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Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

theatlantic.com

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Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#141

Post by rectang »

briandear wrote: post #126
piva00 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless you're one of the little people whose health was harmed in the Theranos fiasco. Or are those people acceptable sacrifices?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-patients-hurt-by-theranos-1...

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#142

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Do the economics stack up?

"""Bird pays Brandon, a contract worker, up to several hundred dollars a night. On one particularly successful night, Brandon brought home $600."""

The article does not have many specifics but roughly Brandon seems to get 10 or so scooters on each trip, two trips a night(?). so that's something between 10 bucks and 30 bucks per charged scooter cost to Bird. Even if it's just 10 bucks that becomes the cost of the bike every quarter or so - that kind of opex must be killing them?

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#143

Post by dalbasal »

apexalpha wrote: post #82
dalbasal wrote: post #80

Dunno about the way charging works, at least long term. Scooter sharing through, that's kind of promising. Beijing (and other cities) have proven that bike sharing can become a major transport type if the city will allow bike sharing companies to just dump bikes all over the sidewalk. It's crude, but it at least let's us see how far bike sharing can go if/when stations are a non-problem. Besides the mess (I could not…

>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.

I guess I phrased that badly. My point is about scooter sharing as an alternative/augmentation of bike sharing. No comment on personally owned scooters or bikes.

Beijing (one example) has bike sharing without stations. Just dump the bike wherever and the bike sharing guys will deal with it. This is an interesting data point, because it removes the infrastructure bottleneck entirely (but makes a mess). What we learn from it is that bike sharing is bottlenecked and that it can grow a lot by widening that bottleneck, by adding more "stations."

European cities ( early to the bike sharing game) are really unlikely to allow such mess. Scooters may be another way of achieving the same thing, because they can be extremely space saving.

In my European city (Dublin) bike stations usually take up about 4-6 parallel parking spaces and a little bit of road and sidewalk. We don't have enough of them because that amount is space is hard to come by. I think a scooter sharing station could half or quarter the required space, with the same footprint. .. especially folding scooters.

At a pinch, I think you could get a station onto a single parking space. This makes finding room for them way easier. This means we can have more of them, maybe much more.

As to the benefit of powered scooters: cheap, small, fun, carriable, effective over short distances. Cons: need power, not as fast/stable as a bike and less suitable for longer journeys.

I doubt any of these are as important as the availablility of stations near where you want to start and end your trip. I think scooters>bikes in terms of space, and space is the right problem to solve.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#144

Post by isostatic »

usrusr wrote: post #106
isostatic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax the fuel to cover the total externalities

Doesn't work if it's teens converting family money into personal money. That is a situation with some surprising similarities to money laundering.

Why is that a concern to anyone other than the person who pays the bils (presumably the parents)

No different to someone mining bitcoin using their parent's electricity, or someone delivering pizzas using their parents car

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#145

Post by isostatic »

gambiting wrote: post #125
chriswarbo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The issue here is that obviously you have to prove that those miles were done in United Kingdom

Why? The law could just charge based on miles regardless.

However if you did choose to allow people to exempt overseas mileage you could read the odometers at ports (say charge them £10 for the privilege, so it only makes sense if you're doing a lot of mileage)

Clearly Northern Ireland would have to be exempt.

However mileage is very different, the externalities of a smart car driving 50miles from Lancaster to Carlise at 3AM is far different to that of a 13 ton lorry driving from Luton to Oxford Circus at 8AM -- in pollution generated (locally and globally), in damage to the road, congestion

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#146

Post by melkiaur »

apexalpha wrote: post #82
dalbasal wrote: post #80

Dunno about the way charging works, at least long term. Scooter sharing through, that's kind of promising. Beijing (and other cities) have proven that bike sharing can become a major transport type if the city will allow bike sharing companies to just dump bikes all over the sidewalk. It's crude, but it at least let's us see how far bike sharing can go if/when stations are a non-problem. Besides the mess (I could not…

>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.

I have one for two reasons: a bad knee prevents me from cycling, and a bike doesn't fit in the train I take to go to work, whereas even the bulky m365 does.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#147

Post by isostatic »

pjc50 wrote: post #133
isostatic wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money do we pay to keep the middle east from devolving into all-out war and keeping a stable oil price?

Eh? Currently or in the future? The war is mostly already there; while Iran and Saudi aren't directly shooting at each other they've on opposite sides of the wars in Syria and Yemen.

Over the last 50 years the US government has spent trillions of dollars and thousands of american lives on keeping the oil flowing from the gulf, directly funding the current shooting wars, but only to a level where the oil carries on flowing.

That's a massive subsidy

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#148

Post by geezerjay »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #68
geezerjay wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back of the napkin calculations suggest that, in order to break even just from the charging costs alone, each scooter needs to be ridden for at least 2 and a half hours. Based on some quick googling (but without taking into account the terrain and the rider's weight and riding style), a scooter with a full load can be ridden for about 6 hours.

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.

> Your calculation is completely off.

Ah, someone complaining online how some random person's back of the napkin calculations are off.

Let's see if the nitpicker has a case.

> 150 min * 0.15 $/min = $22.50.

So, let's actually do the math:

* $24/0.15 = 160 minutes

Wow. Completely off.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#149

Post by icebraining »

joosters wrote: post #127
weber111 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yet electric scooters existed before these services started, and there was no major uptake of their ownership comparable to their current rented use, as far as I know. Which implies that alternative is not real.
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