Spin Removes 8,000 Scooters From Cleveland Warehouse After City Legal Action

Skinny Labs, the parent company of Spin Scooters, this week finished removing some 8,000 broken and damaged scooters it had been storing at a warehouse at East 42nd St. and Lakeside Ave. ahead of a Friday deadline following legal action from the city.

Cleveland in March had sent a cease and desist to the company, warning that the jam-packed scooter dump, with thousands of lithium-ion batteries, posed a serious fire threat, being housed without a permit or license. Skinny Labs was also cited by the fire department.

“There’s just thousands of them stacked on top of each other,” a fire marshal captain told the building standards board in March. “Each one of them has a lithium-ion battery. This is the hazard… I don’t believe that, if this were to ignite, if we would even be able to extinguish this product. It would probably burn to the ground.”

The company argued Cleveland simply wasn’t up on the latest safety standards of batteries.

“We don’t see any difference whether there’s 80 scooters stored, or 800, or 8,000, or 80,000,” the company’s chief legal told the board, according to Signal Cleveland, which first reported the story. “We are to the letter of the recommendations from numerous safety experts…We are doing everything to a T.”

But the city in August sought a temporary restraining order against the company in Cleveland Housing Court, setting the clock ticking on their removal.

Spin exited Cleveland’s scooter program in late 2022, along with a handful of other markets, citing low demand and city regulations.

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