at home, it’s with me. If I’m at work, it’s with me. I just need to decide to want to go somewhere, and that accessibility is a game changer.
Taur is still at the beginning of its journey. What’s the long-term vision? Are you sticking with scooters?
We’re pretty focused on two-wheeled transportation. I don’t know how broad we will get, but there is a lot of scope for innovation. The latest national numbers we’ve looked at show scooters have outdone e-bikes both in terms of unit sales and growth. So we see a lot of dry powder in this space.
Our first-generation product that we’re shipping addresses a lot of the prerequisites that we feel all scooters should have. All scooters should have really good bike lights, should handle really well and have wheels big enough to ride over the terrain that you’re going to get in the city. But those are just the starting points. You’re gonna see more iterations there. Maybe a few more off-the-wall exciting things because we definitely like to push the boundaries.
What does that look like? More tech in the scooter?
We are pretty integrated, and I think a lot of the future improvements are about integration. If you take a look at some of the really nice electric cars now, the way they fit into your lives is getting better and better. They can do things like route planning, mapping and understanding the range better to increase the longevity. Or look at how wearables and smartwatches have evolved to become a much more integrated companion to a smartphone. I think scooters could easily be the same, which would make them a much more compelling alternative to a car, which is so important.
That’s why adoption is such a challenge. When you introduce a new form factor to someone, they have to understand how it will fit into their life. I’m gonna use an awful analogy. Lots of people are changing their diets for sustainability reasons. One of the biggest challenges people have is to eat less meat and more vegetables, but their entire psyche of how they build meals starts around meat first. It’s the same thing with transportation. If you’re so used to driving around in a car, thinking about how to get somewhere changes when you have a scooter or a bike.
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How can additions to your scooter help people with that mind shift?
Our app has recently gone live in the App Store, so that’s one avenue of how we can do it. But actually, a lot of this stuff starts with the architecture on the scooter itself. So the information that we have about your range or locational things like the weather — because people don’t ride if it’s raining — can be integrated into an app so that people can more accurately plan their journeys in a more personalized way. People want to know how to plan their journeys right now, or tomorrow morning, and getting a really quick answer using factors like the environment, the terrain, historical data on how you ride — that’s important. The main thing people care about with transportation is predictability. As soon as you have that, you can much more easily adapt them into your life.
There are a lot of scooters coming out right now. What do you think the industry needs to succeed?
The industry needs a technological leader. It needs a flagship brand, an example for everyday people who don’t care about micromobility, haven’t heard the term and have no interest in knowing the term, to look to as something that they would want to do. There have been a number of products over the years that have come out in various sectors and been game-changing enough that everyday people go, “Yeah, I want that. What is that thing?” The iPod was that. There were already plenty of MP3 players, but Apple created that moment of aspiration, which is what this industry needs more than anything.
The shared scooter world has seen the introduction of what I call scooter ADAS, or advanced rider assistance systems, to detect things like sidewalk riding and poor parking. But some say this type of tech will move to the owned space, as well. Thoughts?
It might be easier to answer this as a user than a manufacturer. If we look at ADAS on a scooter like ours, I think that, obviously, it’s going to deliver some benefits. But I wonder, are they demonstrable enough for it to make sense as a consumer to want it?
If you look at the rental model, it was about getting people, many of whom had never ridden a scooter before, onto this tiny wheeled vehicle that is slightly janky and unpredictable, and I’m going to ask them not to ride it where they would feel the safest, like on the sidewalk. Now Taur has gone the other direction and said, how do we make that vehicle feel better in the true environment where it belongs? We are not advocates for people riding around pedestrians. We want people to ride on the roads, just like bikes do.
So I don’t know whether a collision warning for a bike or scooter is going to change the rider’s reaction time or safety very much. Is it going to slow the vehicle for me? If it slows down a scooter for me, am I prepared for that? There are a lot of challenges that I think that I’d need to try for myself.
Alex Nesic, CEO of Drover AI, which makes these scooter ADAS systems, says he thinks cities will eventually demand this tech on private scooters like they’re doing with public scooters.
