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What new electric scooter rules are coming to Ireland?

Marty
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What new electric scooter rules are coming to Ireland?

Following a meeting this morning between Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Tánaiste Simon Harris, Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan, Minister of State for Transport Seán Canney and Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly, decisions were made which will impact the usage of electric scooter in Ireland. This follows recent reports that in 2026, more than one in three children admitted to CHI at Temple Street with a traumatic brain injury had been involved in an e-scooter accident. These admissions have jumped 50% in the last year.

But what exactly does this mean for electric scooter owners? Honestly, for those following the rules already – not much as, for now, an outright ban is not being sought. However, Micheál Martin did say it would remain a possibility.

New electric scooter age limits

In 2024, Ireland produced the first electric scooter laws in The State. These laws stated that to ride a compliant electric scooter in a public place, you must be at least 16 years old. The Government today has stated that this age will now increase to 18 years of age. Given the age profile of those so heavily impacted, this makes sense although when juxtaposed with the fact 16 year olds can drive tractors on public roads, with only a theory test as training with a provisional license, it’s a bit wild.

Regardless, this new rule is largely logical, so no complaints from me.

Electric scooter riders must wear hi-vis and helmet

Emerging today was also the requirement for electric scooter riders to wear a helmet and hi-vis jackets. I largely disagree with hi-vis in these conversations because it generally amounts to a route towards victim blaming in Ireland. If you’re not wearing a hi-vis, it’s one of the first things said when a motorist doesn’t see you. However, I think there is a secondary reason for this recommendation. If you ride an electric scooter and wear hi-vis, you are broadcasting to the world that you are seeking to be compliant. Not wearing a hi-vis should be a nice big red flag to Gardaí.

For helmets, I’ve been on a journey with these. I wouldn’t dream of mounting my scooter without a helmet, but I’ve never believed they should be mandatory. But I guess it was obvious that we would end up here given the statistics that were emerging. I can understand and support mandatory helmets, but this does open a new can of worms.

What helmets are considered sufficiently rated for electric scooters? What defines a helmet? I get a bad feeling that this won’t be sufficiently defined and could lead to more debate down the line.

Licensing and registration to come

Later this year, legislation will be introduced to define e-scooters more strictly as mechanically propelled vehicles and there will be a requirement for licensing and registration. Exact details are a long way away for now on what all of this means, but the hope is that a scooter, when sold, gets tied to an individual. Speaking to RTÉ, Minister of State for Transport Seán Canney said right now there is no process for documenting electric scooter sales and that current rules are hard to enforce “when you don’t know who bought the e-scooter, you don’t know where it was bought, and you don’t know what it is being used for”.

Targeting retailers

An issue I flagged years ago was that retailers were selling electric scooters that were initially not legal to use in Ireland at all, or today that are far too powerful for legal use on roads. This was due to the loophole that they could be purchased for use on private property. But whether or not they would be, well noone really cared or checked.

Under these new attempts to wrangle control over electric scooters, it will be illegal to sell scooters to minors and also the sale of scooters that do not meet the legal requirements for use on public roads. Whether or not amendments to specs will happen remains unknown, but this means electric scooters can only be sold if they are limited to 20kmph, weigh less than 25kg and have a motor rated no higher than 400 watts.

I’m going to start reaching out to some people in Government and have contacted the Garda Press Office too to ask for more details on this along with what plans are being made for enforcement. Simply, all of these ideas are somewhat sound and understandable. But they will achieve absolutely nothing unless Gardaí are given more freedom and tools to police electrics scooters and made these rules more than just ink on paper.

If you want ro read more about what I think on electric scooter bans, you can check this out.


How Ireland could make electric scooters safe without a ban

Marty
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How Ireland could make electric scooters safe without a ban

Recently I wrote about the fact that Ireland needs enforcement of the rules around electric scooters, not a ban. I’ve been taken aback by how quickly the conversation has escalated since. The Taoiseach is now “leaning towards” an outright ban and the Garda Commissioner says he would “absolutely” support one. Perhaps more surprising is public sentiment largely being against a ban, deeming it unfair on honest commuters and simply lazy by government. I’ve been mailing several TDs and councillors with mixed responses, leaving me wanting to do some of the work for them.

So here it is. A cross-European framework for safe electric scooter use that Ireland could champion rather than retreat from. It has four parts. A new EU vehicle category for electric scooters, mandatory third party insurance costing tens of euro rather than hundreds, a light-touch registration system modelled on drone registration, and a set of standardised riding rules. Italy and Germany have already built most of the pieces. But it’s important to note that none of this works without increased levels of enforcement. That was true when I wrote the last piece and it’s true now.

Create a new EU vehicle category for electric scooters

What is an electric scooter? That was the fundamental question put to Shane Ross years ago that the Department of Transport struggled to answer, and Europe hasn’t done much better since. Across the continent, both privately owned electric scooters and public shared schemes operate in a bizarre grey area where a product can be purchased in the aisle of a toy shop and ridden alongside cars and buses.

Ireland did eventually define a “powered personal transporter” in 2024, and fair play, it’s a decent start. But it’s a national definition in a single market, which is exactly the problem. A study commissioned by the European Commission has already recommended a dedicated vehicle category for personal mobility devices, or PMDs, rather than cramming scooters into moped rules. That’s the direction I’d take, with one EU-wide definition regardless of private or public ownership.

My version of that PMD definition looks like this. A maximum weight of 25kg, a motor rated no greater than 450 watts and a factory limited top speed of 25km/h, which is already the norm across most of Europe. Ireland currently caps legal scooters at 400 watts and 20km/h, so harmonising upwards slightly would bring us in line with our neighbours rather than leaving Irish riders on technically illegal imports. Interestingly, the Commission’s study goes further and suggests scrapping power limits altogether in favour of an acceleration cap, which is a smarter way of measuring how a scooter actually behaves on the road. It also gives a little headroom to reduce the number of electric scooters deemed completely useless by new laws.

Additional requirements around braking, lighting, bells, CE marking and safety standards should be baked into the same definition, along with anti-tampering rules so speed limiters can’t be removed with a YouTube tutorial and ten minutes. Retailers would only be allowed to sell scooters that meet the standard. More on that shortly.

Mandatory third party insurance for electric scooters

Should electric scooters require insurance? Yes, and it’s already happening elsewhere in Europe. Italy recently made third party insurance compulsory for electric scooters this month, with annual premiums starting from around €25. For private ownership, the responsibility falls on the owner of the scooter. For shared schemes it falls on the operator, and Germany has just gone a step further by making rental operators liable for accidents involving their fleets, including badly parked scooters blocking footpaths.

Naturally, this insurance product would not be like car insurance. We’re talking about a micro-policy in the region of €25 to €60 per year, linked to the scooter’s ID number, which I’ll discuss next. The overall idea is to protect the vulnerable road users that electric scooters share space with. A pedestrian knocked down by an uninsured scooter today has almost no route to compensation, and that’s the gap Germany’s new law was written to close.

Ideally, I’d like to see this being somewhat of a state-run operation, to avoid it becoming another terrible private insurance product. And again, without enforcement this is worthless. But with modern databases and roadside checks via a simple QR code, identifying riders lacking required cover is not a massive ask.

