Id suspect its the disconnect between wealth and reality. At the end of the day the VC only sees what the VC wants to see. in this case a verdant world of the futuristic e-scooter where each is powered by the fantastic internet technology of the smartphone and destined to enrich and engage the lives of millions while forging a new path in e-commerce that will surely reward the diligent shareholder.

unforeseen is the army of charging slaves that patrol the city at 4 AM for a few extra dollars at their own expense. E-scooters launched through shop windows and into streets after bars close. The Litigation prompted from both governments endless frustration with this new corporate detritus littering the public sidewalk, and citizens facing ugly medical expenses after the sobering reality that cars in the United States are still far more prevalent, careless, and lethal than any chinese internet scooter.

How are they slaves? They have the free will to decide if they want to work or not.

Yeah? Depends how you define free will.

If people want to eat and make rent, they need to afford it somehow, and the employment options are bleak (see: charging scooters).

So maybe you meant they have "the free will to decide if they want to work shitty jobs, or not live". We can't be too surprised that the suicide rate is going up in this country.

That’s a weird definition of a slave and free will. By this definition none of us have free will since most things we do are driven by some motivation. I want to eat and make rent, so I work for the money to do so. Now I’m a slave?

I think it may have to do with the number of options a person has to earn money. To those with few options a shitty job can feel a lot like slavery.

Taking someone to task over the technically incorrect use of the word slavery seems a bit pedantic at best.

Income inequality, underemployment and lack of employment opportunities are real problems. But words have meaning, and we as a species have had a pretty ugly history with slavery. Let’s not dilute the meaning of that word when there are others that are more accurate.

Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and this slavery of wages must go down with the other.

If you hate your job, which has negative affects on your health, are you really free just because you get to choose what clothes you wear or what you have for lunch?

Yes because I can choose to find another job. No one chained me to my desk.

I can see personal e-scooters as being a great alternative to cars for short trips such as commuting less than 5-ish km to work, or taking the kids to school. However, I still think bicycles are vastly preferable. With a pannier rack you get quite a bit more cargo space, and in the winter, the fact that you're physically exerting yourself helps to keep you warm, which makes for a more comfortable and pleasant trip. Also, the whole "Lithium batteries aren't supposed to be operated below 10C" situation limits e-scooters' value for a large chunk of the year in temperate climates.

The for-hire e-scooter market continues to seem to me like a novelty more than a realistic transportation option. My city's recent e-scooter pilot program hasn't done much to dispel that notion. People used them quite a bit in the first few weeks, but, by the end, most the scooters were obviously going all day without being used.

Also, the whole "last mile" argument started seeming a lot more hollow once I realized that, by the time I got to the busy areas where e-scooters were being placed in the mornings, I was already 75% of the way to the train station. More like "last block". And, at least when they were being used, I'd have to walk well out of my way to find one to use on the way home, too, because they were scattered all over the neighborhood as a result of their normal and intended usage pattern. So, they didn't seem to be much of an effort saver going in either direction.

All that said, I'm guessing that they were being highly valued because of the very low barrier to entry for the market. A fleet of e-scooters is presumably quite a bit less expensive to purchase and maintain than a fleet of docked rental bikes. What got lost in the shuffle was the fact that the dock, while it might seem like an unnecessary annoyance, is actually a big part of what makes those rental bikes pleasant to use.

The major issue for me with biking, particularly e-biking, is that it can be very expensive if your bike is stolen. Secure bike parking is hard to come by in many places, and even secured bike parking can be broken into. In my city it's also very hilly, so I've taken a rideshare bike down the hill but not up it. Docking also solves this problem, but the problem with docks is that they have to go through whatever NIMBY-obstructed local process the municipality has for setting up docks, they have to be appropriately densely spaced together, etc. and that's a lot of work. Bike/scooter share, at least initially, tried doing the Uber model of "break rules and apologize/legalize later", but I think cities wised up after Uber did it once.

