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This partnership could also allow Uber driver partners to basically have another source of income - rebalancing the scooter/bike network and helping with charging (ex. someone drives for Uber Eats, drops off a scooter at pickup restaurant to charge). Current Lime freelance chargers are making ~$1400 earnings per month[1] so this could start being substantial and help the growth for both companies

[1] https://www.axios.com/how-lime-is-pitching-its-bike-a-152949...

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That $1400/month number strikes me as dubious. They mention the charger earns $30-50/day. Assuming a standard 22-day work month, $1400 would have to be $63/day. A more realistic number seems to be $40 * 22 days, or $880/month. Which is not a lot of money in the expensive cities Lime is active in.

They were active in at least one Midwest city (Indianapolis) until last week, so $880 might not be a full-time job there, but would be a very nice supplementary income.

I cannot imagine a VC-funded gig-economy company failing to notice that if they can pay people $x in SF, they can probably pay people $0.3x to $0.5x in Indianapolis. [1]

[1] https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/indianapolis-in/sa...

Man... $880 a month to drive around Seattle sounds miserable.

What else can you do in Seattle with absolutely zero skill or qualifications and no willingness to commit that pays that well?

Not a joke question. I'd have loved any fraction of $880 a month when I was in college and was otherwise worth nothing and couldn't get a traditional shitty part time job because I had unpredictable hours due to school.

valet parking or catering

It's common for gig companies to limit payouts, because it lowers the cost of fraud, which is common. A smart charger charges for multiple companies, and could easily hit higher payouts that way.

Huh. Wouldn't charging for multiple companies increase my ability to commit fraud? I steal smaller amounts from each company, and each company having less data makes it harder for them to detect fraud.

Yea it does. But if you fraud multiple companies you're increasing the odds one will detect you.

This is why companies don't rely only on their own data, they do credit checks, and buy data from third parties.

I worked as a charger - made $11k in a month. Only had a month until SF shut them down. I imagine payouts will get compressed as the market matures. Earnings are also highly dependent upon the scooter density of the area you service and the amount of charger competition in that area.

wow - can you ping me b@langonline.com working on something i'd love to chat about

Interested to know how you managed that; a specific technique or someone helping you or some such?

This was all on my own. Being in a central location in a high density environment helps a lot. After that it's just good old fashion operational efficiencies and hustle.

at $20/payout, that would be 550 charged in a month or 18/day. Doesnt it take like 4 hours to charge each one? How much did your electric bill go up?

Average payout was $12 for Lime, $12.27 for Bird over the 905 scooters I charged. These were inflated payouts due to the launch in SF. Electricity usage was surprisingly minimal due to usage being in non-peak hours (late night/early morning). Bird quotes $.20/scooter charging expense. My costs were closer to $.02/scooter.

How are you getting time-based rates in residential SF?

This additional source of income will only last until we fully implement ASR's - Autonomous Scooter Rebalancers.

Just have them self-drive to a charger.

They are going to self-drive everywhere, I suspect. It's much easier to make a scooter or a bicycle autonomous than a car.

There's at least one company around here working on self-delivering bicycles. The idea is that you call one up on your phone and wait by the curb, and the bike will come cruising up to you. When you're done, you just hop off, and the bike cruises to its next renter (or charger) rather than lying around littering the place up.

> It's much easier to make a scooter or a bicycle autonomous than a car.

No it's not. Less stable platform. Exact same issues with obstacle detection and avoiance, path planning and scene understanding with less available power for sensors and compute. Higher relative sensor cost. Fewer closed environments like highways. Added issue of being able to steal them more easily.

None of those factors are of any importance whatsoever next to the key one: less likely to kill people when something goes wrong.

Stealing a GPS-tagged autonomous bike or scooter is also not going to go especially well for whoever tries it.

Exactly, our mistakes are not inherently catastrophic. Stability is actually much harder than navigating.

Yo, I'm with that company doing the AV scooters and bikes, and yes it's much easier to nav than a car, we're looking at two magnitudes easier as far as computing power. We won't do autonomous with riders on-board so we can go slow and be conservative. Sensors are more than two orders of magnitude cheaper, we can use ToF laser rangefinders that are close to mobile phone grade.

Where are you testing?

Then this happens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbouTftw3RY

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