Apollo Scooter Rider Data Puts Winter Range Loss at About 12 Percent at Freezing
Ask online how much range an electric scooter loses in winter and the usual answer is 20 to 50 percent. Apollo Scooters, a Montreal brand that sells in the United States, Canada and Australia, says its own riders lose about 12 percent at freezing. That’s a big gap, and it’s worth being clear up front about where the smaller number comes from: a manufacturer measuring its own scooters and publishing the result in a press release on October 30.
What Apollo measured
The company says it looked at 512,359 rides on 8,449 Apollo scooters logged through its app between April 2025 and October 2026. Each ride was tagged with the local air temperature and compared with the same scooter at 68°F (20°C), matched for speed and trip length. Range was measured on real roads as distance covered per percent of battery.
The loss builds gradually. About 5 percent at 50°F (10°C), 10 percent at 41°F (5°C), 12 percent at 32°F (0°C) and 13 percent at 20°F (minus 7°C). In Apollo’s example, a scooter that does 25 miles on a mild day does about 22 at freezing. Battery size made no real difference: models from 540 Wh to 1,800 Wh all lost 10 to 15 percent near freezing, so a bigger pack buys more miles and takes the same percentage hit.
The loss also comes back. Riders who kept going through winter fell to 86 percent of their fall range and were back at 98 percent by spring, which Apollo says matches scooters that never saw the cold.
CEO and co-founder Maciek Piskorz said the company couldn’t find where the 20 to 50 percent figure came from, so it measured instead. His explanation for the gap is simple. A scooter has no cabin to heat. The rider brings the warmth.
How it squares with car tests
That argument holds up against the best-known car study. In a 2019 lab test of five electric cars, AAA found that at 20°F range fell about 12 percent with the cabin heater off and about 41 percent with it on. Most of the scary winter number, in other words, is the heater. Apollo’s 13 percent at the same temperature sits right next to AAA’s heater-off result.
Still, the limits matter. The data covers Apollo’s own scooters and Apollo’s own app users, and the release doesn’t point to any outside review of the method. People who ride in the cold may ride differently, too: shorter trips, more careful throttle. The company says it matched for speed and trip length, and it has posted the full method on its website.
The bigger problem is the road
Apollo’s own numbers suggest the battery isn’t what keeps people off scooters in winter. About one in five of its New York summer riders still rode in January. In Montreal it was fewer than one in fifty. The company puts that down to snow, ice and road salt. Same chemistry, very different streets.
That’s the useful takeaway for cities planning bike and scooter lanes as part of the commuting network. Range is a 12 percent problem. Cleared lanes in January are the bigger one.
Apollo’s advice to buyers is to size a scooter for the November commute, not the July one, by adding about 15 percent to the round trip. The test of the 12 percent figure will be whether independent testers, or the big shared scooter operators with fleet data of their own, publish numbers that match it.