Dockless scooters are also much more immediately annoying to a lot more people - basically, a few people ride them, and everyone else trips over and/or fears getting hit by them on the sidewalks.

By contrast, at least in the early stages, rideshare was almost invisible to anyone who wasn't actively using it. That left a much longer runway for the "break rules and then get forgiveness" strategy.

I'd take my bike everywhere if I knew it'd still be there after I finished having lunch, visiting friends, grocery shopping etc.

As it is though, my bike isn't even safe chained up in a locked garage.

What's going on in America if absolutely everyone is afraid if theft? Or are the bikes just big target?

There's a market for stolen bikes, and there are enough people whose incentives are such that the rewards of stealing seem higher than the risks of getting caught and punished.

And one place that people land after they fall through the cracks of society is petty theft. In the US, we just have bigger cracks than many other wealthy developed countries. I don't like the theft anymore than anyone else, but I'd rather we not fix it by further criminalizing people through an even harsher police state than we already have, and becoming like even more authoritarian countries.

It's funny that we constantly ask this (very fair) question about common theft, but don't as often express such incredulity at the existence of extreme wealth. These two are connected in many ways.

It's just bikes. Mostly because they're valuable+standardized enough to be easily fenced, and yet not high-value enough for police to bother investigating. It's like leaving MacBooks sitting on street corners.

My understanding is that bike theft is not prosecuted, even if you found someone that stole 1000 bikes.

If you stole 10 dollars from a bank, you can bet you are prosecuted. Bikes are just not defended as private property for some reason.

Bike chop shops that do that kind of volume do get prosecuted because it’s relatively easy to show that a place is selling a large volume of scrap metal from bikes.

It is much harder to prove that a thief is responsible for 1000 individual bike thefts, because you’d need evidence for each bike.

Proving bike theft is as easy as honeypotting any bike. Its just no prosecuted. It's a cultural blindspot for what I think are probably historical reasons.

You can steal a car priced lower than a bike and get a year in jail. ITs not about the cost of proving anything, it's about the willingness of the institution to enforce it.

first of all, yes, anything of value not bolted down is going to get stolen pretty fast in most american cities.

bikes are a particularly easy target. most people seem to use those U-locks that can only go through the frame and one wheel at most. the thief then pops off the other wheel and either pawns it or sells it for scrap. even if you secure the frame and both wheels, people will still strip the shifters and brakes off of it. people can also just cut the lock itself if they bring the appropriate equipment.

finally, nice bikes tend to really stick out. if you lock your $1000 schwinn alongside a bunch of shitty bikes, the thief will go for your bike every time.

- Bikes are an easy target given that most locks are easy to deal with and it’s the only mechanism preventing them from moving; cars are hard if not impossible to hotwire these days

- Bikes are high value but not extremely so, unlike a car, and most police forces do not take bike theft seriously

- Walking around with a stolen bike is a lot less conspicuous than walking around with, say, a stolen TV

Nice bikes are $3000 - $10000. That's not something you want to leave chained to a lamp post in the street. Any lock can be picked or cut.

anda great entryway for a budding insurance startup to get customers

There's already Velosurance. It's a good service if you've got a nice bike you're looking to cover.i But it's a heck of a lot cheaper to use a cheap bike as your townie, though, and accept that you might have to replace it every few years.

And it's amazing how strong a theft deterrent crap like stickers can be - it takes 5 seconds with a dremel for a bike thief to grind the serial numbers off a frame so it can't be traced, but the time it takes to scrub stickers off a frame to get it in resellable condition, divided by a cheap frame's resale value, easily works out to an even lower wage than driving for Uber.

Anecdotally, I make my bike up to look like bits are held on with duct tape (they aren't), and in 25 years I've never had a bike stolen. My theory is that thieves aren't looking close enough to figure out that it isn't actually a hoopty bike.

i utilized and loved the dockless scooters for the first two weeks of my last job in SF, until I found out there was a bicycle room in the garage downstairs.

