Was the $5B that VCs plugged into escooters worth it? | Hacker News Reader

Was the $5B that VCs plugged into escooters worth it?

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33 pointsmarban64 comments

It is just really expensive to ride. I use it sometimes where there are no good public transport options and it is like half a cab fare. I can’t see them maintain a market if they increase prices. Maybe if we had longer lasting batteries they could drop the prices since they would not need to be charged so often. But as it stands it is either a curiosity or replacing something already expensive like a taxi for a small subset of taxi rides.

I read that batteries can last for dozens of miles.

This changes dramatically if its cold or if its the end of the night and all the scooters have been used during the day. I’ve ran them dry a number of times and had to find a new steed.

Why don't you just buy your own scooter?

I don't think it's just the batteries, the whole economic model makes no sense. First, they're expensive - they need to be built for commercial use, so they're $500+ each. Second, demand is massively inefificent, a hundred thousand people want to travel from the train station to their office in the morning, and then back in the evening. Either you pay someone to keep riding the scooters back to the train station in the morning during commuting hours, or you accept that their utilization is going to be woeful. Thirdly, the MTBBTITR (Mean Time Between Being Thrown in The River) is 2 days, so you end up replacing your entire inventory every 2 days.

So, we need to hire a full time worker per scooter to return it to where it's needed constantly, we need to replace the scooter every 2 days, and they're $500 each. So it costs the company about $300 a day to run 1 scooter, so they need to charge about $100 per journey. Unsurprisingly, the demand is highly elastic.

The numbers are a bit facetious, but you get my point.

Bike share systems with docks have the same demand problem, but they are locked to docks so don’t get thrown into the River. They survive fine. Maybe a docked scooter share would work?

Aren't those subsidized by cities? I know that they are here in Montreal, and the Bixi corporation behind our bike share system went bankrupt at least once in the past.

Bixi isn't subsidized anymore (and I don't think they have been since they went private in 2014). They even got acquired by Lyft last year.

Edit: I was thinking of their international division. Looks like the Montreal network is still run by the city of Montreal.

There is something I don't understand. Why are people throwing these things into the river, so to speak? The more you break these the more units will have to be bought and the more expensive the ride becomes and the more resources "energy" is necessary to keep the system going --which seems ironic since riders are the ones who opt to ride in order to use fewer energy resources to begin with...

Drunk tourists don't care? At least where I live scooters are just littered all over until they get picked up which can be hours. Might not even be the rider dumping them in the river.

Maybe because they're an eye sore?

Some people probably resent that if they were the ones leaving their product lying around all over common areas, such as footpaths, so they could make a buck, they would feel the weight of the local municipality. But they have to put up with it because a VC backed company can move faster than local government because DiSruPtive?

Yeah, fuck 'em, harvest them for 18650s I say.

I mean people do that with cars too, and I don’t mean public parking, they drive their shit up on the sidewalk and park, park on cross walks and drive down bike paths and do donuts in the park. drivers generally don’t give a shit ever. But people mostly leave them be. So I think the answer is easier. People throw scooters in the river because it’s easy and fun. Anything that is left around near a river and is light enough to throw, somebody is going to throw.

People give a shit with cars too. In some places you’ll get towed quickly for putting your car somewhere a homeowner doesn’t like. And obviously if cars were easier to move people would absolutely shove them out of the way.

Kids do it. Kids destroy stuff just for the fun of destroying stuff. They don't care about the rides becoming expensive or whatever. It's just funny to them to throw it in the river.

So, where are they putting their Gretta money? Looks like they would be ignoring her imperatives.

What is Gretta money?

Why do you assume the riders are the ones throwing them in the river?

And what does "so to speak" mean here? They're literally getting thrown into rivers.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/spark-421-1.4973383/why-are-p...

https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/electric-scooter-bird-l...

https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/local/electric-scooters-hi...

I was under the impression that the river throwers were not the riders. Annoyed locals trying to hurt the company, teens looking for tiktoks, etc.

The costs are pretty high these days. I took a lime recently and I ended up paying a dollar more than what rideshare quoted me. In hindsight I really should just skip them and go for rideshare. The rich enclave cities in my area with their octopus like city borders have geolocked scooters. So when you are going on a major road and you go over one block into the rich angry city, the scooter loses power and you nearly die from the fickle 45mph traffic on your tail that is now angry at you even more than they were previously.

In Poland they are already more expensive than cab. It makes zero sense to me that scooter that I ride on without needing to be driven by other people, and which only needs to have battery switched daily, can cost even close to cab.

In Barcelona too. There's no point over a cab really.