An ID system that isn’t over the top

Every legal electric scooter should carry a registered ID, but full number plates are overkill. Italy has gone down the plate route with an adhesive registration marker, and Germany’s insurance plate system works but would be quite difficult to retrofit here. A solution similar to drone registration would work well for Ireland and could scale across Europe.

The model is simple. An online database where every electric scooter must be registered, linking the device ID, the owner and the insurance policy. Riding without the sticker and matched registration would be illegal. The sticker includes a QR code that Gardaí can scan, making roadside checks a ten second job rather than a paperwork exercise. The same system works for shared scooter fleets, where devices are simply tied to the operator instead of an individual.

This is the piece that makes everything else enforceable. Right now a Garda who stops a rider on an overpowered scooter has limited options and no easy way to establish what the machine even is. An ID system turns “sure what can we do” into a fixed penalty notice.

Standardised rules across Europe

There are some fairly obvious rules that could be applied across Europe too, and most of them already exist in Irish law. They just aren’t enforced.

Retailers must only be allowed to sell road-legal electric scooters, full stop. The loophole where non-compliant machines are sold “for use on private land” must be closed, a problem I highlighted back in 2020 before legal scooters were even on the table. Ireland’s minimum age of 16 should apply EU-wide, and it should apply to riding, not just buying.

Helmets are where I’ve shifted. I never liked the idea of mandatory helmet usage after reading about the impact it had on cycling in Australia, where participation dropped off a cliff. That said, the recent headlines are hard to ignore. Hospital admissions of children with traumatic brain injuries from e-scooter incidents in Ireland are up 50 per cent year on year. Perhaps mandatory helmets for under-18s is enough, but it’s no longer a hill I would die on if mandating helmets for all riders became the standard.

The rest is general cop-on that’s already in Irish law and simply needs teeth. No passengers, no carrying items, no phone in hand, zero tolerance on drink riding, and clearly defined areas for usage, which is basically anywhere bikes are allowed and nowhere pedestrians walk.

What happens to the scooters already out there

Overpowered scooters will need to be removed from the roads. Many of these were purchased from retailers “for private land usage”, and while that loophole was a poor, the buyer is ultimately responsible for what they ride on a public road, whether we like that or not. Anyone on a compliant scooter today has nothing to worry about, since a harmonised spec would sit above Ireland’s current limits rather than below them. The only route back I can see for overpowered machines is a premium insurance product, priced to reflect the added risk, that legalises them once registered and inspected. I’m not convinced insurers would touch it, but the door shouldn’t be welded shut without asking.

There’s a carrot in this system too. A scooter carrying a valid ID should also be passing quality control on its battery. The NTA currently bans e-scooters from public transport over lithium battery fire risk, and it’s a blanket ban because there’s no way of telling a certified battery from a dodgy import. Registration fixes that. A registered scooter with a certified battery could be welcomed back onto the train and bus, and that matters because a scooter you can carry aboard is a fantastic last-mile mode of transport, exactly the behaviour we should be encouraging.

Ultimately, a ban is the easy headline and the lazy policy. Paris banned shared scooters and Prague followed this year, yet privately owned scooters kept multiplying because bans don’t answer the actual question of what these machines are and who’s responsible when things go wrong. Italy and Germany answered it. They classified the vehicle, insured it, identified it and made someone liable for it. Nothing in that list is beyond Ireland, and most of it could be lifted almost verbatim.

I’d rather see Ireland lead on this than watch the Government reach for a ban because enforcement was never seriously attempted. Honest commuters shouldn’t lose a genuinely useful, clean way of getting around because the State couldn’t be bothered distinguishing them from a lad doing 60km/h on a footpath. Classify, insure, register, enforce. It’s not complicated, it’s just work.

Disclaimer: The featured image for this article was created using AI.

Are flying cars closer to reality than we think?

Marty
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Are flying cars closer to reality than we think?

When I think of some of my favourite movies, sci-fi often tops the list. And when I look at what makes the aesthetic of these modern, cyberpunk worlds so great, it’s often the towering cities and the flying cars weaving between them. Think Deckard’s spinner in Blade Runner, or Korben Dallas’s cab in The Fifth Element. But are flying cars even that far away? Not as far as you’d think, because prop-based flying cars are not only coming, they’re already rolling off a production line.

The one leading the charge is XPeng, the Chinese EV maker, through its flying car arm Aridge, until recently known as Aeroht. Its Land Aircraft Carrier is a six-wheeled electric van with a two-seat electric aircraft folded into the boot. It has racked up around 7,000 orders at a price in the region of $300,000, and deliveries in China are due to start around the end of this year. I sat in a room in Munich this week listening to the company lay out its plans, and I came away convinced flying cars are properly happening. Just not necessarily here, and I’ll get to that.

The mother ship with an aircraft in the boot

I was at XPeng’s brand day workshops in Munich, where Wang Tan, co-founder of Aridge and the man heading up the flying car programme, walked us through it. Aridge claims to be the largest flying car company in Asia, with 1,800 employees, and its first product is a genuine new species of vehicle. The Land Aircraft Carrier is a 5.5 metre, six-wheeled range extender EV with over 1,000 km of driving range. In the boot sits a two-seat eVTOL, an electric aircraft that takes off and lands vertically, so no runway needed. One button releases it, and the van can recharge the aircraft six times over. Wang Tan’s line was that this is the first vehicle that can put an aircraft in its boot, and it’s hard to argue.

His pitch for why it exists was refreshingly personal. He’s a helicopter pilot, and the four things that annoy him are hangars, fuel, the 40 hours it takes to learn to fly, and trailering an aircraft anywhere. The mother ship approach answers all four. Store it in the boot, charge it from the van, learn it in minutes, drive it wherever you fancy flying.

This isn’t vapourware either. Aridge has built what it calls the world’s first mass production flying car factory, with capacity for 10,000 units a year. Mass production is due to start around the end of 2026, with customer deliveries following into 2027. There’s a second act coming too, a tilt-rotor hybrid flying car with over 500 km of range and a top speed above 360 km/h.

Is Europe actually getting it?

Sooner than anyone expected, and I heard it announced in Munich myself. XPeng revealed at its brand day that it has European approval to start bringing in their flying vehicle. I’ll be honest, this one caught the room off guard, and at the time of writing it has barely been reported anywhere.

Some context on why that matters. Until this week, the roadmap was China first, where the government has thrown its weight behind what it calls the low altitude economy, all the commercial activity in airspace below 1,000 metres, then the Middle East, where 600 orders have already been placed in the Gulf and Aridge holds a special flight permit from the UAE’s aviation authority. Europe looked years away, since EASA only recently published the world’s first dedicated airworthiness technical specifications for eVTOLs. That said, an approval is not the same as one of these landing in your local GAA pitch. Full certification, airspace rules and national regulators all still stand between an announcement in Munich and an aircraft over your house.

A three minute lesson and off you go

XPeng’s boldest claim isn’t about the hardware at all. The company reckons that if you can drive a car, or even just play video games, you can learn to fly this thing with a joystick in three to five minutes. In China you’ll still need a pilot licence, but the flying itself is deliberately dumbed down, with intelligent flight navigation, automatic landing and geofenced no-fly zones doing the heavy lifting. Aridge is also planning over 200 flying camps across China, approved sites where the airspace paperwork is already handled, so owners just turn up and fly.