> I can see personal e-scooters as being a great alternative to cars for [...] taking the kids to school

If it's close to 5km, are you really going to take the kids on scooters?

If it's closer to 1km, how about simply walking? Reality check: we have two (of three) kids in school, their walk to school is just over half a mile, they both walk more or less every single day, in summer and winter and in the rain and the snow.

Oddly they really like walking to school in the snow :)

When I was a kid I used to ride my leg-powered bicycle three miles to school. 5km on an e-scooter doesn't seem that far different. That's really not a long distance at all.

You need a drivers license for the dockless scooters, so there's no way for a child to legally ride one.

You don't need one for a kick scooter though, and exercise is good for kids.

I visited Moscow last year, and noticed they have docked scooters: https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/328422-how-rent-electric-scoo...

Plenty of places have undocked bicycles, so a fair comparison is possible.

> Plenty of places have undocked bicycles...

They certainly do: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-J_4_SQmUNQo/Wuwwsp5w6BI/A...

I live in Moscow and far more people use docked bikes than docked scooters. There aren't that many places where you can ride the scooter smoothly so they're only available in the very center of Moscow where a lot of sidewalks have been repaved recently. And half of the year the weather is not suitable for riding a scooter.

Same story in Canada. I'm in a big city and the scooters aren't really useful outside of the city center, both because of how the scooters do "zones" but also because hills, bike lanes, and sidewalks are very hit-or-miss in terms of quality and safety.

They're a fun novelty, but not a solution to public transit.

It might be an issue of implementation then, specifically with density. I had a good example of this.

About a year ago ebikes were around in Beijing but not many of them. While I enjoyed riding them (beats traffic here over low single digit KM range and faster than a bike) it was frustrating to have to hunt for them. So while I opportunistically used them when convenient it wasn’t frequent.

Fast forward to now, there are enough of them around that I can pretty much always find one on the current block. Now I use them as my primary mode of transportation ever short distances.

I own both a bike and an e-scooter and one of the things I really like about my e-scooter is I can fold it up and bring it in with me to a restaurant or my office or wherever else I am going. A bike I have to find a place to lock it and pray it doesn’t get stolen, as has happened to me multiple times in the past.

This isn’t necessarily applicable to a rental market, but as far as personal ownership the e-scooter is just vastly more convenient in a major city with high rates of bicycle theft.

It seems that a lot of VC is a multivariate ponzi scheme of sorts, which might explain some of it. If they're making fees regardless, then they just need to show/push fast initial growth to attract more layers of investment and it doesn't necessarily need to make long term sense.

Chamath Palihapitiya describes this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVVsdlHslfI

Wow, thank you. This guy decisively describes what I’ve been yammering to my friends about since moving to SF and learning about this industry.

I was there for this, and starting at the 09:30 mark it was exactly what I was thinking about when I read the headline.

> Why did the VCs value these as billion dollar companies? Desperation?

That's my guess. 10+ years of very low interest rates and wealthy people having more and more free cash seems to have led to a lot of crazy valuations in tech investing and elsewhere.

Interest is already negative in Japan for years, and now it's negative on Europe too. The US is heading fast to this insane reality of negative interests too. Since 2008 the FED has multiplied the amount os dollars in circulation by what, 5-10 times? This created this crazy scenario where the Softbanks of the world see a business model that is clearly destined to fail and never be profitable, and still keep pouring money on it at higher and higher valuations. I live in Brazil, and the price these companies charge for the scooter rides here is totally out of our economic reality. I'm just waiting for this HUGE bubble to explode. UBER, Netflix, WeWork, Tesla to some extent. All multi billion dollar companies that never return profits to their investors. I for one am glad to be getting cheap UBER rides down here at the expense of the pension funds of millions of americans, but this can not go on forever. Since the end of 2019 I began to switch my investments to gold and wait for the crash. Trump gave me some help with this gold idea this week, so far so good ;-)

> The US is heading fast to this insane reality of negative interests too. Since 2008 the FED has multiplied the amount os dollars in circulation by what, 5-10 times?

