People injured in accidents involving e-scooters will soon find it much easier to get compensated. On Thursday, 9 July 2026, after a short twenty-minute debate, the Bundestag voted to pass the government's bill on e-scooter accident liability, adopting it exactly as the relevant committee had recommended, with no changes. CDU/CSU, SPD, and Die Linke voted in favor, while the AfD voted against. The Greens abstained.
The core purpose of the legislation is to introduce owner liability, referred to in German as "Halterhaftung," for the operators of e-scooter fleets. Under the government's reasoning, the case for this shift rests on a simple principle of fairness: those who profit from an activity should also bear the risk it creates.
As the government put it in its own explanatory text, the economic benefits of e-scooter sharing services flow mainly to fleet operators in their role as vehicle owners, so it follows logically that the party benefiting from the activity should also carry the corresponding risk.
By placing this responsibility on fleet operators, the law is intended to push these companies to factor the cost of accident-related damage more fully into their business models, treating it as a genuine cost of doing business rather than a burden left to fall on injured third parties.
Alongside owner liability, the law introduces a stricter standard for individual riders as well. Going forward, anyone driving an electric scooter will be subject to liability based on presumed fault, meaning a rider will be held responsible for an accident unless they can show they were not at fault. With this change, the liability rules that apply to e-scooter accidents will match those already used for accidents involving other motor vehicles, such as cars.
The government's reasoning for the bill points to steadily growing use of electric kick scooters and stand-up scooters since the Electric Micro-Vehicles Regulation came into force on 15 June 2019. Accident figures have climbed sharply alongside this growth in usage, rising from 5,860 incidents in 2020 to 12,509 in 2024.
The number of third parties harmed in these accidents has followed a similar trajectory: the insurance industry settled around 1,150 third-party damage claims in 2020, and by 2023 that number had grown to roughly 5,000 cases.
Before this reform, anyone seeking compensation after an e-scooter accident had to establish and prove fault, particularly on the part of the rider, according to the government's bill. That requirement, the government notes, has proven difficult to satisfy in practice for two main reasons. First, identifying the rider involved in a given accident is often genuinely difficult. Second, the structure of scooter rental operations means that the registered owner of the vehicle, typically the rental company, and the person actually riding it at the time are usually two separate individuals.
The bill specifically singles out the challenge faced by people harmed by an e-scooter that had been left parked improperly in public space, stating that under the law as it previously stood, victims in these situations faced considerable difficulty gathering the evidence needed to support a claim.
With its passage on 9 July 2026, the reform brings e-scooter accident liability substantially closer to the framework already governing other motor vehicles, shifting more of the financial risk onto fleet operators and tightening the standard riders must meet to avoid liability.
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