Bird has raised $100M for electric scooter sharing

Re:Bird has raised $100M for electric scooter sharing by dpiers on Friday March 09, 2018 @11:03PM (#16557034)

One scooter could easily have 5-10 trips per day. At $2/trip, the payback period on a $400 scooter is 20-40 days. The economics here (and with dockless bikes) are quite impressive, which is why billions of dollars has been dumped into dockless electric personal transportation companies over the last few years.

The bigger question here is whether people will adopt scooters when they are more comfortable on bikes.

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Re:Bird has raised $100M for electric scooter sharing by bufferoverflow on Saturday March 10, 2018 @03:43AM (#16557732)

Your math assumes zero operational costs and near 100% use rate of every scooter. What about damage, theft, liability, staff, IT, amortization costs?

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Re:Bird has raised $100M for electric scooter sharing by TomMarius on Saturday March 10, 2018 @04:36AM (#16557856)

Yes, that pushes it to... let's say a year. Still impressive, IMHO.

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Re:Bird has raised $100M for electric scooter sharing by bufferoverflow on Saturday March 10, 2018 @02:59PM (#16559885)

Why "let's say a year" and not 50 years? Or never? You just made a number up without knowing any operating costs.

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Re:Bird has raised $100M for electric scooter sharing by TomMarius on Saturday March 10, 2018 @05:28PM (#16560503)

I made an educated guess. "Never" might happen just as well as 1 year, but it's unlikely considering other similar companies (we can't measure business skills of the operator); also we're talking about how it'd be if the business is a success. 1 year is more likely than 1 month; 50 years is extremely improbable (this business will probably either succeed or fail within just a few years, again, considering other similar companies).

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