> I'm just waiting for this HUGE bubble to explode.

Wait till you calculate how much money is necessary to push US bonds into negative territory. Ka-CHING long 10 yr bond futures, leverage uuuuup if you think the first you said is actually going to happen, because that means bubble doesn't explode

Very simple, have you ever rode a scooter? Once I took a ride along the beach in Southern California, it was immediately obvious, and, I was hooked! It's a disruptive, perfect combination of technologies, that immediately antiquates riding a bike for short distances. The main problem is that it's too good, and people with poor balance, poor judgement, or bad luck, have been in accidents which ruined it for everyone else.

I could see scooters completely wiping out local ride-share, taxi, and bicycle shares in many places.

But again, people have been injured and because of that, along with the excessive inventory that has littered some areas, cities are cracking down and writing new regulation to curb their use. In the short term they will win and we might not enjoy their full potential for awhile.

It's been a while since I hit a buzz word bingo while browsing a HN comment thread.

I've got "disruptive," "obvious," the free space in the middle, "synergy" (which I'm counting combination of technologies for), and "ride-share".

On paper Singapore, should have been the perfect market for eScooters. A central, urban, well-developed infrastructure, low crime, stable warm weather without seasons, you name it. Starting December PMD's were banned.

Mostly because people behaving like idiots riding scooters on the sidewalks leading to at least two serious accidents per day. Bicycles are still allowed.

Lessons learned : The urban infrastructure needs to have space for the eScooters to co-exist with other participants (cars and pedestrians alike)

Like three quarters of American men, I'm overweight. I'd never use an electric scooter because the absolute last thing I need in my life is an excuse to walk less. I'd wager at least a significant portion of that three quarters probably have thoughts similar to mine. Of the rest, most probably drive instead (which for the particularly obese, is probably a lot more comfortable than a scoooter.)

I see a ton more scooters on the sidewalk than I see people riding them. From my perspective these scooter companies have greatly overestimated the demand.

Have you ever used one? I get what you're saying, but as an example: my girlfriend and I have on multiple occasions, in multiple cities, used scooters to explore local geographic regions that would otherwise not have been possible in the same time constraint. We would ride across town, then get off and walk around for a bit until we decided to hop back on and ride way across town to another place and do the same thing. So it is possible to still get the exercise etc, with the benefit of being able to cover more turf than possible strictly through walking. Of course you could do the same thing with a bike, but it's more cumbersome and less agile imo.

Yeah, I actually had never seriously considered riding one, and thought it was a bit silly, then a friend just randomly suggested going for a ride after we had caught up one time. It's actually really, really fun and pretty great for getting around urban areas.

That said, I'm not sure how sustainable their business model will be because riding Lime and Neuron (a Singaporean competitor that we have operating in some Australian cities) is probably leaning me more towards wanting to get my own e-scooter than regularly hiring theirs...

Depending where in the world you are, these scooters are as expensive as Uber for the same distance (in Europe). But you cannot carry a suitcase, it is not safe, you get wet when it rains, etc.

I get that it feels like a 2-dollar-Harley, and once parents realize that their kids are both at risk AND it costs as much as an Uber, I expect loses to grow.

Unless something drastic happens and the cost drops dramatically.

For me when rarely riding a scooter (in Berlin) it is always frustrating that I am (at capped 20km/h) a bit slower than the flow of numerous bicicles. This also understandably increases frustration for the cyclists (I feel the same when usually taking a bike to work). This alone rules out taking a scooter over a bike whenever possible.

At the beginning VCs love to see the revenue increase and when you are dealing with companies like this you can grow revenue rapidly by moving into new markets. And it requires a tremendous amount of capital to do so, because they are purchasing and servicing the scooters.

