Jump, the bike and scooter rental company owned by Uber, is getting a facelift. On Tuesday, the bike-share company unveiled the next generation of its electric-powered bikes. The hope is that these new, high-tech bikes will spur Uber’s effort to dominate the micromobility space, which is growing increasingly competitive and more expensive to navigate.

The new bikes, which will be introduced in January 2019, have swappable lithium-ion batteries, fancy new displays, retractable mounts for smartphones, and cable locks in the rear. In total, these new features are meant to make Uber’s Jump e-bikes more resilient, easier to use, and less in need of constant repairs. They are also designed in a way to help Uber grow and scale its bike-share program. Jump’s current footprint is just a dozen US cities and Berlin; the company hopes to expand to dozens more in 2019.

Uber’s Jump e-bikes are more resilient, easier to use, and less in need of constant repairs

The swappable battery is perhaps the most game-changing feature. Jump distinguishes itself from other bike-share services by operating a fleet of solely electric-powered “pedal assist” bikes. (Others offer only human-powered bikes or a mix of both.) The batteries provide a boost while you pedal — up to 20 mph — but if you stop pedaling, the bike slows just like a regular bike. Users can locate and unlock the bikes using an app on their smartphone.

With this new feature, Uber’s operations team can swap out depleted batteries for fully charged ones in just minutes, eliminating the need to remove the entire bike from the street each night for charging. The battery is custom built, so it can pull real-time data from the bike while it is in use, says Nick Foley, head of product at Jump.

“Every key subsystem — whether it’s the motor, the drivetrain, the locking system, the battery system, the user interface — are all custom engineered and porting information up through our cloud,” Foley says. “So this is just really an important leap in terms of how intelligent the vehicle is.”

He adds, “This is a vehicle purpose-built for this application of shared fleets and operations of those fleets.” Foley says that third-party manufacturers, which dominate the shared bike and scooter industry, “don’t even understand” some of the technology that Jump is putting into its bikes. Jump’s bikes are manufactured in China, but Foley said Uber has more control over its supply chain than other micromobility startups.

“This is a vehicle purpose-built for this application of shared fleets and operations of those fleets.”

The retractable phone mount allows riders to view maps and turn-by-turn navigational instructions without having to dangerously fumble with their device while riding. And riders can “pause” their rides or put the bike in repair mode when something is wrong from the redesigned front “dashboard” that’s located between the handlebars. The dashboard looks shiny, but it’s designed to be resilient and survive any number of weather conditions, Foley says.

A one-meter-long cable lock attached to the side of the rear tire replaces the heavy metal U-lock that is used by the first-generation bikes. This allows riders to lock the bike to a rack or signpost at the end of their trip. It’s also supposed to reduce the likelihood that the bikes will be left in hard-to-reach places, like at the bottom of a river. Unlike other dockless bike-share services, Jump requires users to lock up their bikes in order to end their trips.

Foley wouldn’t comment on the specific unit economics of each bike or the amount of money it costs to produce versus the amount of revenue it pulls in for Uber. The San Francisco-based company recently filed confidentially for an IPO two days after Lyft did the same. The filings mark the beginning of a race to the stock markets for the two ride-hailing giants. As such, both are racing to introduce new products that compel riders and drivers to spurn competitors, while also showing they can keep costs low and turn a profit.

Foley says that Uber is mindful of the costs of building and managing fleets of shared bikes, especially ones as complicated and high-tech as Jump’s. He predicted that, in the long term, Jump’s new generation of bicycles would be cheaper to produce than the previous model.

The lifespan of the new Jump bike is three to five years, though Foley notes that not all of the subsystems are engineered to last that long — at least not yet. Each bike is ridden an average of 10,000 miles a year, which is around 10 times that of an average personally owned bike. The goal is to only have to bring each bike in for maintenance once a year. “That’s the thing we’re aiming for — a vehicle that can do up to 10,000 miles with only one intervention,” Foley says, “a yearly check-up, so to speak.”