I can't speak for others , but OBike (which they dumped about a thousand over night into a city of 400'000 people) are borderline useless crap.

They actually tried to sell them off after the company folded, but no takers. None!

I tried using one of the schemes in London (ofo I think). After 5mins I got off and walked because they somehow designed a bicycle less efficient than walking

In the US? Liability. Uber has lots of money, so slippin’ jimmy would have a field day

How are ordinary bike companies immune from this kind of lawsuit?

In US liability is everywhere and in everything. With that logic it would be impossible to sell anything (imagine liability associated with a copy of Windows!). I'm not lawyer but I can imagine donating these bikes with clear legal contract with receiver in a state where this won't be issue.

> "Why not at least peel the decals [branding] off and sell the bikes to individuals?" Jon Orcutt of Bike New York, a non-profit group, told news site Motherboard.

> "We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes," Uber said in a statement.

> "But given many significant issues - including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment - we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them."

Translation: selling the bikes would remove those buyers from our pool of potential renters.

Not really, it'd remove them from the company that bought the newer ones. I suspect liability really is a concern, particularly for scooters full of lithium ion batteries and being charged by Joe Experimenter at home.

All it takes is one person who does something stupid and burns down their house with a used scooter to negate any benefit from selling them. Not because that person would automatically win, but because Uber would have to defend.

Weren't the scooter companies paying random people who signed up to go charge the scooters themselves at their homes? Surely that's far higher liability.

Plus, if this was a concern how on earth is the used car market able to survive? I just don't think liability factors in here at all. My guess is that scrapping them is easier and nets about the same amount of money as selling them. Selling that many scooters off piecemeal would take quite a bit of time & effort, plus costs to store them in the meanwhile.

Scooters yes, e-bikes no. The e-bikes have much bigger batteries. More energy = bigger boom. They also probably only had a fraction of chargers compared to the number of bikes, and sourcing more would probably take a lot of extra time and expense. It would have been better if they could find another bikeshare operator to sell to, but I can understand why they didn't sell to consumers.

If they sell them on the cheap it would kill demand