Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business • Hacker News Board

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#121

Post by pwg » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:03 AM UTC

makomk wrote: post #89

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your calculation is completely off. 150 min * 0.15 $/min = $22.50. In the US you can get a kWh for about 12 cents. That means you can get 187.5 kWh. The largest Tesla Model S has a 100 kWh. I don't know what kind of battery these scooters have, but I am sure it's not nearly as big as a Tesla battery.

The electricity costs aren't the problem, the big cost here is paying people to collect the scooters up and charge them. As the article points out the cost of electricity makes up such a tiny amount of this cost that it's not even worth calculating.

And, from reading the article, the cost of the electricity comes out of the "finders fee". So those that charge them receive $5-$20 each, minus their cost of electricity to recharge them. So if most scooters only receive the $5 "finders fee" then Bird is paying a flat $5 per scooter for finding, recharging, and returning the scooters.

It costs $1 to 'unlock' and $0.15/minute after that. So a $5 payment requires: 1 unlock $1 and $4.00@0.15/min = 26.7 minutes of "usage" (note, not ride, usage, the 0.15 is paid per minute that a user has the scooter "unlocked") before the $5 "finders fee" is repaid by one scooter and one rider.

The numbers shift of course if the same scooter is "unlocked" by plural individuals during the day, due to the $1 unlock fee. Five usages of a few minutes each for a single scooter in a single day repays the $5 "finders fee" just with the $1 unlock fees alone.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#122

Post by bschwindHN » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:04 AM UTC

aembleton wrote: post #115

bschwindHN wrote: post #84

Wouldn't it make more sense to make the batteries replaceable? Just have them locked in place until a "charger" person authenticates through the app, then allow them to swap in a fresh one. At that point transport would be reduced to just moving the batteries around instead of the whole scooter. They could still be charged at home. People might steal them but the article already mentions that some people steal them a…

It would but that would require custom designed scooters. These are Xiaomi M365 with some additional electronics - https://www.gearbest.com/skateboard/pp_596618.html

Ohhh, that explains it! I wonder if they'll have to switch to that kind of charging system in the future, this current model doesn't seem all that economical.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#123

Post by Sharlin » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:05 AM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #104

hmd_imputer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the lack of strict regulations is one of the reasons start-up businesses flourish in the US. Although I am pro-regulation in some issues, I think that European style pain-in-the-ass regulations only hinder technological advancement. Would UBER ever be successful in Europe? Nope.

...uber is successful in Europe. There are cities that banned it, but there are as many that didn't. Conversely, Uber is not very successful in South-East Asia, but not for the abundance of regulation but for the lack of it - Grab, a local copy-paste of Uber, has become so dominant that Uber had to leave most of the markets there

And indeed Uber has been a catalyst in several EU countries for taxi deregulation. They had to leave Finland because it was illegal to be an Uber driver without having a ”traditional” taxi license; a legislation change will come into effect this summer that greatly deregulates the taxi industry. So I guess they succeeded in being disruptive, but I agree with the other commenter that Uber is probably not the best example from corporate ethics point of view.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#124

Post by camtarn » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:06 AM UTC

bschwindHN wrote: post #84

Wouldn't it make more sense to make the batteries replaceable? Just have them locked in place until a "charger" person authenticates through the app, then allow them to swap in a fresh one. At that point transport would be reduced to just moving the batteries around instead of the whole scooter. They could still be charged at home. People might steal them but the article already mentions that some people steal them a…

It's an interesting point. Perhaps the reason they ask people to move the scooters is that they also sometimes need scooters to be retrieved from weird places and left somewhere more convenient.

So, sure, a scooter which was used and left on a main street can just stay there and get its battery swapped, but maybe it's not worth trying to figure out which scooters need moved and which battery-swapped, and to get the chargers to do the right thing in each case.