For me, it’s a foolhardy approach, but I understand why they’re trying to keep it simple. Nobody buys a $300,000 toy that demands 40 hours of flight school. To be fair to XPeng, the safety engineering underneath sounds serious, with redundant batteries, propulsion and flight control systems, so if one fails a backup takes over. Wang Tan also told us that XPeng’s founder makes every senior executive fly the thing themselves, borrowing the wartime logic of making the parachute factory boss jump first. He’s flown it a couple of times himself.

Could you imagine this in Ireland?

It’s hard to. This very week, the Taoiseach said he’s leaning towards a full ban on electric scooters, and the Garda Commissioner would “absolutely” support one. We’ve also just watched Manna, an Irish drone delivery success story, pause its Irish operations over the lack of a clear national framework, after residents complained about noise from drones flying at around 60 metres. Even though XPeng is proposing ordinary punters piloting themselves around the airspace below 1,000 metres – so they will be quieter – I still think the Oireachtas transport committee would need a defibrillator.

Being totally transparent, I don’t see it working in Irish urban areas at all. But I do see the attraction of one of these for flying around picturesque rural Ireland. A machine you drive to the west coast, release from the boot and fly over a landscape with nobody underneath to annoy sounds far more plausible than a Blade Runner commute over Dublin.

The rest of the field

The wider category is a story of Chinese momentum and Western attrition. EHang, another Chinese firm, is already flying paying tourists on autonomous sightseeing hops, and remains one of only two companies in the world with full certification, both Chinese. Joby Aviation is closest in the West and expects to carry its first paying passengers in Dubai this year, while FAA certification in the US isn’t expected before 2027. Europe’s home-grown hopes have largely collapsed, with Lilium being scrapped after two insolvencies and Volocopter rescued by Chinese money. The pattern is that flying car startups without a deep-pocketed industrial parent don’t survive, which is exactly why an EV giant like XPeng treating this as a side project might be the ones to crack it.

The Goosed verdict

Flying cars are real, funded and in production, and that still feels mad to type. What they aren’t is the sci-fi dream of replacing your car, and XPeng knows it, which is why the first product is a leisure machine for wealthy enthusiasts rather than an air taxi. The gap now isn’t technology, it’s regulation and public patience, and if Ireland’s week of e-scooter panic tells us anything, we’ll be watching this one from the ground for a good while yet.

The Land Aircraft Carrier costs around $300,000, with Chinese deliveries due from late 2026 into 2027 and no European launch date.

XPeng launches the L03, an AI SUV coupe with Ferrari design DNA

Marty
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XPeng launches the L03, an AI SUV coupe with Ferrari design DNA

I’ve had a lot of firsts covering tech, not least of which was recently reviewing a cologne based on a computer game. I can add covering a car launch to this list of firsts now too. I’ve just spent a couple of days in Munich with XPeng and the new L03 two days before the covers came off. I sat in it, poked at every screen and heard the full pitch, but I haven’t driven it yet, so this is a first impression, not a review.

What I can tell you first-hand is that it impresses on paper, feels incredibly comfortable and premium inside, and that the Ferrari design lineage is unmissable in person. XPeng poached JuanMa Lopez, Ferrari’s head of exterior design for eight years and the man who worked on the LaFerrari, and it shows from every angle.

The L03 itself is a 4.6 metre electric SUV coupe, XPeng’s third SUV alongside the G6 and G9. It promises up to 520 km of WLTP range, and XPeng is aiming it squarely at the VW ID.4, Skoda Elroq and BYD Atto 3 while being a full size bigger than all of them.

That’s the pitch in a nutshell. A proper mid-size car squaring up to compact SUVs, with tech the German brands reserve for their flagships. There’s also a range extender version claiming 1,000 km that might be the most interesting thing here for Irish drivers, but more on that shortly.

Ferrari fingerprints all over it

Design is the story XPeng leads with, and having seen the L03 in Munich, I get why. This doesn’t look like a car built to a budget. The fastback roofline gives it a proper SUV coupe stance, and the front end is dominated by what XPeng calls Starship headlights, a light bar built from more than 400 LEDs. Park it beside an ID.4 and there’s no contest on kerb appeal, though chatting to others at the launch, not everyone agreed, so file that under personal taste.

That Ferrari lineage does the heavy lifting here. Lopez spent eight years shaping Ferrari exteriors before XPeng hired him, and he also led interior design at Lamborghini, so both sides of the glass have supercar fingerprints on them.

The slippery shape isn’t just for show either. The L03 has a drag coefficient of 0.228, which XPeng got to with active grille shutters, frameless mirrors with integrated cameras, carefully placed air ducts and low rolling resistance tyres. The short version is that a slipperier car spends less battery fighting the air, so more of that quoted range survives contact with a motorway.

It comes in five colours plus a black special edition, though the exact palette varies by country. Two of the colours are new to XPeng entirely, a rock grey and the phantom purple my studio car wore. The purple is the one I’d point you at; it shifts constantly under light and photographs far better than purple has any right to.

Versions and Irish availability

The L03 is expected in Ireland from September 2026, and XPeng already has a proper foothold here with five dealers, three in Dublin and two in Cork. That matters more than it sounds for a brand plenty of Irish buyers are still getting to know; you can actually go and sit in one without a ferry being involved.

The L03 arrives in four flavours:

  • Standard range, 445 km WLTP
  • Long range, 520 km WLTP
  • Performance AWD, 440 km WLTP
  • Ultra, available on long range and performance only

The play here is simple enough. This is a 4.6 metre car, a proper mid-size SUV, going after compact SUVs like the ID.4, Elroq and Atto 3. XPeng made that comparison itself in the briefing, so it’s inviting the fight.

Range, batteries and charging

The numbers here are solid rather than showy. Depending on the version you’ll get a 58.3 or 71.2 kWh LFP battery, good for 445 to 520 km WLTP, and every grade gets a heat pump as standard. That last bit matters more than it sounds; it’s the difference between winter range dipping and winter range falling off a cliff, and plenty of rivals still charge extra for one.

Charging is where the L03 punches above its class. It’ll pull up to 236 kW from a DC charger, taking the battery from 10 to 80 per cent in 20 minutes. In real terms, that’s a coffee and a toilet stop on the Dublin to Galway run, not a rearranged afternoon. AC charging at home tops out at the usual 11 kW.

The 1,000 km range extender

Alongside the pure electric models, XPeng will offer the L03 as a PowerX EREV, an electric car with a petrol generator on board. You get 210 km of proper electric range, and when the battery runs low a small petrol engine fed by a 42 litre tank kicks in to charge it back up. The engine never drives the wheels, not once, it’s purely a generator. Combined, XPeng claims 1,000 km of range.

This is not the hybrid you already know. In a BYD or a Toyota the petrol engine takes turns driving the wheels. In a Nissan e-Power the engine only generates electricity, but the battery is tiny and you can’t plug it in. The L03 PowerX is an EV first, with 210 km of plug-in range covering most people’s week, and the petrol bit exists purely for the days you’d otherwise be planning your life around chargers.