There’s been an arms race going on by operators of shared vehicles trying to compete for tenders within highly regulated city environments. So scooter operators have been pitching safety features that in some cases do not move the needle but make a politician feel more comfortable to pitch it to their colleagues and residents. Innovation for innovation’s sake is never really a good thing. Neither is regulation for regulation’s sake. But there will be benefits that come out of this, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this tech on scooters years down the line when they reach the levels that we’re predicting. But right now, today, I’m not not so sure.
What are your thoughts generally on the shared scooter industry at the moment? Bird and Helbiz are the only public companies, and they haven’t exactly been performing well.
I’m fearful that shared scooters could drag down the whole industry. I say that from discussions I’ve had with people in finance and what I would say is an inability to distinguish the business models from the vehicles. When we started the company, we had a big battle convincing people that scooters didn’t mean shared. Today we tell people that owned scooters are actually growing year on year exceptionally well. Just because you see the stock prices of Helbiz and Bird suffering, doesn’t mean you should associate the vehicles themselves with what you’re seeing on the stock market.
I think shared scooters are here to stay, but just as you have general automakers that have been around for a really long time, you also have rental car companies that still exist. The sizes of the businesses are very different, but they’re both valuable. I just don’t think shared micromobility will be anywhere near the size business that it was pitched as, and that’s fine. In the long run, what will be the much bigger market is ownership, and that trend is seen both in cars and bikes. Outright, people own transportation.
What about subscription services?
Subscription is interesting because it delivers some of the benefits of ownership while lowering barriers to entry. Cost of living is high as a millennial living in cities. But I do think outright ownership in terms of cost is the best thing you could do for your wallet. It’s like five cents to charge the vehicle to take you 20 miles down the road. That’s insane and a game-changer. Look at the Hummer EV; they’re saying it will take $100 to charge it in some places.
The outright purchase of a scooter comes in at roughly half of what most people spend on public transport in urban areas a year, so the return on investment is rapid. I think we’ve got to get to the tipping point where people realize the cost savings, because when we’re talking about fractions of a cent per mile, I think we could basically call it free, and who doesn’t like free stuff?
Taur’s scooter costs $1,495. That’s not cheap.
It’s not cheap, and you can go downmarket, but unfortunately, the middle to bottom end of the scooter market is very much ship-and-forget. Like, here, you can have it, and if you ever have problems, they’re your problems. You’ll struggle to find someone to help or pick up the phone because they were designed as a commodity. The Taur, on the other hand, is not a toy. This is a form of transportation.
So will Taur have servicing and maintenance set up in each market you launch in?
Yes, we do. We have a two-year warranty. We just saw servicing and repair as a prerequisite. I think there would be people who’d say we don’t need to do that. But I think if you are truly building it as a form of transportation and you don’t build any aftercare in, it’s a lie.
I’m hearing from investors that they don’t want to invest in companies that have a track record of being wasteful. Taur seems to run a lean ship. Any advice for other founders or startups on how to do the same?
My co-founder and I have always ran with a more traditional mentality of not overscaling a team. We have a lot of people who are doing many things. I don’t know if I’m late enough in this journey to give great advice, but I feel like one of the things I can say has worked is having exceptional people who can do many things at a standard higher than some people just do their one job. That’s enabled us to retain a very tight team but still deliver a scooter that has our own electronics in it, our own firmware in it, our own design, an app, and obviously a company that builds the product around it, our own marketing. We do a lot, and it’s very challenging to build a team that can do that without ending up with the bloat. Hopefully, others are able to do the same, because in this environment, we have no choice as founders.
Where do you see Taur a year from now?
I feel like electric scooters in general are going to be a product people turn to over the next couple of years, and I want Taur to remain the aspirational figurehead, both from a technological and from a brand perspective, through this pseudo downturn. The next year will be all about growth and continuing to surprise and excite.
It would be nice to also have some new stuff in the year to share with the world.
And of course, we’re going to be looking at being in more cities and generally being more visible as a company. We’re gonna be really focused and strategic and get our heads down.