The fact that they pay different prices per scooter might invalidate this, but just a guess.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#125

Post by gambiting » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:10 AM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #117

gambiting wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but at the moment(at least over here in UK) the tax on petrol and diesel covers road building/maintenance for the entire country. With this tax slowly disappearing, we will have to find another way to tax people who use the roads, and the best way to do that is to tax the fuel they use as it's directly proportional to their use. Same reason why heating/farming oil doesn't have this tax, even though it's technical…

This is kind of a perverse incentive though: - Discourage "bad" thing (driving, drinking, smoking, sugar, ...) by applying heavy taxes - Occurrence of that thing goes down - Complain about falling of tax revenue I'm generally in favour of applying taxes like this, but they need to be based on the actual harm/externalities, and be targetted effectively. Taxing electricity-used-for-vehicles seems easy to game, and only…

>>and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter;

If you mean VED I don't think that achieves anything, perhaps only discouraging people from buying cars with particularly high CO2 emissions, but if you can afford a sports car with 200g/km+ emissions, you can probably afford the annual VED on it. Besides, with VED refresh recently it almost doesn't matter, you only discourage people from buying expensive vehicles as they incur extra tax due to their purchase price, not their emissions.

>>perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT?

The issue here is that obviously you have to prove that those miles were done in United Kingdom, and obviously it's not illegal to use your car abroad. Taxing fuel has the nice property of the taxes going into the budget of the country where you buy it, so the assumption is that visitors to the UK will buy fuel here and contribute at least a bit to the UK road budget - and the same goes for British drivers going abroad.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#126

Post by briandear » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:17 AM UTC

piva00 wrote: post #109

hmd_imputer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the lack of strict regulations is one of the reasons start-up businesses flourish in the US. Although I am pro-regulation in some issues, I think that European style pain-in-the-ass regulations only hinder technological advancement. Would UBER ever be successful in Europe? Nope.

I don't think that Uber was a good example of a good company hindered by regulations... The pain-in-the-ass regulations also save a lot of people's time and money (Theranos-style startups are much less likely to pop-up over this side of the Atlantic also). It's a trade-off, like most things in life.

For every Theranos, there are 25 Stripes, Dropboxes, and Mixpanels.

It’s not a good trade off at all.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#127

Post by joosters » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:17 AM UTC

weber111 wrote: post #113

joosters wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These companies have existed for how long? It was you who chose it as a measure of success for the company! It'd be difficult to find any examples even if the scope was widened to include bike hire schemes, which have been around for almost a decade. I agree that it'd be great if we could switch from using cars, however I'm not sure that scooter hire companies are the way to do this. Wouldn't it be better and less wa…

> Wouldn't it be better and less wasteful if people owned scooters? Isn't the, well, _whole point_ of the sharing economy to reduce waste by not having everyone own things they only use some of the time?

Yes, but the costs might prove to be too high. For example, if people owned their own, they wouldn't need people driving around town collecting scooters to recharge, and then driving them back to a drop-off point. Likewise, rented scooters probably have a far shorter lifetime due to theft, harsh treatment, abandonment and so on.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#128

Post by mkbkn » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:18 AM UTC

Meanwhile, Ather Energy, an electric scooter startup based in Bangalore, India is launching charging stations across the city and it'd be free to use for the next six months (for any type of electric vehicle).

https://blog.atherenergy.com/ev-adoption-made-easy-with-athe...

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#129

Post by simias » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:19 AM UTC

rkangel wrote: post #86

apexalpha wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I could not imagine buttoned down European city like Vienna or even a messy one like Amsterdam allowing it) I don't really see benefit over a bike. Except that bikes don't require charging.

The main one would be that you are a pedestrian rather than a road user. People who take bikes along sidewalks and footpaths are a hazard but a scooter is less of an issue. Also, less skill to ride and less risk.

In bike-friendly European cities like Amsterdam and many German cities you generally have dedicated biking lanes which makes this a non-issue. On bike-unfriendly cities like Paris the sidewalks are often so crowded and filled with obstacles that merely walking fast can be challenging at times.

I can believe that it works great in American cities with very large roads and mostly deserted sidewalks but that wouldn't translate well everywhere I think.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#130

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, May 22, 2018, 10:24 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #93

gambiting wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can't register a company at your home address, but no one will ever deny you coverage if you do clerical work at home. At least every single insurance and rental I had in UK had a special provision for this - if you need to stay at home and work remotely, that's 100% covered. It just can't be your principal place of work.

What kind of insurance are you talking about here? Wouldn't increased presence in the home make any mishaps less likely?

You can easily get cover for working at home. But usually work is excluded from domestic policies; particularly third party liability.

Obviously the liabilities vary, if you're doing prototyping of fireworks in your garage then it's a little more risky than coding!

Insurance isn't always priced solely by risk; work-from-home insurance probably reduces claims for many people but that doesn't mean you can't charge more for it.

It would be interesting to know how occupier presence varies with claims made.