The problem with scooter rental is that cheap scooters are not very reliable at all.

I own a £300 Xiaomi M365. I expect it to save me approximately £300 of transport cost before it falls apart.

But I care for it. Rental users won't.

Scooter rental needs to be done using far more sturdy equipment if it's going to truly be profitable (e.g. not a VC pump and dump) in my opinion.

That said, I love scooters - I'll probably buy a better one when mine inevitably breaks. It saves me a bunch of time and is fun to boot. I'm just skeptical of the economics because these aren't like rental cars, they're made of Chinesium, have no suspension, etc. They're built to be disposable at present.

That sounds like it's good for less than a year. Really? That's flimsy pre-trash if so.

I can't claim I have a very good track record of looking into the future, but, I'd be really surprised if scooter rental (and sales) turn out to be a sustainable business in more than just a few random cities.

Scooter and other electric micro vehicle sales are probably only going to increase. Rental is always going to be an issue. Bicycles have been around a very long time and yet rental of them has generally only been sustainable in small tourist hotspots where people are cycling on established sightseeing routes. In big cities they are trashed or stolen.

No, actually in my area they decreased. The bicycle shop we had for twenty years closed, probably because the price of enthusiast bicycles were getting too high. We had a phase with razor gas and electric scooters and hoverboards, but they died too.

The scooter thing really only targets the college student, and the adult who lives like a college student. Single, spends most of their time on or near a campus be it school or work, etc. It can't really scale past them, because that form of life is extremely limited compared to others and congenial to it.

It seems like most flat cities (and even some hilly ones) in Europe have successful city bike programs running, no?

Where I am in the UK we have a large city bike program. The majority of people I see riding them are riding 'liberated' ones, which are now more numerous than ones that can be paid for. Whether you consider this to be a failure depends on your viewpoint, but from a commercial standpoint I suspect they will be running at a loss.

Have you used one of these scooters? I was skeptical of them, and think they're an eyesore, and hate the idea of a private company keeping their property on public land, but they sure are convenient, and I have friends who use them all the time.