The system makes sense in well-planned (dense, accessible) cities. Most American cities -- indeed, most cities designed primarily after the invention of automobiles -- do not fit this definition.

A classic XY problem. The issue is not the cost, it is what the built environment demands.

The article talks about how they're not even really working in European cities, despite being less spread out and more amenable to cycling options.

Why don't you just buy your own scooter?

You are reading far too much into my comment.

Sorry, I actually replied to the wrong comment

I have a similar experience where I live. Taking a scooter only saved me a dollar or two on my trips over a ride share. It even took me longer to scoot over rather than what the ride share would typically take too, so it’s just really not worth it.

Also so many horrendous riders when I’m cycling in the road.

Here in the U.K. scooters are only legal in specific trial areas and when hired from a company (normally one per city), which vets that the hirer has a driving license, and this ensures the person is riding them with insurance. But there are lots of people using privately owned e-scooters illegally - I live not far outside a trial area and regularly see people on them. This is despite a risk of large fines or even losing your driving license (most people need 12 penalty points to be banned from driving and being caught on one of these is 6 points).

I would be interested to see how profitable these startups are in the face of competition in this direction, because it looks like here there’ll be a liberalisation of the rules at some point. For e.g. I know a couple of people who commute on them, but it would seem to me to make sense for them to just buy one and charge it at home/work if it was legal.

In Bristol a provisonal driving license is enough, and anyone can get those. I think that's more about providing ID than proving that you can drive.

Well you can't get them if you've been banned for driving, at least...

I know two people who were seriously injured on them. One required facial reconstructive surgery and the other had a broken arm. Both happened soon after they became ubiquitous.

I also had many close calls as a pedestrian. Some could have been very serious had I not jumped out of the way. Perhaps 5 or so of those.

From my perspective they are not worth it.

They need to be on bicycle infrastructure.

That said, if they remove cars from the road they are worth it.

I agree with that. The problem is people. > 50% of the people I saw using the devices were on the sidewalk. And many of them that I conversed with (in a calm tone) who I told to use the street said "but it's too dangerous out there!" My retort that them being on the sidewalk was too dangerous for me fell on deaf ears.

Just yell at them and make being on the sidewalk more dangerous than the road. I throw shit in front of them or kick them off of their stupid looking scooter. Shows them. They won't try that shit in front of my home again. Best thing is that your jury will never find you guilty because that shit is annoying.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm anymore.

Slow descent into insanity

Where I live it's illegal for adults to ride scooters (or bikes) on the sidewalk and thanks to everybody riding scooters on the sidewalk the police have begun enforcing the law. People don't want to ride the scooter in the street with traffic so scooter riding has dropped tremendously.

Where I live, the police were told not to enforce the law to keep scooters off the sidewalk. Came from the mayor of Oakland, CA. I engaged with the Mayor's staff and they confirmed it, but soon after that they ghosted me. (Yes, I was always very polite.)

The danger to pedestrians from 20lb scooters is very obviously a small fraction of the danger to scooters from 2ton cars.

But that being said, if there isn’t sufficient bicycle lane infrastructure for the scooters to use then the city in question shouldn’t be allowing scooters in the first place. Neither roads with car traffic nor sidewalks are suitable places for them.

20lbs scooter + 200lbs human traveling at 20kph

It'll do some serious damage

In the Netherlands, the country with maybe the best biking infrastructure in the world, escooters are banned from public roads (including bike lanes), because the authorities consider them too dangerous.

Why are they considered too dangerous? Won't an ebike at full speed be heavier and as such even more dangerous?

I know that this is the case in Netherlands. I think they are over reacting to those and under-reacting to cars. As long as the speed is sufficiently limited, they not more dangerous then bikes.

eScooters are significantly more dangerous to riders than bikes. They have much smaller tires so they’re far more susceptible to falling because of small imperfections in the roads. They are not as easy to balance as bicycles. They are harder to see. They are harder to control. They are harder to slow down rapidly unlike a bike.

There’s a whole host of fundamental physical reasons why bikes are just much safer.

For the rider, but I don't think they are more dangerous to the other people.

How fast do they go where you are? In the UK there are various hire schemes trialling their use. Riders must have a driving license and they are limited to 15.5 mph (depending on area, in Oxford for instance they only go up to 12.4 mph). And they are not allowed on pavements, only streets!

I would say about the same (15 mph), but maybe a little faster. The problem with mixing pedestrians and scooters is the former don't have lanes and the amount of momentum a 200 lb person has going 10 or 15 mpg is considerable. The people I saw riding on the sidewalk had no problem zipping through pedestrian traffic.

