As students and faculty on NC State University’s campus, we have all become well associated with the phenomenon known as Lime scooters. What was originally a foreign concept, seeing an adult human gliding along on a high speed scooter, the idea has now become a part of our collective everyday reality.
However the current scooter craze has made obvious some blatant errors in the business model. The costs of maintenance of the scooters and the payment of employees to wrangle misplaced scooters are pretty much draining the profits as fast as they are made. Cities have begun to become opposed to the scooter sharing apps as the scooters can clog sidewalks and be very hazardous. Pro-scooter arguments point out that the scooters encourage people to ditch cars and make electric vehicles more accessible. That is, if a scooter can be considered a vehicle.
Since there is money to be made, tech companies won’t stray away from the scooters, which in this case has lead to a pretty interesting solution: autonomous scooters. Now it won’t be like autonomous cars, where the idea is to have the car drive while the owner is riding. The main appeal of self-driving scooters is their ability to relocate themselves into better parking places. Even companies like Uber are looking into autonomous scooters to lower maintenance costs and come out on top of other scooter and e-bike companies. The scooters and bikes have less regulations as they are lighter and slower than their car counterparts. 
Autonomous scooters have already been introduced in Singapore by the company CtrlWorks. There were no accidents, but upon seeing the scooters drive themselves many concerned bystanders thought they were runaways and tried to stop them. Additionally, sometimes children would sit and ride on the scooters.
Lime has refused to state whether they are looking into self-driving technology. Perhaps within the next 5 years we will begin to see autonomous vehicles, but not quite the ones we expected.
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/15/tech/self-driving-scooters-bikes/index.html
https://www.curbed.com/2018/12/21/18152121/electric-scooter-bird-lime-cities-scooters-behaving-badly
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/10/self-driving-scooter-tortoise-technology-mobility-sidewalks/600013/