Shared scooters don't last long
oversharing.substack.com
oversharing.substack.com
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
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?
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.