Bicitekas rescued Uber's condemned Jump bikes at one peso each — 1,600 reborn

When Uber sold Jump to Lime in May 2020, Lime didn't want Mexico — the market's theft of Lime's electric scooters had made it intolerable — and Uber began destroying hundreds of motor-powered bicycles in Mexico City. Bicitekas, a nonprofit that promotes cycling, approached Uber and offered to pay a symbolic one peso, about five US cents, for each bike set to be destroyed. The deal that was struck came with conditions: Uber's swappable lithium-ion batteries would be removed and the technology would not be replicated.

The conversion fell to Kristel Paredes Álvarez, a former Jump mechanic hired to lead Bicitekas's mechanics department. The bikes' technology was entirely Chinese and no parts, down to light bulbs, were available in Mexico, so the team worked by trial and error: dismantling the frame to reach the cables, pulling the 250-watt motor, the interface controller — the bike's 'brain' — and the lock, leaving the pedal-assist sensor untouched, and repatching the frame where motor and battery had been. Each bike came out 10 kilos lighter; 40 bikes took a week, about three hours each.

The first 500 conversions, named Bicicatarinas ('ladybug bikes'), were loaned to the borough of Azcapotzalco, where they help women entrepreneurs deliver goods across the city. The loan income of $104,000 a year, combined with repairs and spare-parts sales, funds work on the roughly 1,100 bikes still in storage. Paredes was also trialling re-electrification without Uber's technology — tests with the Mexican brand Mastretta worked well but cost too much, with a new battery alone about $350 per bike.

Buy the condemned fleet for one peso per bike, remove the batteries and brains the license forbids replicating, and loan out what's left to pay for converting the rest.

A peso-per-bike price turned a disposal cost for Uber into an asset transfer for the nonprofit — there was nothing left to negotiate.

Accepting the no-replication condition meant removing exactly the parts that made the bikes expensive, theft-prone and unsupported in Mexico.

Loaning converted bikes to a borough created $104,000 of annual income plus parts revenue, making the remaining conversions self-funding.

The reverse-engineering used only trial-and-error mechanical skill with no Chinese supply chain, so nothing depended on Jump's vendors.

An asset's liability lives in its licensed, theft-prone electronics, not its frame: strip what makes it risky and the husk can pay for its own second life.

About 500 bikes were converted and loaned to Azcapotzalco as Bicicatarinas by October 2021; roughly 1,100 remained in storage pending funds. Paredes kept experimenting with third-party e-bike kits, including Mastretta's, to re-electrify the fleet without Uber's technology.