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.
https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last...
That seems like quite the barrier to me. Also crazy to think that 1/3 of a billion dollars is considered trivial barrier.
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"?
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversup...
[0] https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last...
they are probably (unit) profitable (or operationally cabable of being so), otherwise, they wouldn't have raised a $300MM series C last year.
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).
Just charge per minute and allow the owner to track the position continuously.
I used ZipCar when I lived in Chicago and Seattle. Great service. Didn't need to own car in either city because of ZipCar.
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.
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.
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.
Personally I prefer these people use electric scooters than N-thousand-pound >100HP vehicles.
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/
0: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/david-b-goldstein/does-every-ca...
Edited to remove sarcastic wording.