For Ireland, this thing writes its own argument. Rural drivers with long runs and thin charging coverage, and the huge chunk of the country with no driveway to charge on, are exactly who EV sales have stalled with. A car that does the school run and commute on cheap electricity but crosses the country without a single charging stop is the answer to the question those buyers keep asking. For now though, XPeng has only confirmed the PowerX for Italy, Spain, Portugal and “some other countries”. Norway is explicitly not getting it due to the country’s excellent infrastructure.

Useful as it is, the extender undermines one of the key selling points of an EV for me. I don’t want to go to a petrol station if I have an EV, and to top up the extender, you’ll have to do exactly that. I get the logic behind it, but having an EV with fuel emissions feels like a step in the wrong direction.

The tech, and what Ireland actually gets

One thing that surprised me is that this Chinese car is fully integrated with Google, and China and Google traditionally don’t play nice together. Google Maps runs natively on the big screen, not mirrored from your phone, no cable, no Android Auto handshake, it’s just there when you get in, with Google Play alongside it for apps. Android Auto is still fully supported if you want your phone running the show, but the point is you won’t need it. XPeng has done this with an integrated Google SDK rather than handing the whole dashboard over to Google the way Volvo does, so the car’s own software stays in charge.

That software lives on a 15.6 inch 2.5K central screen, backed by an 8.8 inch driver display and a huge 26.8 inch head-up display projected onto the windscreen. European cars get the driver display as standard, which explains why some photos online show a bare dash; that’s the Chinese spec, where it’s optional. There’s an AI voice assistant handling most controls, though I couldn’t get this to work. Full disclosure, we were told the software is not yet final, so here’s to a review car coming my way around launch time.

Then there’s the Ultra grade, the halo of the range. Three of XPeng’s own Turing chips power what it calls VLA 2.0, a vision-based autonomous driving system that promises point-to-point navigation and a party trick where you drag a line on the parking camera and the car parks itself along it. I doubt that will come to Ireland, but arguably it would be a silly investment.

Silly, because none of that autonomous capability works in Ireland at launch. The rollout starts in Germany and France in 2027, and Ireland and the UK don’t have a date at all. Buy an Ultra here and you’re paying for hardware that sits waiting on regulators. XPeng is upfront that the hardware is ready and the software will come, but nobody can tell you when “will” becomes “does”.

Being realistic about it, given Ireland is currently considering banning electric scooters and making life difficult for drone deliveries, it feels autonomous driving is some way away.

The safety kit is live everywhere though, 17 active safety features including blowout stability control and a driver incapacitation system that detects an unresponsive driver, pulls the car over and calls emergency services. Some of those safety features depend on the autonomous systems arriving here, mind.

What it’s like to sit in

Again, I haven’t driven the L03, so treat this as first impressions from the passenger seat rather than a verdict. But I spent proper time in the car, and the thing that stuck with me is how comfortable it is in both rows. Plenty of SUV coupes sacrifice the back seats to that sloping roofline; this one hasn’t, and I say that as a big lad who tested it. There’s geansaí loads of leg room in the back, partly down to the lack of a gearbox bump, so no more calling shotgun.

Honestly, you’d be as happy being driven in the L03 as driving it.

The front seats are heated, ventilated and massaging as standard, which is spec you’d pay four figures to option on a German badge. It all feels modern and premium in there, and nothing I touched gave the game away that this is meant to be the accessible end of the range.

The practical stuff is well thought out too. It’s the first XPeng with 40/20/40 split rear seats, the boot holds 367 litres with another 89 in the frunk, and it’ll tow 1,500 kg. My favourite touches are the X-Mag magnetic mounting points in the roof and a dedicated GoPro mount on the dash; someone at XPeng clearly makes content on the move.

I feel I would have gotten so much more from driving this car, but for now, that’s your lot.

The Goosed verdict

I went to Munich expecting another decent Chinese EV, and I left thinking the L03 might be the most convincing “why would you pick the German option?” argument yet made. The design is the real thing, not a knock-off of the real thing, the cabin is a lovely place to sit, and the spec sheet reads like a car from a segment or two above.

I’m not sold on the extender and plenty of smarts in the Ultra are locked behind countries catching up. But even the standard car is offering an awful lot, and that’s what will turn heads. There are plenty of Chinese brands making better smartphones than the one in your pocket. The XPeng L03 is the automotive extension of that, assuming it drives well when I get to test it.

The XPeng L03 is expected in Ireland from September 2026, available through XPeng’s five Irish dealers, three in Dublin and two in Cork. Pricing and full availability to follow.

Revolut becomes Revolut Bank to build consumer confidence

Marty
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Revolut becomes Revolut Bank to build consumer confidence

Revolut is now Revolut Bank in Ireland. The neobank announced the repositioning today, with the new name rolling out across the app, app stores and all marketing materials. Ireland is the pilot market for the change, and it marks the first time Revolut has tweaked its name since launching.

Revolut Bank has more than 3.4 million customers in Ireland, roughly 80% of the country’s adult population, and has operated as a fully licensed European bank since 2022. Nothing changes for customers today. Accounts, cards and everyday banking in the app all stay exactly as they are, and deposits remain protected up to €100,000 under the European Deposit Guarantee Scheme, the same cover you get with Ireland’s traditional banks.

So this is a name change rather than a new offering. It’s an effort by Revolut to cement itself as a proper bank in the eyes of Irish customers, though having asked about mortgages, I can tell you there’s movement on that front too. More on that shortly.

Why Revolut is changing its name

The rebrand exists to kill off one lingering doubt. Plenty of people still don’t think of Revolut as a real bank, even though it has been one for years.

Since 2022, Revolut has operated as a fully licensed bank across Europe, including Ireland, through its Lithuanian banking licence. Your money carries the same protections it would in any of the traditional banks. Despite that, plenty of consumers remained reluctant to make one of the big transitions in personal finance, moving their salary into Revolut.

Calling itself Revolut Bank is about as on the nose as branding gets, but that’s the point. The company clearly hopes it removes those lingering concerns which, anecdotally, I’ve seen slowly evaporating in Ireland anyway. When AIB announced its new €6 monthly current account fee, kicking in this month, online chatter ramped up, with plenty of customers saying they’d close their AIB accounts and move to Revolut.

It’s not a move without merit. That money could go towards one of Revolut’s paid plans instead, and if you actually use the bundled app subscriptions that come with them, the plan can effectively pay for itself. Even sticking with the free tier gets you enough flexibility and service that the traditional banks are becoming a tough sell.

What about Revolut mortgages in Ireland?

Not yet, but they’re on the way. When I asked Revolut about mortgages, a spokesperson told me, “Using the strong momentum and the opportunity presented in the Lithuanian market, we are refining our mortgage product there before rolling it out elsewhere, including Ireland.”

To be honest, I think mortgages are the next big barrier to full adoption. People are more willing than ever to move their salary into Revolut, but if you’re planning to buy a home in the near future, you still need a traditional bank for now. The legacy banks know it too. AIB waives that new €6 monthly fee entirely for customers paying their mortgage from an AIB current account, which tells you exactly which customers it’s trying to keep.

The shift to Revolut Bank is a simple yet clever attempt to overcome one of the last fundamental concerns Irish customers have about switching to a neobank. With modern banking experiences and savings rates of up to 2.50% AER, Revolut Bank is turning up the heat on what has grown to be a stagnant financial market. Whether a new name alone shifts consumer sentiment remains to be seen, given so little else is changing. That said, with mortgages on the horizon, the pressure on the traditional banks is only going one way.

