A fleet of 300 rental electric scooters is to be put on Malta's roads by GoTo, the car-sharing company.

More than 13,000 customers have made some 200,000 trips and driven over 2 million kilometres in GoTo vehicles since the service was introduced in November 2018 — far surpassing the company’s expectations.

The company is expecting similar enthusiasm for its scooters.

Chief Marketing Officer Johnny Tominaga said: “The launch of our scooter fleet is paramount in our strategy to keep building a multimodal mobility platform and reduce dependency on private cars.”

Scooters are smaller, lighter and more convenient to avoid most traffic situations and parking constraints, which makes them particularly handy for shorter trips.

A pilot GoTo exercise conducted with the scooters in the past weeks saw 3,000 scooter rides in 45 days with over 230 rides a day. A large number of trips were shorter to what the company is used to with its One-Way and Roundtrip cars, especially in more concentrated urban areas.

GoTo’s new CEO Gordon Bugeja said: “This reinforces our belief that we’ll be serving our customers even better by adding different solutions targeting multiple forms of transportation needs in a single platform, in turn making the customer experience even more seamless.” 

“We believe that in the long run shared mobility solutions like ours will continue to grow, as they bring a more sustainable solution for people to move around, while reducing transportation expenses, traffic levels and resource waste since private cars tend to stay parked over 80 per cent of the time.”

Prices for GoTo scooters start at 21c per minute for a basic plan; 20c for Standard and Tourist Plans; and 19c for a Savings Plan. A licence for riding two-wheel vehicles of 49CC or more is required to be able to book a scooter ride.