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Comment by cameldrv | Hacker News Reader

This is a weird offering for an individual purchase. Look at the unique features:

1. Non folding stem: Adds durability for a rental, but the super quick fold is a huge part of the appeal of a scooter, because it means you can easily take it with you on the train, put it in the trunk of a car, or store it under your desk. If you didn't care about compactness, you'd probably buy an e-bike.

2. Huge battery: Adds to the cost and weight, which makes it more annoying to carry. Great for a rental where Bird is paying per charge, but very few people need to ride 30 miles between charges, and for those that do, they'd probably rather have an e-bike that is faster and more stable.

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I own a Xiaomi Mi m365 scooter that I use daily for commutes around downtown Denver and while it's lighter than this bird, it is by no means lightweight. It won't fit under a desk. It attracts funny looks if I bring it into a business or restaurant, and locking it up on the street is annoying and time-consuming. Even when it's folded and locked up, people try to steal it.

The Bird One marketing document doesn't really go into detail, but the huge battery and GPS functionality suggests to me that the expected approach for using these scooters is to park them on the street and leave them there. If they borrow the anti-theft functionality that you see in VanMoof bicycles, this scooter makes a lot of sense. You ride it around town. You charge it in your garage. You leave it on the street when you're done with it. If it's stolen you look up its GPS location and the police help you get it back. There's low urgency to charge it. If it breaks, they'll fix it for you. And if you don't have it with you, Bird comps your rental scooter.

That's a lot more compelling of an offering than just a "heavier, faster, longer-range" scooter.

>If it's stolen you look up its GPS location and the police help you get it back.

Do your police do that?

I want to know the answer to to this. Must be a nice place to live.

In the Netherlands the police definitely will not. Vanmoof has their own team to track down bikes and retrieve, but so far this seems more like a marketing stunt than actual service (they have a youtube channel “Van Moof Bike Hunters”).

They do in a lot of cases in Aus.

Not in Adelaide they don't. Never in 25 years of living there have I ever heard a case of the police recovering stolen property. Heard several cases of people find it themselves and recovering it on their own, but not once of the police helping.

My own personal experience was that they noted my report, duly filed some paperwork in their write-only document storage system, and then went back to issuing traffic fines.

Even if they recover your property later, like during a big arrest, you won't get it back. It will sit in evidence, for years, then it will be destroyed because nobody picked it up. Chances are, you were never informed; even if you filed police reports with serial numbers.

Even if they do, who has a day to waste chasing thieves? I'd just lock up the scooter and save myself the potential hassle, especially since the GPS isn't a deterrent (the scooter doesn't look obviously theft-resistant so thieves won't notice until after they've stolen it).

Or to make theft as unappealing as possible, do an “Apple” on them, and require proximity of a “recognized” device for them to turn on, and require a long password, unique to each scooter, to reset the pairing.

They’ll still get stolen, but after apple implemented its current “find my iPhone” scheme, thefts of those devices has plummeted compared to what it was before.

1200 dollars - I wouldnt just park this on the street, given the battery and other useful things that might be mistaken for a ride share offering.

3. If you leave it parked outside a place, people will assume it's part of the shared fleet or "force ride" it without unlocking while it beeps the whole way.

These are just asking to get "stolen".

Or if you leave it parked outside, people can rent it and you make money... :)

Ala Tesla auto driving fleet

And then never get it back...?

So Bird is unable to recoup the costs of buying a scooter from rentals but somehow an individual, paying more for each scooter, and getting a smaller rental share than Bird does, will?

No just subsidize it

Exactly. I came to the thread to also point these things out.. Where is it's point of difference from a Segway Ninebot ES-2 or even ES-4 which is significantly cheaper? Weird.

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