There's always the promise of we will get to free cash flow positive and net profitability in the future to stave off concerns immediately especially when revenue growth is high.

The problem for Lime and other scooter companies is that they grossly underestimated the amount of issues they would run into from operating and servicing them. So they began to see those ill effects in the first 12 months of bringing them on to the streets.

Of course massive revenue growth and promises to fix that allows new investors to plow money in, but now as the scooters become ubiquitous in many large metro areas, the revenue growth is harder to get and an increase in competition also slows down revenue growth.

With growth slowing, now they need to immediately focus on improving their unit economics where ever possible. Getting out of failed cities, reducing staff where they over hired planning for the future. Also at a company of their size firing 100 people is the equivalent of getting rid of poor performers and not that big of an issue.

This is all done to show how they can be unit economic profitable in a single large city, and then use that combined with revenue growth to raise a new round.

But if you look at the landscape of Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Postmates, Instacart, everyone is no where close to profitable, so definitely that story arc of continuing to grow without profitability is taking a large hit. More layoffs will definitely follow across the board in this sector.

> In terms of any environmental benefit, I highly suspect more gasoline is being consumed to collect and distribute scooters than the offset of a few last mile transports.

I agree, however, it's obscured by an Uber-style gig: a lot of these startups incentivize random people to drive around, collect & charge their scooters. That allows them to set the financial cost of charging and ignore the underlying environmental cost.

I suspect it's one way they hide the maintenance costs while pretending to contribute to the "gig economy".

> Why did the VCs value these as billion dollar companies? Desperation?

1. FOMO

2. Easy Access to Capital in last decade

3. Winner takes it all culture, which causes more FOMO

But then as a VC you also have to bet future with incomplete set of data... which is not truly a science... though there are some Midas in VC... reality/statistics is only 3-5% of all investment will hit home run, 5-15% will do average and other will just fail... we would not have many of the company/services around if someone would not have taken those bets (from UBER to AirBnB and others...)

E-scooters are a very tempting business because the napkin math is very tempting.

In my neck of woods escooter rentals are 10+ Euros an hour.

So 500 Euros for scooter / 10 => 50 hours to break even

Then you say okay maybe only 1 percent utilization => 5000 hours which is still ~6 months (we are talking napkin math).

This makes for a great elevator pitch.

Only later do you start worrying about vandalism, logistics/costs of gathering scooters every night etc.

>Why did the VCs value these as billion dollar companies? Desperation?

Because VCs get paid from selling the shares to the public. So as long as a general unsophisticated investor is expected to buy in, it's a good deal for a VC, even if the underlying business model is laughable.

While never having been on one due to no helmets being provided, in Denver and in Dallas and in Austin they arguably revolutionized the city core and how younger people get around. For better and worse.

And while not fully diligent on this, isn't Uber still not profitable on a unit economic basis? And they are mature and public. Perhaps that statement isn't true but it provides one justification for investing in scooters

My impression in Austin is that it peaked last year. Not to say they aren't still common.

To be honest I think there's a possible real business here, but maybe only for one or two companies, and only in cities where they achieve a critical mass. The 4am collecting of abandoned scooters, becomes much more efficient if it's only one company per town, and they are commonly used such that there is much less distance between scooters of a given company.

I suppose that, like for every 1000 1999 e-business there was only one Amazon, the VC's are thinking there will be one or two survivors here who will eventually do well.

You are correct about Uber not being profitable. They’re burning cash quickly. And if you look at market performance, they’re not where they expected to be. Furthermore, they’re fighting things like employee unionization (See California) which will increase their cost.

And Uber is fundamentally different. It’s not seasonal, and the costs fall mainly on drivers rather than the company.

Investors are hopeful on Uber, but I bet if a scooter company tried to go public right now, it would get eaten alive.

> isn't Uber still not profitable on a unit economic basis?