The Revolut Bank rebrand takes effect in Ireland from today, with full details on the Revolut Bank Ireland website.

Kingdom Come Deliverance cologne review: brilliantly barmy, and genuinely lovely

Marty
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Kingdom Come Deliverance cologne review: brilliantly barmy, and genuinely lovely

I get offered a lot of stuff to review. Hazard of the job. Most weeks that means the usual run of phones, gadgets and gear, but every so often something properly random lands in the inbox, and this was one of those weeks. Someone reached out about a cologne tied to Kingdom Come Deliverance, and that was a yes before I’d even finished reading the email. Find out the brand behind it is called Kintsugi and I was doubly sold.

For anyone landing here without the context, the Kintsugi Perfumes Kingdom Come eau de parfum is a genuine collaboration between developer Warhorse Studios and the Czech fragrance house Kintsugi Perfumes. It comes in a 50ml bottle priced at €155.99, and because it currently only ships within the EU, Irish buyers are sorted while UK fans are left watching from across the water. Kintsugi position all their scents as gender neutral, and this one pulls its notes straight from Henry’s journey through Bohemia, apple and herbs up top, honey and sage through the middle, leather and incense underneath.

I’m no cologne expert, I’ll say that upfront, but I know what I like, and I like this a lot. More on the smell, the price, and the one thing that actually worries me about owning it, shortly.

What does the Kingdom Come cologne actually smell like

It opens with the strong alcohol hit you’d expect from any spray, and that clears within a minute or two, leaving behind a fruity, smoky sort of scent that doesn’t smell like anything else I own. Kintsugi call it gender neutral, and fair play to them for saying so, but if this were a candle in my house we’d be calling it a “mandle” without a second thought. There’s a tobacco, Mad Men sort of energy running through it. The official notes back that up too, apple, lavender and mint at the top, chamomile, rose, elderflower, honey and sage through the heart, olibanum, leather, papyrus and birch holding it all down at the base. On skin, it reads exactly the way that ingredient list sounds, which is more than I can say for most fragrances I’ve tried on.

I can only assume here the idea was to create a scent that lands you in medieval times without a bang of plague.

Is €155.99 worth it for a gaming tie-in fragrance

Compared to what you’d pay for a proper premium fragrance, honestly, I suppose it depends. I’d been in the market for a cologne anyway and had been trying the usual Tom Ford style options in Brown Thomas, baffled by the price every time. A Tom Ford would set you back €300 – double the price of this – at €155.99. So this isn’t cheap either, but it’s not a bad ask for something that smells this good and this specifically odd. If you’re not sure you’ll get on with it, Kintsugi also sell a 2ml tester for €8, which is the smarter starting point for most people rather than committing to the full bottle blind.

Here’s the thing that actually gets me though, and it’s not the price. This looks like a limited run, and once mine is gone, I don’t expect I’ll be able to replace it. As a reviewer, that’s the gut tell that interests me more than what I paid.

Can you actually buy the Kingdom Come cologne in Ireland

Yes, and that’s not something every Kingdom Come fan can currently say. The eau de parfum ships EU-wide for now, which covers Ireland without any bother, while UK buyers are locked out until Warhorse and Kintsugi sort out shipping outside the EU. Even though it does look like the Kintsugi team needed reminding as “part of EU” sits beside Ireland in the drop down menu of the shopping options. If you’re ordering from Ireland, the official Kintsugi Kingdom Come store page is the place to go, and the €8 tester is there too if you want to dip a toe in first.

Feel free to try a batch of testers and save €33 off your next full scent purchase.

The Goosed verdict

As a random piece of marketing or a gaming accessory, this is brilliantly barmy, and I mean that as a genuine compliment. I wasn’t expecting to reach for it as often as I have, but I like it, a lot, and I’m now more precious about running out of a game tie-in cologne than I am about the price I paid for it. If you’re a Kingdom Come fan with €155.99 spare, or just curious enough to try the €8 tester first, it’s worth a go, and Ireland is one of the easier places in Europe to actually get your hands on it. It’s available now through Kintsugi’s Kingdom Come collection, priced at €155.99 for the full 50ml bottle.

Eufy E15 review: the wire-free robot lawnmower minding two gardens so I don’t have to

Marty
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Eufy E15 review: the wire-free robot lawnmower minding two gardens so I don’t have to

I’ve been eager to test drive some robot lawnmowers for some time, and just like waiting for a bus, two came along at the same time. To kick off Goosed.ie’s lawnmower review season is the Eufy E15. I’ve installed this where it looks after two gardens. Previously, two gardens which were constantly overgrown – my Mum’s house.

They’d get cut once every couple of weeks if they were lucky, and now they’re being topped every single day while I look on from afar. That change alone has pretty much everybody in the family bamboozled by the little thing trundling around outside, left asking how did we ever live without it.

The Eufy E15 is a robot lawn mower that navigates using on-board cameras and AI vision rather than the boundary wires most robot mowers have traditionally needed. It covers lawns up to 800 square metres, handles multiple zones, adjusts its cutting height from the app, and costs €1,200 in Ireland at the likes of Amazon.ie. That’s not cheap, but for that money you skip the wire installation entirely, and that turns out to matter more than I expected.

I’ve been running it through an Irish summer heatwave, so there are caveats I’ll get to, including one mistake that was entirely my own fault. But the short version is that this is one of the most quietly useful bits of technology I’ve tested in a long time.

No boundary wires changes what a robot lawnmower can do

The E15 runs on what Eufy calls AI vision, and it’s actually quite good. Instead of detecting a wire buried around the edge of your lawn, it uses cameras and smart algorithms to see where the grass ends and the flowerbed, footpath or fence begins. The obvious upside is that you don’t have to install any boundary wires, which is the fiddly, back-breaking part of traditional robot mower ownership.

The less obvious upside is that it expands what the mower can cover. Because there’s no wire dictating a single enclosed area, you can send it out to completely different parts of your garden including through transit areas. We have two separate gardens, and the E15 handles both. You map a pathway between garden one and garden two in the app, the mower remembers it, and from then on it just commutes between the two on its own. If you have a big garden, or two separate ones like us, this is a really clever way of bridging that gap, and it’s all down to the fact that it navigates with cameras instead of wires.

Alan, the Eufy E15, will detect no go areas like this concrete water access point. Image: Marty Meany

There is a downside, though only a small one. Because the whole system depends on cameras, the mower is limited to daylight hours. In summer that’s no bother at all, you have a big long window and mine happily works away between 6am and 8pm, deciding for itself when to run. In winter that window shrinks considerably. A wire-guided mower doesn’t care whether it’s bright out. This one does.

If the mower gets lost in the top garden, it can also be an issue as it’s likely going to be out of WiFi range. More of an issue if you’re not around to correct it in the evening but ultimately, I don’t expect my mother to drag the Eufy E15, which we’ve affectionately named Alan after Alan Titchmarsh, back to his dock.

Setting up the Eufy E15

I took this thing out of the box and it was mapping within ten minutes. That’s not an exaggeration. You place the charging station in a corner of the garden, turn the machine on, it does a quick mapping run of your entire lawn, and it learns. Honestly, the hardest part of the whole setup is sorting out power, because the mower itself is really clever and really easy to get going.

