Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the company is asking these teens, during the registration as contractors, if they have permission from their parents to charge all those scooters at home. I can imagine several parents getting angry for excessive increments in the electricity bills every month without having a clue about their children's "business". Of course, many of them will probably find the scooters in the garage in a regular morning walk around the house, but then…

- Do they [the parents] get a percentage of that money to pay for the bills?

- Is it even legal for these independent contractors to use home electricity to charge a 3rd-party business asset?

- Are damages to the house, in case of a fire, covered by their contracts?

- If the scooters are out of battery, how do these companies know where they are?

- Can these teenagers hold the scooters "hostage"?

- Can they charge extra money for dropping the scooters to places with some people can find it more convenient? Say, if I want to find one of them right in front of my house every morning, I would pay one of these teenagers some extra money for the arrangement.

- Are these houses in risk of over-charging their electricity net?

I have so many questions about all this, it seems so weird to me.

Each scooter has about a 300 Watt Hour battery, call it 60% charging efficiency (likely way more efficient than that) and you’re only talking about five cents of electricity per scooter.

Setting homes on fire seems like the highest risk -- there's no way standard domestic insurance is paying out if they know the fire is caused by business activities.

This seems like the biggest risk to me. Charging untold amounts of batteries that have been used/abused in unknown ways in my house while my family sleeps doesn't seem like a great idea.

Seems like a great idea to offload risk if you're Bird though! All those hoverboard battery explosions a year or two ago (and for example the FAA baggage bans that came as a result) really soured the image of chinese battery electronics.

Defining the heuristic now: the scooter market will truly be "mature" once Bird et al start incorporating commercial fire insurance add-ons into their charger programs, kinda like how Uber started providing commercial driver and liability insurance.

The article says that electricity cost for charging scooters is practically nothing. If we believe it or assume that electricity cost is trivial compared to the payment, then I don't see any parent that'll say no to their nearly-adult children making money on the side by such an activity.

At worst they'll ask for compensation.

* The article says that electricity cost for charging scooters is practically nothing.*

The article actually qualifies that for people in large apartment buildings with a "bike room" - so essentially these people are freeloading.

Charging a Bird doesn’t require a ton of electricity, so minus the labor cost, charging a few scooters overnight is essentially free—especially if you live in a large apartment building and can do so in your bike room

If you think about it, the scooter must stop scootering before 100% battery depletion to allow for the location electronics adequate life.

Not really. Trivial to deal with this. GPS, GSM, separate small battery. Done.

Wouldn't most parents be thrilled for their kids to earn money and learn life lessons by working a job they enjoy? Even if it costs them $20 a month?

I'm not sure if it's a requirement, but all of the individuals quoted in the article were over 18.

I don't think they were. To quote the article "“Finding the really hard ones is so awesome,” says Lucas, a young teenage Bird charger in L.A. who didn’t want his last name or his age listed since he technically hunts under his parents’ account."

> since he technically hunts under his parents’ account.

You're right, but that suggests it is a requirement. It's not Bird's fault the kid and his parents are lying about it.

This is why you didn't found a scooter startup.

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