Keeping Your Cool In Recording Setting Heat
This summer is setting the records again and not the kind anyone wants. Temperatures are climbing higher than ever.
While on paper the sunny weather forecast might look good, it’s becoming a real operational problem across many sectors of society.
Especially for those in the platform economy. Where record-setting heat quietly breaks the unit economics. If you operate a shared mobility for instance, the damage lands on the asset side: batteries degrade faster and lose effective range, charging throttles in the heat, vehicles overheat, and maintenance and swap cycles multiply.
Assets spend more time off the road at exactly the moment you need them earning. To help you navigate, below we break down the keys to keeping your cool, and protecting your assets, during record setting heat.
Breaking Record After Record
June 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded in Western Europe. Having big and devastating wildfires across various countries.
Germany broke their heat record reporting 41.7°C in Coschen, Hungary as well with 40.7°C in Budapest, Austria set a new temperature record with 40.0°C in Vienna and the list keeps on going.
This year is not an outlier. These extreme weather events are increasingly becoming a norm. It can seem that every summer brings new heatwaves and new records broken by the thermometer.
How Much Heat Can Your Assets Handle
Hot weather brings more problems with drainage on batteries, reduced riding range, slow charging efficiency, with extreme cases battery swelling, reduced long-term battery life, and increasing risk of overheating.
Driving uphill can be too much for the motor, resulting in shut down. Or tire pressure is not stable, since hot pavement causes air to expand, overinflating the tires and reducing the road grip.
This can become potentially dangerous for the rider as well.
In Barcelona, electric bikes started to fail with temperatures going over 35°C. With that kind of heat the batteries were going out faster than they were able to charge them, causing an operational burden with shortage of vehicles while demand is high.
The problem is that lithium-ion batteries operate best between 14°C and 30°C. Outside that band performance and lifespan start eroding and above 40°C degradation accelerates sharply.
But There’s More to Consider Than Heat Alone
It isn’t the only thing working against your fleet. Modern cities full of curved glass towers and packed together buildings behave like a giant magnifying glass. Focusing sunlight into a narrow strip of pavement that can run far hotter than the air temperature around it.
In Birmingham a Lime bike was giving off smoke because of the reflection from the building. Several vehicles have reached dangerous temperatures.
The useful thing about this failure mode is that it's predictable. Beam concentration depends on building geometry and sun angle, so the risk sits in specific bays at specific hours. As cities grow hotter and fleets expand, the connection between parking locations and buildings geometry can’t be an afterthought anymore.
It’s rarely been considered before but it’s becoming a risk management necessity.
Vehicles Can’t Take the Heat, but People Still Need to Move
With temperatures going above 40°C, there’s not much you can do besides staying inside. But life doesn’t stop and people need to get from A to B.
Public transport is not really an option with those degrees anymore. Vehicles are filled with stale, poorly ventilated air. For passengers, it raises the danger of heat exhaustion and dehydration.
When public transport becomes unbearable to use, bikes and scooters become a necessity rather than just convenient.
In Paris, metro and bus usage dropped by 15-30% since people don’t want to use public transport where the temperatures rise to even 50°C.
This has created a surge for using bikes to get around the city. Dott has seen a 30% surge in July 2026 compared with last year.
Others who benefit from such a situation are taxis and ride-hailing services. Bolt confirmed that they saw a 46% increase in rides during the heatwave in Paris.
This isn’t a once-in-a-decade hit anymore. Hot summers are becoming the new normal.
Operators who want to capture this demand need to have batteries and assets that handle extreme weather conditions and think through how they can best protect their assets.
Adaptive Insurance for Extreme Conditions
Cachet has built transient risk factors, adjusting dynamically to evolving weather forecasts. When extreme heat is on the way, operators can get the signal ahead of time to reshuffle their assets. That could involve moving vehicles from hotspots to prevent batteries overheating or tires overinflating. Meaningfully controlling their risk exposure.
It’s working the same way with rainy weather, giving you meaningful feedback loops and timely alerts that shape how you control risk across your fleet. To de-fleet the assets before an upcoming storm when conditions turn dangerous.
Adaptive insurance means fleets can scale as fast as demand does. When a heatwave pushes riders off public transport and onto bikes or other vehicles, operators can re-fleet to meet the surge. Doing so without carrying the risk of scaling blind.
Cachet is not just a set of pay-as-you-go insurance solutions. It is the insurance infrastructure that is providing smarter operators the oversight and insight needed to stay ahead as conditions change. Leaving you in control of the risk, not the other way around.
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