On power, the E15 comes with a lovely long, thin cable that gives you decent flexibility on where the station can live. Ideally you want an outdoor IP68 or IP69 rated socket to plug it into. Being totally transparent, I haven’t done that yet. I bought the proper IP-rated socket but ran out of time to install it, so it’s currently running off a weather-rated extension into a waterproof box. Not the permanent solution, but it’s been running fine on it, and that’s the important thing.

The docking station that Alan calls home. Image: Marty Meany

Two gripes from setup. The ground pegs that anchor the station are plastic and pretty crappy. Our earth is quite stony, and one peg broke going in. In fairness, I was driving them with a battery-powered drill, which was probably too much for them, and the rest went in fine. The second issue was the 5cm step between our two gardens, which is too high for the mower to climb on its own. I lobbed a cheap ramp in from AliExpress, and even that wasn’t enough at first because the wheels slipped on the way up. Some Gorilla spray glue and a bit of felt on the ramp sorted it, and now it flies up and down without a bother.

This final step was critical to the two gardens being automated as this now meant Alan could venture out daily, unaided, and cut all grass on the property.

Daily topping instead of weekly cutting

This is one of those moments where technology challenges your mental model of how a job should be done. With a traditional lawnmower, you cut the grass once a week or whenever it starts looking shaggy. You’re taking off a lot of grass each time, maybe halving the length of every blade, hauling the box off the back and emptying it into the compost over and over.

A robot lawnmower works completely differently. It runs every day and constantly tops the grass, taking maybe ten percent (or even less) off instead of doing a big dramatic cut once a week. There’s no collection box because the clippings are so fine they just disappear back into the lawn which ultimately feeds it too. It also means the machine is far less likely to clog up, including in wet weather, because it’s never trying to chew through long grass.

One small thing I’ve noticed and quite enjoy is the lawn lines. Because the mower cuts in such a regimented, pre-programmed pattern, you get lovely straight lines across the grass that make it look like you put in far more effort than you actually did, which in my case was none.

The blades reflect that approach. This isn’t a traditional mower deck. Underneath there are four small razor blades, not far off Gilette razors, spinning at high speed, and replacements come in the box. Because the mower is always maintaining rather than hacking, it’s not hard on them at all.

One catch applies to robot mowers in general. You still need a regular lawnmower to start the process, because the grass has to come down to the height you want maintained before the robot takes over. That’s probably the biggest hiccup in the whole setup.

I’ll also own my one big mistake. We’re in the middle of a heatwave and I had the cutting height set way too low, so a good chunk of the lawn got scorched. Longer grass protects the roots and drought conditions. That’s not the mower’s fault. The grass gets a kind recovery period now while I learn how to actually look after a lawn, because this is my first year genuinely trying.

The result of this learning is the mower currently runs less frequently and at a higher cut.

The Eufy app and features

The Eufy app is fairly good. You can control schedules, manually kick off a session for one lawn or the other, or just leave it running its daily routine. Cutting height is adjustable remotely from 20mm up to 75mm, which is more useful than it sounds. If I’m away on holidays and see a hot spell coming, I can raise the height in the app so the grass holds more moisture. In hindsight, that’s exactly what I should have been doing before the heatwave.

There’s anti-theft built in too, so the mower should alarm if somebody lifts it. In my testing I couldn’t actually get that to work. It may have been down to Wi-Fi signal in the garden, or the fact that I never activated the GSM unit that’s also tucked inside, but either way it didn’t trigger for me. There are child protection measures as well, letting you lock the keypad on the mower itself so small hands can’t set it off.

What the Eufy E15 struggles with

No robot mower is perfect around obstacles, and this one is no different. It struggles to get tight to the base of things like a washing line pole, and certain obstacles will leave a little collar of longer grass for you to tidy occasionally. On lawn edges it’s better than I expected. Where the grass meets a footpath it can get right onto the margin, and you can adjust how wide a margin you deem acceptable in the app.

The feature I’d really like is predictive control. If there’s a heatwave coming in two weeks, I want the mower to stop cutting short on its own. For now, that’s a job I have to manage manually by raising the height when the forecast turns, but it feels like an obvious software update waiting to happen.

You might want to amend the edge allowances in the app to ensure a tight trim. Image: Marty Meany

A bit of an unknown for now is wet weather. I’ve seen Alan stop cutting in the rain, returning to his dock and waiting it out for a few hours before coming back to work. But I’ve yet to see him work with a few days of solid rain. Or after a few days of sitting cutting out in the winter and coming back to cut longer, slightly higher grass. That is an unknown for now but I will update this review in due course.

The Goosed verdict

The Eufy E15 has taken two constantly overgrown gardens and turned them into lawns that are quietly maintained every single day, and the difference in just knowing that job is handled is huge. It’s the same trick a robot vacuum pulls. It doesn’t completely eliminate the job, but it stays on top of the vast majority of it, and that is a really valuable thing to have in your life. Robot lawn mowers are clearly growing in popularity in Ireland, and having lived with one for a while now, I completely get it.

It’s been left unattended for days at a time and just keeps going about its business. Setup took minutes, the app is genuinely useful, and the wire-free AI vision means it can do things, like serving two separate gardens, that wired mowers simply can’t without a lot of installation pain. The daylight-only limitation is real and worth knowing about before winter, and you’ll still need a regular mower for the very first cut. Neither changes my mind.

If you have a big garden, an awkward garden, or two of them, this is the cleverest way I’ve seen to hand the whole job over. The Eufy E15 costs €1,200 in Ireland and is available from Eufy and Amazon.ie, Irish retailers like DID as well as directly from Eufy.

Airlines beginning to clamp down on mid-flight power bank usage

Marty
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Airlines beginning to clamp down on mid-flight power bank usage

Over the past few weeks, I’ve flown Ryanair, Aer Lingus and Lufthansa. All three providers have updated its pre-flight safety briefing. No longer can you store your power bank in the overhead locker. In fact some go further now stating you can’t use a power bank in flight at all. This is a specific problem for anyone flying Ryanair given none of their aircraft offer charging.

So what are the new rules, and why does that mean you should make sure your phone is fully charged before you take off?

What each airline actually allows now

Ryanair keeps to two power banks per passenger, none of them in the overhead locker, none of them over 100 watt-hours, and no recharging the power bank itself once you’re on board. What it still permits, per Ryanair’s own permitted items guidance, is using the power bank to charge your phone or tablet during the flight, aside from taxi, take-off and landing.

Aer Lingus allows the same two power banks in cabin baggage, again nowhere near the overhead locker, but draws the line further back. No charging a device from the power bank at any point in the flight, and no charging the power bank itself either.

Lufthansa Group, which covers Lufthansa itself along with Swiss, Austrian Airlines and Brussels Airlines, applies the strictest version of the three, confirmed on its own regulatory notice. Same two power bank limit, same overhead locker ban, and the same blanket ban on using or charging a power bank in the air that Aer Lingus has, in place since the middle of January.

The overhead locker point is the one that caught me out on the Aer Lingus leg, in Dusseldorf. I had to jump up and grab my bag, placing it under the seat in front of me.

