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Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

theatlantic.com

11–20 of 243 posts

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#11
> “Charging scooters for Bird is like Pokémon Go, but when you get paid for finding Pokémon”

A modern version of Rip Van Winkle would only have to be asleep for 2 months to be just as clueless and out-of-touch as the original Van Winkle was when he took a 20-year nap.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#12

I wonder if the company is asking these teens, during the registration as contractors, if they have permission from their parents to charge all those scooters at home. I can imagine several parents getting angry for excessive increments in the electricity bills every month without having a clue about their children's "business". Of course, many of them will probably find the scooters in the garage in a regular mornin…

The article says that electricity cost for charging scooters is practically nothing. If we believe it or assume that electricity cost is trivial compared to the payment, then I don't see any parent that'll say no to their nearly-adult children making money on the side by such an activity.

At worst they'll ask for compensation.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#13

I wonder if the company is asking these teens, during the registration as contractors, if they have permission from their parents to charge all those scooters at home. I can imagine several parents getting angry for excessive increments in the electricity bills every month without having a clue about their children's "business". Of course, many of them will probably find the scooters in the garage in a regular mornin…

Each scooter has about a 300 Watt Hour battery, call it 60% charging efficiency (likely way more efficient than that) and you’re only talking about five cents of electricity per scooter.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#14

I love how you can see the original less-clickbait headlines of 'Who charges those electric bird scooters?' in the title tag and 'charging-electric-scooters-is-a-cutthroat-business' in the url.

How do you know that the tag contains the "original" headline? It seems to be more tailored for SEO, i.e. to attract the people who wonder (and then Google), "Who charges the electric scooters?"

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#15

Out of control? Seems pretty cool that there's a company offering young people a rewarding, competitive, and productive after school activity.

Did you get to the part about violent confrontations between would-be chargers trying to claim the same scooter?

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#16
I'm surprise they haven't tried old school kick powered scooters with an additional electronic GPS unit:

http://goped.com/know-ped/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtn5kg3ZH3M

Or something like this: Micro PedalFlowhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfIzZo6ouDo

It would reduce the speed concerns too.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#17
I want to hear more about Bird's business model. How can it be worthwhile for them to give hundreds of dollars out to have the scooters charged? What do people pay for using the scooters?

As per the article, it also seems incentives are not quite thought out yet, so people can grab the $20 "hard-to-find" fee reasonably easily. It sounds like you can have a friend stash them until the fee goes up, then go and collect it. If this happens to every bike, that's maybe $20 per week? $1k a year per scooter? And I would guess a scooter itself costs a few hundred, as well?

Can you rent out a scooter for a sensible amount? My guess would be that the scooters are not at 100% capacity, otherwise it would be hard to find one. Kinda like the Boris Bikes in London. There's also infrastructure costs involved with maintaining the fleet, making sure they're where rides are likely to originate, marketing, and so on.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#19

I want to hear more about Bird's business model. How can it be worthwhile for them to give hundreds of dollars out to have the scooters charged? What do people pay for using the scooters? As per the article, it also seems incentives are not quite thought out yet, so people can grab the $20 "hard-to-find" fee reasonably easily. It sounds like you can have a friend stash them until the fee goes up, then go and collect…

> Riders can locate and unlock scooters using the company’s smartphone app, and after paying the $1 unlocking fee are charged 15 cents per minute during use.
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