The president signed bill 8172, which recognized scooters and other means of electric micro-mobility as light personal electric transport.
Bohdan Lepiavko, traffic safety and advocacy coordinator at U-Cycle, noted that in the adopted law "On some issues of the use of vehicles equipped with electric engines and amendments to some legislative acts of Ukraine on overcoming fuel dependence and development of electric charging infrastructure and electric of vehicles" have taken into account recommendations developed by the U-Cycle team and community and partners.
In the post, he summarized the main theses adopted in the law.
A light personal electric vehicle is a wheeled vehicle that is equipped and driven exclusively by electric traction motors (one or more) with power in the range of up to 1000 W, an electric energy storage system (battery) that can be charged by connecting to an external source of electrical energy, with one, two, three or four wheels with a maximum design speed of up to 25 kilometers per hour.
A low-speed light electric vehicle is a wheeled vehicle that is equipped and driven exclusively by electric traction motors (one or several), an electric energy storage system (battery), which is capable
to be charged by connecting to an external source of electrical energy, with two, three or four wheels, which has a maximum design speed of less than or equal to 50 kilometers per hour and more than 10 kilometers per hour, and a curb weight of not more than 600 kilograms.
Of course, some devices can go over 50 km/h - nothing new is foreseen for them, but they do not fall into these categories and will obviously be considered generally, probably as motorcycles.
The existence of the definition represents these devices as vehicles, and in case of any accidents, the user of such a device is already 100% the driver of the vehicle, not a pedestrian. This greatly simplifies the interpretation and removes a number of cases and issues that have already arisen and were widely discussed.
The allocation of the category of vehicles with a speed of up to 25 km/h and with a power limit of up to 1000 W fully complies with European regulations. All rental scooters fall into this category.