The real problem isn’t Ryanair, it’s the airlines with no power at all

Thinking Ryanair would also ban usage outright, my first assumption was that Ryanair passengers would come off worst here, since none of Ryanair’s 737s have seat power to fall back on. Turns out Ryanair is the one airline of the three that still lets you use a power bank in flight, so its passengers are no worse off than before. It’s Aer Lingus and Lufthansa’s short-haul fleets, the ones running the same power-free A320 family jets as everyone else, that have banned power bank use on top of already having no seat power.

That’s where it gets personal for me. I travel with a ROG Ally, and it wouldn’t get through much more than an hour and a half of gaming without needing to be plugged in. On a Ryanair flight I can still top it up from a power bank mid-flight, even though the seat itself offers nothing. On a short-haul Aer Lingus or Lufthansa flight, with the exact same lack of seat power, that option is gone entirely. Once the battery’s spent, it’s spent, whatever’s in your bag. It’s a first world problem, I know that. But an airline banning the one workaround for a gap it has never bothered to fix is a bit rich.

This didn’t come from any one airline on its own

It’s part of a new global standard from the International Civil Aviation Organisation that came into force in March 2026, though there’s no single rule forcing every airline to implement it the same way, which is exactly why Ryanair’s version differs from the other two.

The Samsung Galaxy Note7 got itself banned from planes entirely back in 2016, ten years ago now, because its battery had a habit of catching fire. That was the moment the aviation industry got a very public, very embarrassing preview of exactly this risk, and it’s taken a decade, a pile of near misses, and at least one aircraft written off on the ground for a coordinated set of rules to turn up. Being totally transparent, I’m not annoyed the rules exist. I’m annoyed it took this long, and that none of the three have paired the ban with any commitment to add seat power where it’s missing.

What to actually do about it before you fly

Charge everything before you get to the gate, phone, tablet, handheld console, whatever you’re bringing, and know your power bank’s watt-hour rating before you pack it.

If you’re flying Ryanair, that charge stretches further than you’d think, since power bank use is still allowed once you’re airborne. If you’re flying Aer Lingus or Lufthansa short-haul, treat whatever charge you board with as the only charge you’re getting for the whole flight. Aer Lingus’s own guidance, on its restricted items page, allows power banks up to 100 watt-hours without any advance notice, with 100 to 160 watt-hours needing 48 hours’ notice beforehand, and Lufthansa and Ryanair both apply broadly the same thresholds.

Ireland doesn’t need an e-scooter ban, it needs enforcement

Marty
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Ireland doesn’t need an e-scooter ban, it needs enforcement

I ride an electric scooter round Dublin city centre most days, and lately it’s left me properly uneasy. Teenagers tearing along footpaths and cycle lanes on scooters far more powerful than the law allows, no helmets, no lights, no sense that anything could go wrong. I’ve taken to calling it blue sky scooter usage, riding like the sun will always be shining and the road will always be clear.

Six children have been admitted to intensive care at Temple Street with traumatic brain injuries in the past fortnight alone, four of them on life support. Doctors there are calling it an epidemic and want e-scooters banned outright. And I do get it. More than 400 children attended Children’s Health Ireland emergency departments with e-scooter injuries in 2025 alone, and Gardaí in Kilkenny have already written to local schools warning that any under 16 caught on one will have it seized with actions following with Tusla.

Here’s the thing though. Banning e-scooters outright won’t fix this, because Ireland already tried the do-nothing version of a ban and it’s exactly how we got here. So what actually needs to change? Enforcement, mostly, along with a couple of decisions successive governments have been too afraid to make. Let me explain why.

How Ireland’s e-scooter mess began

Back when Shane Ross was minister for transport, e-scooters sat in a legal grey area for years while he did nothing about it. The default stance was that electric scooters were mechanically propelled vehicles, uninsurable and thus by default illegal. As Ross stood by, the Irish market was flooded with electric scooters that met a transport demand the country failed to sort out.

His own government colleagues eventually turned on him over it, accusing him of treating the whole issue with total disdain. By the time the law actually caught up in 2024, the horse had bolted. The market was already flooded with scooters that met no regulation whatsoever, and the passive approach up to that point was essentially they’re illegal so no one should be using them. That was never going to work, and it didn’t.

Why the e-scooter speed limit is part of the problem

Here’s a direct answer before I get into the personal stuff. The 20km/h cap on legal e-scooters is a big part of why so many riders go looking for something faster, not because they’re all speed demons but because 20km/h genuinely isn’t quick enough to compete with the alternatives.

my own Pure electric scooter. 100% road legal.

I have a dog in this fight. My own scooter meets every legal requirement. It’s capped at 20km/h, rated at 400 watts, and weighs nowhere near the 25kg limit. And I get overtaken constantly. Elderly riders on ebikes cruise past me without breaking a sweat. Regular cyclists on Dublin Bikes leave me for dust. That’s because ebikes get a 25km/h limit and pedal bikes have no cap at all, so my perfectly legal scooter ends up the slowest thing in the cycle lane. I’m actually about to swap my commute over to an ebike for exactly that reason, alongside the comfort.

But surely, the slowest of all the vehicles being ridden within the rules shouldn’t be facing an outright ban? I don’t want to over simplify here but I’ve never seen a call for an outright ban on cars despite skyrocketing road fatalities every year.

My unpopular opinion is that the legal limit should move to 25km/h to match ebikes, not to please anyone chasing speed but to remove the reason people go shopping for something illegal in the first place. It’s unpopular to say, and surely unpopular for anyone in goverment to back. But a radical overhaul of the electric scooter landscape is needed.

The loophole letting illegal e-scooters onto the road

Here’s the second direct answer. Shops can legally sell you a scooter capable of far more than the law allows, as long as it’s marketed for private usage on private property, and once it’s sitting in someone’s shed there’s nothing stopping it turning up on a public road the next morning. I’ve no doubt they are not the exact conversations happening on the shop floor. Where you use it will likely never come up versus commute distance.

I reached out to the Garda Press Office for comment on seizure figures and how they’re engaging with riders, and I’m still waiting to hear back. In the meantime, the Department of Justice’s own numbers tell a decent chunk of the story. Gardaí seized 817 e-scooters in 2025 alone, a jump of 150 per cent on the year before, with a further 352 seized in just the first two months of 2026. Nearly 1,700 fixed charge notices have gone out since the law came into force. I’ve seen mobile Garda speed dynos out testing riders directly too, but the streets are still awash with scooters that will comfortably do 60km/h or more.

My lived observation is that it’s often commuters who’ve purchased a high powered scooter with little knowledge of the law that ends up being in the statisics for seizures. Not the teens who have the cheek to run away from Gardai.

The excuse I keep hearing is that these overpowered scooters are all being bought by farmers for use on private land. I’ve heard that said with a straight face more than once, and it doesn’t stack up. Supply needs to be tightened at the point of sale, because you can’t enforce your way out of a market that’s flooded with machines the law was never meant to allow.

What real e-scooter enforcement actually needs

Fair play to Gardai in Kilkenny as it’s one of the few places doing something concrete. Gardaí there have already written to local schools warning parents that under 16s caught on an e-scooter will have it seized. They recently seized an e-scooter from a child under 16 riding it in public, and confirmed the child will receive a Juvenile Liaison Officer caution while Tusla contacts the parents directly.

That’s a start, but Gardaí also need the training and legal tools to safely stop something moving on two wheels, and right now that’s genuinely difficult.

