Does a video show a graveyard of green electric scooters that ran out of battery life and were abandoned because it is too expensive to replace them? No, that's not true: This video is real, but the reason the electric scooters were taken out of service had nothing to do with the batteries. Slowing demand for the bikes led the company that owned them to reduce its fleet.
The video dating back to 2022 resurfaced in a post (archived here) published on X by @MAVERIC68078049 on Dec. 2, 2025. It was captioned:
A graveyard of electric green scooters that have run out of battery life
Since it's very expensive to replace the batteries, electric scooters that have reached the end of the battery life cycle are being completely abandoned, also disposing them in any other way would be dangerous and expensive.
The environmentally friendly EV transportation.
This is a screenshot of the video in the post:
(Image Source: Lead Stories screenshot from x.com/MAVERIC68078049/status/1995514625434194122.)
The resurfaced video has the watermark of a TikTok account, @smartsetting, where the video (archived here) was originally posted on Nov. 7, 2022. With no suggestion that the scooters had been decommissioned due to the cost to replace spent EV batteries, the post was simply captioned:
Incredible 😳 #nowlookatthis
Other fact checks
This claim was investigated by Snopes on Nov. 30, 2022, and USA Today on Dec 16, 2022. Neither fact check found evidence to support the claim that the batteries were the reason the scooters were no longer in service. Instead they both found that a failed business model in the bike-sharing industry resulted in overproduction coupled with a lack of demand, resulting in the decommissioning of fleets of bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters.
A photo on Wikimedia Commons shows a clear view of yellow scooters that appear to be the same model as in the video. They appear to have still been in service at the time the photo was taken in Fuding, China on Feb. 9, 2022. They clearly show the logo of the company Meituan (archived here).
(Image Source: Lead Stories screenshot from commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Park_on_the_roadside_Meituan_Shared_Motocycles.jpg.)
On April 3, 2018, TechCrunch reported (archived here) that Mobike was purchased by Meituan for $2.7 billion. Mobike was a bike-share company that operated around China and around the world. On Nov. 23, 2018, TechCrunch reported (archived here) that Meituan was walking away from bike sharing. The article opened:
A major player in the race to transport Chinese people around is losing steam. Meituan Dianping, the Tencent-backed, all-encompassing platform for local services, continues to put the brakes on bike-sharing and ride-hailing, the company said on its earnings call on Thursday.
Meituan currently operates several services such as hotel and travel booking, as well as commanding the largest share of the food delivery business in China.
Lead Stories has published fact checks on similar claims (here and here) involving decommissioned electric cars.
