Germany is extending vehicle-style liability to e-scooters. The Bundesrat has approved a law that subjects electric micro-vehicles — including e-scooters and Segways — to the same holder liability that applies to cars: in an accident, liability can fall on the vehicle's owner regardless of fault, not only on the person riding it.
Until now, vehicles with a top speed of 20 km/h were explicitly excluded from holder liability. The new law removes that carve-out for electric micro-vehicles. Slow commercial vehicles used in agriculture, forestry and construction remain exempt.
The focus is on everyday problems caused by e-scooters, and especially by rental fleets. The Justice Ministry's (BMJV) draft argues that injured parties often cannot identify the rider — rental accounts generally do not require an ID upload — or prove fault, and that this is particularly hard for rented scooters. Holder liability would let victims claim damages directly from the rental companies.
The numbers back the concern. According to the insurers' association GDV, rented e-scooters caused roughly 40 percent of all third-party damage attributed to e-scooters while accounting for only about 20 percent of the total fleet. Germany had around 990,000 e-scooters in 2025. Accidents involving parked scooters are not systematically recorded by the Federal Statistical Office, and the ministry cites several court rulings in which sidewalk-parked scooters caused serious injuries — including cases where they stood legally.
Legally, a rider who parks badly is often the wrong target anyway: the ministry notes that other equally plausible causes, such as third-party negligence or a storm, can make fault hard to establish. Holder liability instead shifts the question to the operator.
The ministry's stated aim is to make rental companies internalise the cost. If operators bear the expected accident costs, the argument goes, they will deploy more vehicles only where the marginal benefit exceeds those costs. The law now needs only publication in the Federal Law Gazette; it takes effect on the first day of the quarter following publication.
