Electric scooter accidents are increasing sharply in Sweden, up a full 38 percent last year compared with the year before, according to recent statistics from the Swedish Transport Agency. In 2025, 7 people died and just over 6,600 were injured in accidents involving electric scooters.
Now, researchers at Chalmers in Gothenburg and at the Swedish Transport Administration have analysed all 204 fatal accidents involving electric scooters, electric bicycles and regular bicycles in Sweden between 2016 and 2024.
Electric scooters stand out both in terms of riders and accident patterns.
It may seem like we are comparing vehicles. But in practice we are comparing people. There are different populations and different uses of the vehicles, says Marco Dozza, who is a professor of active safety and road user behaviour at Chalmers.
Private scooters
Some of the results are relatively expected, he notes. For example, helmet use among those killed was very low, regardless of vehicle type.
A little more unexpected, however, was that fatal accidents involving electric scooters stand out in terms of the proportion of riders under the influence of alcohol.
In addition, it turned out that most of the fatal accidents occurred with privately owned electric scooters - while the public debate has largely been about rental scooters.
"Because there are so many people renting out e-scooters, we thought the statistics would show that more people die on rented e-scooters. But it was the opposite," says Marco Dozza.
Lack of standards
To reverse the trend, he believes that more regulation is not needed in the first place. Instead, it is about changing attitudes towards electric scooters as vehicles.
"Today, there are few established social norms around electric scooters, as they are still relatively new. They are therefore often perceived more as toys than as real vehicles," he says.
But I think we need to start looking at e-scooters the same way we look at bicycles. For example, parents teaching their children to ride e-scooters and making sure they wear helmets, even when riding e-scooters.
In 2016-2024, 204 people died in Sweden in accidents involving electric scooters, electric bicycles and regular bicycles.
Accidents involving electric scooters differ significantly in several ways, according to a study from Chalmers and the Swedish Transport Administration.
Some examples:
While about a quarter of the electric cyclists and cyclists who died were wearing helmets, not a single one of the electric scooter riders who died was wearing a helmet.
The fatal electric bicycle accidents were largely single-vehicle accidents on weekends, evenings and nights, while regular bicycles and electric bicycles often involved collisions with motor vehicles on weekdays.
44 percent of e-scooter riders were under the influence of alcohol, compared to 27 percent of e-bike riders and 13 percent of those on regular bicycles.
The median age of the deceased e-scooter riders was 47.5 years, while that of both regular bicycle and electric bicycle riders was around 71 years.
Source: Chalmers University of Technology.
