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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

To put this in perspective, there are about 8 parking spaces for every car in the US [0]. A parking lot costs about $5,000 to $50,000 per space, depending on if it’s a gravel lot vs a parking garage. Yet parking lot operators and rental car companies are still able to make a profit.

0: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/david-b-goldstein/does-every-ca...

Edited to remove sarcastic wording.

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That big lot by the abandoned k-mart in Rockford has a lot of spaces but none of them are within walking distance of the restaurant I’m supposed to meet my friends at in Chicago.

In transit planning the walk shed for transit extends from one mile (that seems to be very optimistic high density east coast planning) to a quarter mile (more realistic in California’s cities) away from the station. By that same metric there should be plenty of parking spaces within a quarter mile of where you’re trying to dine. There’s also likely the parking space you have at home, and the space you have at work (assuming that like most Americans your job offers free parking).

That $5-50k is amortized over decades, though.

Bird's scooters cost ~$500, probably make under a buck a ride in profits, and I suspect their average lifetime is well under 500 rides.

Last I heard lime was making $28 over the lifetime of a scooter.

It looks like they are losing money per scooter [0]. I doubt the strong markets make enough to offset the losing ones.

[0] https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last...

$500 is the retail price (that's how much i paid for the xiaomi m365 they used to use). someone estimated that it's ~$300 per scooter, which i find more believable.

they are probably (unit) profitable (or operationally cabable of being so), otherwise, they wouldn't have raised a $300MM series C last year.

We've seen plenty of wildly unprofitable companies make it far past Series C. Lyft is on its 19th round and lost a billion on two billion dollars revenue in 2018.

At least you had to build a two-sided network. Without the driver, there literally is no barrier to entry, which is funny when you think about all the future rideshare "profitability" once you have self-driving cars...

yes, but the unit economics probably pencil out, meaning the direct costs of providing the service (distribution, charging, maintenance, and support) are paid for by the revenue. that’s unit profitability.

but they’re probably losing money in capital costs and overhead (marketing and the like), so overall unprofitable.

lyft was (is) principally both a hedge against uber and a way for VCs that didn’t get into uber (ever or early enough) to make a bet in the space (the top 2-3 companies in a new market usually survive to a decent exit), so profitability wasn’t an important metric for funding (but the probability of surviving to exit very much was).

On sale for US$410 retail right now, including shipping to EU (possibly from EU warehouse) if you choose the Fast-08 warehouse:

https://www.gearbest.com/skateboard/pp_596618.html

Don't use Gearbest. They're incredibly shady, and have terrible customer service. I've never had the issues that I had with gearbest with a vender on Aliexpress. Also Xiaomi even has a store on ali.

Someone discovered shared scooters don't last long, and thus don't make anything even remotely approaching a profit.

https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last...

When a startup is roughly a year old, and its rival just raised $300M, alarm bells should go off in investor's heads, "If both these companies started a year ago, and it only takes $300M to fund the next one, and none of them have IP or even make their own scooter, maybe we shouldn't do this since there are no barriers to entry."

only takes 300M

That seems like quite the barrier to me. Also crazy to think that 1/3 of a billion dollars is considered trivial barrier.

https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/tiger-global-closes-bigg...

If you throw in NEA's new fund, that's five funds where $300M is less than 10% if they did the whole round, and if the economics are great, a bunch of growth equity funds.

It's crazy to me that you'd invest that much without having more data on the unit economics given none of these companies even have an advantage on making the underlying scooter. The more scooters you have and the more market share you have, the faster your bleed money. If the unit economics were great with off the rack scooters, what's to stop Lyft/Uber from adding a scooter option given they already have the demand side of "trying to get somewhere"?

I was looking at the figures in that article and was just horrified at the sheer environmental impact of this whole fiasco.

Have you seen the pictures of what must be tens of thousands of bike share bikes just sitting, unused, likely never to be used, in fields in China?

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversup...

Wow. Those pictures are ridiculous.

Wow. That's incredible. Thanks for sharing!

Also, some of those are probably empty lots in places like NYC or Chicago where they can be better monetized once the land is rezoned, etc.

If people weren't bad actors, I bet you a ride sharing company where you can just get into a car and drive around with it would make big money.

Just charge per minute and allow the owner to track the position continuously.

How do you think rental car companies stay in business? You are still liable for the damage to the car if you blatantly abuse it, and you are still liable for property damage or accidents in states that require insurance and insure the driver.

This is just a car rental for a shorter amount of time. And in D.C. we had something called ZipCar which was pretty close to that.

Is ZipCar no longer in DC? They’re in every state I’ve been to. I assume they’re in all of them.

Ah sorry if it came out that way, it is I that am no longer in D.C.

When I was in the bay area zipcars were consistently driven by some of the worst drivers on the road.

It's like tourists in rental cars but worse, since these people often have never owned a car and drive very infrequently. I know people who never drove until their 30s then got a drivers license just to access zipcars. They're exceptionally bad drivers.

Right but it doesn't matter if they are bad drivers. They are still liable for damages and any accidents they cause. If you get in a wreck/get a ticket in a ZipCar, it is still your insurance that goes up, and points on your license, and you have to pay the ticket.

Which means nothing to the other drivers and pedestrians sharing space with these hazardous nuisances.

Personally I prefer these people use electric scooters than N-thousand-pound >100HP vehicles.

Car2Go? GetAround?

BMW, MB, and Lime already do this in Seattle.

I bet you a ride sharing company where you can just get into a car and drive around with it would make big money.

I used ZipCar when I lived in Chicago and Seattle. Great service. Didn't need to own car in either city because of ZipCar.

https://www.zipcar.com

ZipCar requires you to return the car to its original spot. With these scooter companies, you take it to where you want to go and leave it.

I've never used one of the Bird-type scooters, but I used to commute to the marina in SF on Scoot. It really was the most fantastic way I've never gotten to (and from) work.

Car2Go and ReachNow are two other similar services that let you leave the car in any legal parking spot. You can see available stock on a map just like these scooter/bike share companies.

Already very popular in Berlin, Germany with multiple companies fighting to dominate but the main one is DriveNow. Smartphone app opens the car, drive anywhere, park anywhere, pay as you go.

It works like at charm and since the early 90s in Switzerland[1]

Alas, as a cooperative it's not profit oriented and there are certain restrictions, notably that vehicles are location bound and need to be picked up and returned at fixed stations.

That said, with a bit of planning it releases you from the dirty details of car ownership and this for much, much less money.

There are other ventures in the form as you describe it (private ownership loaned out). But to the best of my knowledge that never caught on.[2] (German and French only)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobility_Carsharing [2] https://sharoo.com/

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