Lost count the number of times I almost got run over by an ebike- those go 30 kilometres an hour. It is a concrete jungle out there.

To the people manufacturing escooters almost certainly.

$5B and the best they could do was dump piles of scooters on the street and make people pay to use them via an app.

And pay other people to go charge them.

There definitely is a lot of stupid money floating around in this space. Lots of companies that are competing with each other for the same group of consumers. So, it's a race to the bottom in terms of pricing and operational cost. All the under-performers struggle to keep users on their platform and quickly fail if they don't sort out their operational issues. Some of the more successful companies have in common that they are a bit more premium in pricing and reasonably well organized when it comes to operations and relations with local governments (key for even being allowed to operate).

I don't use scooters but I do use a lease bike (Swapfiets), which is very popular here in Berlin. Good old pedal power and I don't mind getting some exercise. They also have ebikes but those are a bit too pricey for me. The scooters look fun but also too unstable for my taste. I like having teeth and I can see a gazillion ways loosing those with these contraptions. Ebikes are nice. I've used a few of those over the years: Uber, Tier, etc. All good fun and pretty effective.

Key challenges in this space are the continuous haggling with local governments about rules and legislation and the continuous drain on cost in the form of maintenance, vandalism, theft, etc. It's just a very operations intensive business and companies that don't do that well don't last very long.

In reality, scooter sharing should be rather a loss leader for a bigger business to retain customers but it's not viable for it to be an independent business. When the Bird scooter sharing service just emerged, I wrote an article where I calculated and described unit economics of scooter rides based on charging cycles [1]. The business is just not sustainable unless scooters are made like tanks and can sustain heavy damage. They are usually not. Chana's big piles of thrown away rental bikes should have taught us something.

1. https://medium.com/13-notes/unit-economics-of-the-bird-scoot...

What market was it supposed to disrupt?

The Uber play was babble about magic self driving cars as a distraction and put the taxi business out of business, then jack up the rate and turn into the taxi business.

What’s bird doing? Other than being the canary in the coal mine that VC dollars ran out of investments, what did it accomplish?

All of them I have seen have been utilized as man made fish habitats in the nearest body of water.

Are there weights on the business logic for the decision and how near/far have outcomes compared to expectations? Apparently Usain Bolts's investing in emerging tech left him empty handed.

Looking at the roadmaps for the core component (batteries) they definitely jumped the gun.

Sodium Ion batteries should produce dirt cheap scooters that will probably be 1/3 the cost of whatever they were using back when they invested.

And "sharing" is kind of stupid. If you own your escooter, the battery will probably be removable (for easy recharging) and you just lock up the shell. Sharing is basically only good for tourism. E-bike sharing? It is bigger/heavier, that does make slightly more sense.

I don't think their investment jumpstarted some fundamental movement either, maybe it helped nudge it a few years earlier, but ebikes/escooters are simply an inevitability of cheap dense batteries.

Afaik Taiwan has a network of swappable batteries for their (road) scooters so you can plug a fresh pack and go. Seems way more sensible than that SV shared scooter nonsense.

Edit: https://www.gogoro.com/

>And "sharing" is kind of stupid. If you own your escooter

Then it gets stolen.

The main value of the rentables comes in making it so you never have to deal with that eventuality.

The fact that they're far more difficult for the average thief to turn a profit from stealing compared to a private vehicle is a bonus for the company (getting away with stealing one requires a Faraday cage or some similar way to jam GPS, and you have to strip it for parts because even the shadier pawn shops won't accept obviously stolen-but-repainted gear), as is the side-effect that (because they're interchangeable) it's fantastic for people who come to the city by car but don't want the inherent hassle that is driving downtown.

Yes, you still have to dispatch people to charge them up (and swappable batteries is something that takes a bit of time to figure out), and sometimes they get destroyed by angry would-be thieves for shits and giggles, but that cost also scales sublinearly as you deploy more of them. And once the batteries have worn to the point of uselessness hopefully batteries are cheaper- a prediction that's likely correct.

Agree, low ROI on theft, at least until we run into a supervillain who is short on cash and needs thousands of powerful hub motors and batteries.

No but if you can get your hands on some laser beams with shark-mounting hardware I would be interested.

Trade ya for a massive social media company?

Getting stolen is only a problem if you leave your scooter somewhere public. One of the big advantages of an electric scooter over an e-bike is that some of them fold down small enough that you can just carry them wherever you are going.

Nobody is going to steal it if it’s sitting under your desk charging.

The breakdown of public order to the point that bike/scooter theft is rampant and normalised seems like the real issue here. Police apathy seems like a big part of the problem, but fundamentally how do we solve that?

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