From Singapore: walk through any major city in Southeast Asia on a weekday morning and you will notice something that Australian commuters are only beginning to glimpse. Electric scooters are no longer a novelty. In Taipei, Hanoi, and increasingly Jakarta, they are infrastructure. The economics that made this transformation possible are now reaching Australian shores, and the timing, heading into the warmer months, is not coincidental.
The global e-scooter market has been reshaped over the past three years by a sustained collapse in lithium-ion battery costs. According to the International Energy Agency, battery pack prices fell by more than 90 per cent over the past decade, with the steepest declines concentrated in the last four years. That cost reduction has flowed directly into consumer pricing, putting capable electric scooters within reach of buyers who would have been priced out entirely in 2021.
For Australian consumers and retailers, the supply chain reality is straightforward. The overwhelming majority of affordable e-scooters sold in this country are designed, manufactured, and assembled in China or elsewhere across ASEAN. Brands like Segway-Ninebot, Xiaomi, and a growing cluster of Vietnamese and Thai assemblers dominate the volume end of the market. When spring deal cycles emerge in the Northern Hemisphere, price pressure flows through to Australian distributors within weeks. The trade implications for Australia are direct: cheaper imports, yes, but also a near-total dependence on Asian manufacturing for a product category that is quietly becoming transport infrastructure.
The complication, and it is a significant one, is that Australia has no unified national framework governing where and how e-scooters can be legally ridden. Queensland has led the country with a relatively permissive approach, allowing e-scooters on roads and shared paths under defined conditions. New South Wales, by contrast, has been far more restrictive, confining legal use largely to private property. Victoria sits somewhere in between, with ongoing trials in select areas. The result is a patchwork that frustrates consumers, confuses retailers, and arguably pushes use underground in states where regulation lags demand.
Advocates for micro-mobility reform, including groups aligned with the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts, argue this inconsistency carries a real economic cost. When commuters cannot rely on e-scooters as a legal, predictable part of their journey, adoption stalls and the potential to reduce short-trip car travel goes unrealised. The environmental case is not trivial either. Short urban car trips, those under five kilometres, are among the least fuel-efficient journeys a vehicle makes. Displacing even a fraction of them has measurable emissions benefits.
The counter-argument deserves serious attention. Pedestrian safety advocates, disability groups, and some local councils have raised legitimate concerns about shared-path conflicts, footpath riding, and the behaviour of a subset of riders who disregard existing rules regardless of legality. These are not fringe concerns. Research from European cities that moved quickly to legalise e-scooters, including Paris, which subsequently banned shared rental scooters after a public vote, shows that poorly managed rollouts generate significant community backlash. The lesson is not that e-scooters are inherently problematic, but that permissive rules without enforcement infrastructure create genuine friction.
Across the region, the trend is unmistakable. Asian cities that have embraced micro-mobility as a policy priority, rather than treating it as a regulatory afterthought, have generally seen positive outcomes on congestion and emissions metrics. Singapore's Land Transport Authority has taken a methodical approach: registering devices, licensing riders for higher-powered models, and banning footpath use with consistent enforcement. The result is a managed ecosystem rather than a chaotic free-for-all. Australian state governments looking for a model could do worse than examining what Singapore has built.
The federal government's National Road Safety Strategy touches on emerging vehicle categories, but micro-mobility regulation has remained stubbornly parochial, left to individual states and territories with little coordination. A national framework, even a non-binding one that establishes common definitions and minimum standards, would help retailers plan inventory, help consumers understand their rights, and help councils design infrastructure with confidence.
None of this means Australia should rush to copy any single model. The density of Sydney's CBD differs from Hobart's inner suburbs. The infrastructure of Brisbane's bike network differs from Perth's. A good national framework would set floors, not ceilings, allowing local governments to calibrate rules to their specific conditions. What it cannot do is leave the status quo untouched while the technology and the market move ahead regardless. The e-scooters are already here. The question is whether Australian policy will be ready to meet them.