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Comment by rubidium | Hacker News Reader

Even if the scooter craze crashes and burns (either due to regulations, insustainable business model, or lack of sustained customer demand aka here comes winter) it's gotta be helping drive down prices to manufacture and improving electric scooters and bikes technology. Scooter rental isn't super appealing for my use case, but buying one to use for commuting now is much more attainable than even 5 years ago.

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I know a person who works on Bird's freight team, they apparently have been moving 2 full Boeing 747s of scooters (I estimate that to be about 12,000-14,000 based on weight) every day from China, at one point about $150 a pop). I think it's a sustainable model because after being shipped, delivered, and released (estimating about $80 more per scooter), it's ridden until dead every day on average 10 times (1.43mi/ride average, range 15mi average), earning it $10 plus $0.15/min, or ~$23.50/day. It breaks even after 7 rides, and they have at least 20 rides in them before they're toast.

I haven't factored in other parts of the economy, like oversupply, theft, premature damage, and payroll for the employees including chargers, but seeing they're in 100 cities with at least 3 million scooters on the streets being ride. I also based my guesses from https://www.bird.co/blog/birdyearone.

That is amazing.

I had a training class on lean manufacturing about a year ago. The low cost enabled by production-line mentality of scooter production combined with the ad-hoc resource allocation enabled by the app for both riders and chargers makes this so darn efficient it is crazy. Very lean.

> and they have at least 20 rides in them before they're toast.

are you saying the scooters electric part dies after 20 rides?

I think kawfey meant that in a given day, each scooter can be ridden 20 times before the battery is depleted. I don't think this was a description of the lifetime of the battery — just its daily capacity.

Take away at least $5 per day per scooter, paid to the chargers, to take it off the street every night.

now that's interesting

"The owner of this website (www.bird.co) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (BR) from accessing this website."

i understand them not shipping stuff to brazil, but full on block? c'mon. what if i wanted to see this and recommend to a friend that lives in the us?

I see they're using Cloudflare - likely it's a tradeoff for them between banning attackers and alienating legitimate visitors - and they don't do business in Brazil, yet. They block my (US) VPN exit, too.

Scooters and electric bikes are the new hoverboards and segways.

Do your health a favor and buy a regular commuter bike instead.

Or even a regular foot-powered scooter. It will last forever and if/when it wears out it won't be full of e-waste.

Hmm, my daily ride is 8mi / 13km - and I often want to pick up groceries, library books, etc. A scooter (even an electric) is still much less practical for these use cases.

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