Uber still has money to burn and is trying to grow even more. They could likely be profitable if they wanted, pretty quickly, by limiting spending/expansion.

VCs also get paid by getting other VCs to evaluate their companies as more valuable in a sort of Ponzi scheme:

https://youtu.be/NVVsdlHslfI

Most companies only go public when they are profitable.

From what I've read, the main driver of profitability is longevity of the scooters, and they've already made a lot of progress extending that.

> In terms of any environmental benefit, I highly suspect more gasoline is being consumed to collect and distribute scooters than the offset of a few last mile transports.

The report I read stated that if longevity could be extended (which is already being worked on, per above), scooters would be net-negative CO2 wise. However right now, they are net-positive. You are correct that moving the scooters around incurs a carbon hit, but also power generation is dirty, as is producing a scooter that only last for a few months.

In Wellington, New Zealand Uber (Jump) replaced their entire scooter fleet a few weeks ago after just six months of operation, their main competitor (Flamingo) will probably have to do the same as their scooters now look worn and tired vs the Jump ones. Lime has been booted out of a couple of markets locally as they had safety issues, all those scooters are probably in a land fill somewhere.

I think it can be in some places. For example Lisbon, Portugal has decent weather all-year (not too cold, not snowy nor very rainy), lots of tourists, low labour costs; plus a fairly clean electricity supply. The only drawback is the lack of separated lanes, but most cities are working on improving that.

It's probably more niche than these companies hoped for, but I think a profitable business can be made from it.

I rode Lime-branded scooters in my "global South" town for a couple of weeks. It was a really expensive proposition and I was basically paying for the thrill. But the city (probably wisely) banned them from sidewalks -- when the whole point was to replace walking, not renting a highly vulnerable motorcycle substitute to ride with the cars in the street.

To answer your question: high prices/margins.

It's a nice better experience in dedicated bike lanes.

I think e-bikes in certain markets will be profitable as a division of bigger organizations like Uber/Lyft. For example I spent $6 on two JUMP bike rentals last night to get to and from a Meetup. It was convenient and the bikes did the job handily. As a company that only does the bike share, I don't think they will be able to compete with the likes of Uber/Lyft etc.

I used to be bullish on ebikes for commuting, until I started buying secondhand ones barely a few months old on craigslist at steep discounts for my own family.

In every case, the owner had a change of heart and switched to a scooter. Why? Because the ebike is huge and heavy, needs dedicated locking, parking etc. Often there isn't room for it on the bus/train. They all found the scooter way better for last mile style commutes.

Scooters are a fraction of the cost, capable of similar speed and range with less user effort and have virtually no maintenance. You can carry them easily into an office, and they weigh a fraction of a typical ebike. They fit much more easily into trains and buses. Long term, I think last mile commuting will surely be won by a scooter style machine.

I still think ebikes have a huge role to play in future of transport, but I don't think it will be last mile commutes as much as some expect.

Unfortunately scooters are more dangerous, the little wheels and high center of gravity means eating concrete is more likely than a bike.

there are some scooters you can buy that go way too fast, but the ones you can rent usually max out around 15mph, and that's only on a warm day with a full charge. it's definitely less stable than a bike, but every time I've hit a pothole I've just ended up awkwardly running alongside the scooter for a few steps. I'm not quite sure what people are doing that leads them to eat concrete. I've certainly never seen it happen in my city, even with squads of drunk college students riding them on the weekends.

Every once in a while a rock runs in front of your wheel. Also many folks ride on the sidewalk which are uneven here.

Where are you located? I just wonder if this is because the enviroment isn't firendly to normal bikes either. Where I live I don't have any issues to park a bike. And I would never take it on a bus/train because there is no such thing as last mile when biking, especially ebiking.

Usually city buses have bike racks on front. You're not meant to bring the bike onto the bus.

Ebikes are usually too heavy for those bike racks.

For me the solution here is a folding e-bike, of which there are many.

