
Shared scooters don't last long - rbanffy
https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last-long
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clay_the_ripper
This does not spell doom for these companies to me.

1\. These companies are focusing on growth, not cutting costs. Which is
normal, rational and understandable. They can afford to lose huge amounts of
money with the funding they have and the cost of not expanding as quickly as
possible means automatic failure

2\. Clearly there is a lot of demand for the scooters. So if they can design a
scooter with better durability and lower cost (becomes easier at scale) they
can get the profitability up pretty quickly

3\. There may be other revenue opportunities down the line for the company who
wins the market. Monetize customer data, ads on the scooters, maybe businesses
would pay to have scooter hubs around them etc etc (I don’t know exactly but
it’s not hard to imagine that these companies will find other ways of upping
revenue per ride)

4\. Once there is less competition and more consolidation in the market they
can potentially raise prices, if only slightly

~~~
jaclaz
>So if they can design a scooter with better durability and lower cost
(becomes easier at scale) they can get the profitability up pretty quickly

Only to highlight how this appears like a pure truism: renting cheaper and
longer lasting products (at the same fee/price level) increases profitability
...

The 28/32 days lifetime sounds more than a tad bit "off" by _any_ possible
standard, particularly if the 3.49 trips by 1.63 miles are accurate.

30x3.49x1.63= 171 miles lifespan?

or - maybe easier to evaluate - 30x3.49x18 minutes=1885 minutes or 1885/60= 32
hours lifespan?

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devilshaircut
> In October, The Information reported that Bird was spending $551 per scooter
> with a goal of reducing that cost to $360.

The full article is gated, but I'd be interested to know where that figure
came from. It is possible for a private individual to buy the same scooter tax
and import duty free for the lower of those two prices. I would _hope_ that
multimillion dollar companies like Lime and Bird would be able to secure
better pricing than that.

