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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

The Information reported they (Bird) were paying $551 with a goal of reducing it to $360 per scooter. The unit economics are pretty atrocious, tbh. These scooters aren't designed for continuous operation out in the wild, for the average American girth, on anything other than a flat surface -- so they break a lot.

The average lifespan is 32 days (median 28) -- and only goes 85 miles over 70 trips. Average is 1.63 miles per trip, 18 minutes long, and 3.49 rides per day on average. That's why scooter rides are so expensive compared to JUMP, for instance. [1] Some napkin math indicates they lose (at minimum) $267 per scooter.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-birds-scooter...

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This was true back then, when Bird and most other companies were using m365 and esx scooters. The newer generation of scooters is way more durable, and have better battery life. The reality now with scooters like the Bird Zero is that churn is at least 10 months, which is more than enough to pay the vehicle and operational cost 7.5x

Disclaimer: I work in this space.

Interesting, though this slice/dice of the data [1] figuring in all known expense quantities show that they only make a net of $2.32 per day in Louisville. Even if we take 10 months that's still just under $700. Those economics do look a lot better, but don't more durable/beefier scooters cost more? I'm not seeing a way to get 7.5X back no matter how the numbers are finagled.

Curious how they know the scooters will last 10 months when new versions can't have been out in the wild in quantity for more than a single quarter.

To be clear, I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm just hoping to learn more about whether it has yet.

[1] https://qz.com/1561654/how-long-does-a-scooter-last-less-tha...

Having seen what people do those scooters I can’t imagine any model lasting ten months on the street.

I'm curious, do you know what scooter model Skip uses in SF? I've also seen Bird use it in San Jose and possibly elsewhere. It has a Segway label.

That model is fantastic. Very pleasant brake, and it is much more powerful than the one Scoot uses. The Segway one gets me up some of the hills in SF, whereas the Scoot one is woefully underpowered, a joke for a hilly city like SF.

They are decent scooters but I wish they had suspension + pneumatic tires. I still find the retail M365 to be much more pleasant to ride.

I actually fell pretty hard from a Skip scooter going slightly downhill in SF because their active breaking gave up on me while going downhill (maybe 20deg angle, not even too steep) I could have dealt with that but even worse it would keep turning itself on and off so the traction would keep changing, because the power connection must have been loose (or battery too low -- this was before they started warning you about a low battery on the app) or something.

They did at least add that battery warning, though. That was an important update.

Do you mean 2 degrees? 20 is very steep.

20 degrees seems about standard for San Francisco. That's only a 5% grade in road parlance.

20° is a 36.4% grade [1].

New Zealand's Baldwin Street [2] is the world's steepest residential street, according to Guinness World Records, with a slope of 19°.

San Francisco's Filbert Street has a gradient of 17.5° [3] and that's that's steep enough that it has steps.

Of course, a road can be "very steep" and "normal for SF" at the same time! IMHO even if a road is very steep, if you're hiring scooters in a city the brakes (and geometry) should be good enough that an average rider can safely descend the city's steepest roads.

[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/slope-degrees-gradient-gr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_Street [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filbert_Street_(San_Francisco)

The way that I was trying to eyeball it was "45° is is kind of like a stairway", this was probably half as intense as that. :)

Either a Segway ES2 or ES4

Most companies have moved to Segway Ninebot Max already.

The ninebot max looks basically exactly like the xiaomi mi scooter pro:

https://www.mi.com/global/mi-electric-scooter-pro/

https://store.segway.com/ninebot-kickscooter-max

and I've seen other like those too. Are all those just some rebranded chinese frame?

Xiaomi owns part of ninebot segway. So for sure.

Oh wow. I had no idea it was that bad.

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