Ironically the ones I purchased are all folding models. In some ways the folding models are the worst weight wise, the extra hardware needed to strengthen the frame makes them incredibly heavy. I own a very nice Tern Vektron, one of the higher end folding electric bikes, and I've folded it once, it's just way to heavy for folding and carrying to be practical. I'd sooner walk than try and move it around a busy train, for example. The fold is really only useful for storage at home.

Lyft agrees. They bought Motivate, who run the bike share systems in NYC and Minneapolis among others.

Minneapolis's had been a local non-profit that decided they needed to move from only docked bikes to dockless and couldn't do it as an independent group.

I've read that next season in Minneapolis the dockless bikes won't be back, and instead they will massively expand e-bikes, which were only available in a few locations this past season.

>I suspect the cost to the consumer would have to double for it to maintain any profitability, and the demand already sucks.

I suspect if you price in other externalities it would be even worse. Those things are flimsy trash that are meant to be utterly disposable. You can barely service or replace something as simple as a broken wheel. If these things ever did actually take off it would have been an ecological catastrophe. For all the waste generated by things like Keuregs, at least they're not going to leach heavy metals into the landfills.

In my city (Zurich) it already feels like an environmental disaster, with 5 or 6 scooter companies jumping into the market, there's probably more scooters on offer than there is demand.

There is no population that is better serviced by scooters than bicycles and better public transit

I think it's a profitable market if you survive the competition. You build the moat by petitioning the government to force licensing (like docked bikes do) and then enjoy the monopoly pricing. There's a natural advantage to being the same guy serving lots of markets so then you're fine.

Whatever happens electric scooters are here to stay. They will be the future of urban last mile transportation.

> Does anyone actually think this is a profitable market?

Can a eScooter business be run in a profitable way? I think yes.

Are these companies going to ever make back money for their investors? Probably not.

> Electric scooters are expensive, repair and charging is expensive

The retail price for these Scooters is $400-800, depending on the exact hardware. I assume these companies are not paying retail prices but have a sweet deal with some Chinese manufacturer, maybe paying $500-ish for a mid-tier model. Really not that expensive.

In Europe most firms are charging 1 Euro to start the eScooter and then additional 15ct per minute. In my opinion this is more than enough to make a decent profit. There are profitable car sharing companies here that let you rent a car for effectively 25-35cents per hour - that is including gas. So somehow, these car sharing companies that have huge upfront costs for purchasing the cars (30-40x more than a eScooter), high maintenance costs, annual registration fees, insurance costs etc. are turning a profit despite charing only a few cents more than the eScooter companies.

Your explanation is exactly why environmentalism is losing ground in the public zeitgeist outside of sensational headlines. People thought they would be profitable because large swathes of people liked them. The cities where they've lost ground have passed laws restricting them but the public votes along party lines so no politician of significance cares about the public reaction. The rest of your comment is essentially an appeal to the idea that cities can't have nice things unless they match your standard for environmrntal friendliness. The products were widely used before they were restricted, the public votes with their wallets, entrenched interests found a way around that vote. The cost to the consumer now is that they're basically useless because entitled people like yourself felt that the focus of a city shouldn't be facilitating the things that its people enjoy.

I think it’s a great business. They are not expensive. There are no employees except for depot repair and customer service call center. Repair can be handled by driving with a van after dark and collecting all sick units. Easy for a small team. It can be a Chrysler Hybrid minivan if you want to be environmentally conscious. Fuel consumption is a non-factor if done overnight without traffic. Solar can charge the batteries, but so can random people, which is how it is done.

They are not cheap to ride. Riders are paying $20/hr. I paid a few times and found it convenient compared to catching an Uber. Unit cost is less than $1000. You are looking at a month of use before the thing becomes profitable. At their volume, the cost is likely far less.

Micromobility like scooters are a "first look" experience. The use case is getting from point A to point B: who is first in line in terms of showing the user options to do that?