There’s a political will problem sitting underneath all of this too. TDs were told at an Oireachtas committee earlier this year that the Government is moving in the wrong direction on road safety reform, even as ministers publicly discuss tightening the rules. If licensing helps close that gap, I’m in favour of it. An ID number linked to an individual owner, similar to how cars work, so that if a scooter is involved in a collision or ridden dangerously, someone can actually be traced and held to account. Right now it’s largely lawless, and that has to change.

Helmets, education and getting e-scooter safety right

Parents and riders both need proper education here. Some of these machines are more powerful than a Vespa, and treating them like toys is exactly how children end up on ones they were never meant to be near.

The Government has been weighing up mandatory helmets and high visibility gear since earlier this year, and I understand the instinct, but blanket mandatory helmet laws elsewhere have a track record of pushing people off two wheels altogether rather than making them safer, so I would rather see it done properly than done fast. That said, I believe helmets should be worn. If people are going to wear a helmet, it needs to be rated for the speeds e-scooters can actually reach, not just whatever was lying around the house. I’m upgrading my own gear for exactly that reason.

The Goosed verdict

My personal opinion is that the Government has a broad legacy of inaction as policy. It’s the safest thing to do to ensure the polls don’t swing. And it has to stop, but with some logic.

An outright ban would punish the riders who bought a legal, compliant scooter to get to work and did everything right, while doing very little to touch the overpowered machines already sitting in people’s sheds.

Fix the speed limit so it isn’t slower than a bicycle, close the loophole that lets shops sell scooters the law doesn’t allow, give Gardaí the tools and backing to enforce what already exists, and educate riders and parents properly. Do that, and Ireland might finally get an e-scooter policy that matches how people actually use them. You can check whether your own scooter is legal on the RSA’s official e-scooter page, and it’s worth doing before you’re the one being stopped.

What I can guarentee you is that doing nothing, has not worked in the past and surprisingly won’t do anything going forward.

Disclaimer: The featured image for this article was created using AI.

The Meta glasses indicator light means nothing for privacy

Marty
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The Meta glasses indicator light means nothing for privacy

Meta smart glasses, whether they carry the Ray-Ban badge or not, are facing a major trust and branding crisis. Sentiment towards glasses with cameras built in has shifted from mild distrust to a growing belief that they are utterly creepy. That shift is not happening because of the technology itself. It is happening because of how people are using it, and how easily the one privacy feature Meta built into the hardware can be defeated.

The YouTuber that got me thinking

I was recently watching a YouTuber called Spanian. He landed on my autoplay and I had never seen nor heard of the guy before, which is maybe shocking given he has over a million subscribers. Because I used to live in the Netherlands, his Amsterdam travel vlog stayed on in the background.

To be honest, he wasn’t my cup of tea. But then he started talking about his Meta glasses and how much he loves them. They unlocked shooting content he would normally miss. He talked about visiting Macau and not being able to film inside casinos, and how much he would love to go back with his Meta glasses on. In Amsterdam, he wore them liberally in coffeeshops, places where filming is usually forbidden or at the very least deeply frowned upon. In fairness to him, he didn’t film in the Red Light District. Still, I was left with one massive question. Does he have the indicator light blocked?

In one coffeeshop, a staff member helped him pick out some weed, offered him tea and showed him where to sit. He filmed all of it on his glasses, glancing around while nobody seemed to take the slightest notice. That raised my suspicions, though I should be clear that suspicions are all they are in Spanian’s case. The simpler explanation might just be that most people still have no idea what that little white light means, or that there’s a camera sitting on his face at all. I mean given where they are, it would make sense they’re not totally aware of what’s going on. Honestly, I’m not sure which explanation is worse.

The indicator light is being modded into oblivion

There is no shortage of cases where Meta glasses have unquestionably been modified to kill the indicator light. Meta’s position has always been that the capture LED pulses whenever the glasses record, and the software refuses to record at all if it detects the light being covered. Stick a bit of black tape over it and the camera locks you out until it’s cleared. Tampering with any of this breaches Meta’s terms of service, and the company says it aggressively targets anyone advertising tampering tools, removing thousands of violating ads and Marketplace listings while pursuing legal action where appropriate.

That all sounds reassuring until you realise a cottage industry of aftermarket modders has sprung up to make the light useless anyway. Journalist Joanna Stern went undercover on this recently, and the wider reporting on the Ray-Ban Meta LED mod found ads for the service across 30 US states, with one modder claiming eight or nine enquiries in a single day. Just today I saw a TikTok of a Meta glasses owner meeting a modder in a carpark. Glasses handed over, and ten minutes later the indicator light was gone. Not an isolated incident at all.

From what I’ve seen, the mod itself is worryingly simple and takes somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes. The glass housing over the LED gets drilled through, the light itself is destroyed, then resin gets poured in and cured under a UV lamp. The finished job is near impossible to spot from a few feet away. Simple as. Crucially, because the LED circuitry is severed completely rather than just covered, the software never detects a blockage. The camera records away happily, which tells you there was never a hard hardware connection between that light functioning and the camera capturing. The whole privacy feature was a promise, not a mechanism.

Sentiment has shifted, and I say that as a fan

I have a pair of second generation Meta glasses and, as a content creator, they are incredible. They offer genuinely high quality capture in an extremely natural way. I’ve shot some really memorable moments on mine, not least a clip of Rio Ngumoha scoring a last minute winner for Liverpool away at Newcastle last year. Nothing else I own could have caught that moment the way the glasses did.

Anyone who has been to a gig can see why a camera in your sunglasses can be a good thing. It’s a few less phones in your eye line. You can record memories and live in the moment. That’s to be celebrated.

But scrolling through social media recently, I saw Corey Taylor, lead singer of Slipknot, at a signing with a sign up saying no Meta glasses. When metal frontmen are putting up signage about your wearable, the vibe has well and truly turned. Sentiment has shifted, partially because of the poor etiquette of some users and partially because modders have rendered the indicator light near useless as a privacy feature. The public can no longer assume an unlit pair of smart glasses isn’t recording, and that assumption was the entire social contract these things were sold on.

Meta’s real problem is only starting

Meta is facing a real mess here. Sales of the glasses keep climbing, but so too are the scenarios where wearing them will be restricted. Gigs, signings, casinos, changing rooms, coffeeshops. Expect the list to grow. Lawmakers are already circling too, with a bill introduced in Pennsylvania that would make it illegal to sell or record with smart glasses that don’t have a functioning indicator light. Honestly this should be the bare minimum. Once legislation starts, it rarely stops at one state, and Europe tends not to be shy on this front either.

I for one am shocked that Meta didn’t have privacy front and centre of the hardware design, given the company’s stellar history in that department. Read the sarcasm if you like. The fix isn’t complicated to describe, even if it’s harder to engineer. The camera should be physically incapable of recording without the light working. Until that’s true, every pair of Meta glasses in the wild, modded or not, carries the suspicion of the worst ones. And that suspicion, more than any modder in a carpark, is what will kill the product.

But realistically, the damage now might already be done. The thin trust people had in the likes of the indicator light is already gone and now I wonder if it will ever come back. Add to that the fact Meta is not the only glasses manufacturer and the news gets worse. Welcome to the Glasshole 2.0 era.

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