The first app to be checked for transportation options to point B has a tremendously valuable asset -- it's not just the scooter, but the fact that it's first in line for the demand.

Useful in a world where ridesharing companies and others are duking it out over users. Less so after the dust has settled.

It is a solely hipster thingy of bay area. The alternative to scooter is walking little more. If the range of your feet is say half a mile (you are willing to walk half a mile after getting out of train say) then scooter probably makes it 1 mile but adds a lot of other variable to it such as unreliability, availability, availability to return etc.

I will happily short position in any of these scooter companies meant for consumers.

.... actually for a more global perspective, they have been operating in New Zealand. Visiting Christchurch which is a fairly compact flat small city Lime's were the best thing ever to get around on. Living in Auckland, I haven't touched one - hilly, not enough coverage, too large a distance. So they do have their place outside of the hipster bay community :)

I've used them a ton when downtown (and even in North Shore).

Shame there's nowhere close enough of bike paths for stuff like this. Really disappointing.

Plus council took their licence away and gave to local company. That's like a pure corruption, nepotism or protectionism.

The amount of smear articles on NZHerald about Lime was disgusting too. It's either an by delusionally old farts or again - corruption.

I wonder if the benefit is to shop owners in the area where scooters work. My reasoning: Scooters are a replacement for walking. Shop owners depend on foot traffic. If you can generate foot traffic by reducing the time cost, you can increase shop visits.

I do recognize a number of holes in this logic, for instance: is scooter traffic comparable to foot traffic?

For one thing, stopping at a shop when you're on foot is free, but if you want to get back to scooting, you can only park the scooter but not end the rental (otherwise someone else might rent that scooter while you're in the shop), but (AFAIK) Lime, etc, will charge you money as long as the scooter is still being rented out to you.

The environmental benefit would ultimately be in reducing car trips and allowing cities to once more be built human scale, enabled by scooter-transit-scooter trips (scooters solve the last mile problem). It would be a laudable thing for governments to support but instead the response has been deep hostility.

Too much money, chasing not enough alpha.

I use Lime ebikes rather than scooters in London and they get quite a lot of money off me - a short trip (5mins) is about £1.50 which means if you pop to a shop and back then somewhere else and back that's £6. You don't need so many of those a day to make a profit.

> Does anyone actually think this is a profitable market?

I recall a study in Paris last year (iirc) in which they concluded that the useful life of these scooters was shorter than their individual rental break even points...

They saw what happened with bike share.

The exit strategy was always: get acquired by Ford, GM, or another major auto manufacturer who wants the ad space. OR look to companies with massive ad spend: Citibank, Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, Oracle, etc. that would love to have ads in places where ads aren’t allowed (eg. parks) through this loophole.

The scooters are just branded litter, which is a huge market. As long as they can claim it serves some other purpose, it’s legal. You could start dumping branded water fountains all over cities saying it has something to do with hydration and it would be allowed as long as there was an app that allowed you to donate in bitcoin.

I don't think anybody thought it was a guaranteed win, but it was cheap enough to enter that a bunch of VCs went in for it.

They also share the market with bike rental.

> Electric scooters are expensive, repair and charging is expensive

Citation needed, at least to convince me. I think they could significantly bring down the cost at scale (production/maintenance wise at least).

Here are some estimates:

https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last...

These scooters are already at a fairly decent economy of production. Chinese factories are producing these in the thousands and companies are buying wholesale.

The core technology (batteries especially) is expensive, full stop. I’m curious where you think they could save money in larger scales? That’s not even to mention to get larger scale, they need more consumer adoption. I don’t have reliable data for this, but anecdotally I’ll say consumer interest is stagnant, and that’s already at unprofitable/heavily incentivized margins.

>Citation needed

Here's one supporting piece of evidence:

>Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100

They cost $300. Maybe bird gets them for $200. Even if you cut the cost down to $100, that's still $100 a month per scooter to run the network.

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