[HN Gopher] Was the $5B that VCs plugged into escooters worth it?
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Was the $5B that VCs plugged into escooters worth it?
Author : marban
Score : 10 points
Date : 2023-02-19 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
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| heavyset_go wrote:
| $5B and the best they could do was dump piles of scooters on the
| street and make people pay to use them via an app.
| brianwawok wrote:
| And pay other people to go charge them.
| nasmorn wrote:
| It is just really expensive to ride. I use it sometimes where
| there are no good public transport options and it is like half a
| cab fare. I can't see them maintain a market if they increase
| prices. Maybe if we had longer lasting batteries they could drop
| the prices since they would not need to be charged so often. But
| as it stands it is either a curiosity or replacing something
| already expensive like a taxi for a small subset of taxi rides.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I don't think it's just the batteries, the whole economic model
| makes no sense. First, they're expensive - they need to be
| built for commercial use, so they're $500+ each. Second, demand
| is massively inefificent, a hundred thousand people want to
| travel from the train station to their office in the morning,
| and then back in the evening. Either you pay someone to keep
| riding the scooters back to the train station in the morning
| during commuting hours, or you accept that their utilization is
| going to be woeful. Thirdly, the MTBBTITR (Mean Time Between
| Being Thrown in The River) is 2 days, so you end up replacing
| your entire inventory every 2 days.
|
| So, we need to hire a full time worker per scooter to return it
| to where it's needed constantly, we need to replace the scooter
| every 2 days, and they're $500 each. So it costs the company
| about $300 a day to run 1 scooter, so they need to charge about
| $100 per journey. Unsurprisingly, the demand is highly elastic.
|
| The numbers are a bit facetious, but you get my point.
| flangola7 wrote:
| I read that batteries can last for dozens of miles.
| rpep wrote:
| Here in the U.K. scooters are only legal in specific trial areas
| and when hired from a company (normally one per city), which vets
| that the hirer has a driving license, and this ensures the person
| is riding them with insurance. But there are lots of people using
| privately owned e-scooters illegally - I live not far outside a
| trial area and regularly see people on them. This is despite a
| risk of large fines or even losing your driving license (most
| people need 12 penalty points to be banned from driving and being
| caught on one of these is 6 points).
|
| I would be interested to see how profitable these startups are in
| the face of competition in this direction, because it looks like
| here there'll be a liberalisation of the rules at some point. For
| e.g. I know a couple of people who commute on them, but it would
| seem to me to make sense for them to just buy one and charge it
| at home/work if it was legal.
| rjh29 wrote:
| In Bristol a provisonal driving license is enough, and anyone
| can get those. I think that's more about providing ID than
| proving that you can drive.
| abudabi123 wrote:
| Are there weights on the business logic for the decision and how
| near/far have outcomes compared to expectations? Apparently Usain
| Bolts's investing in emerging tech left him empty handed.
| strangattractor wrote:
| To the people manufacturing escooters almost certainly.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Looking at the roadmaps for the core component (batteries) they
| definitely jumped the gun.
|
| Sodium Ion batteries should produce dirt cheap scooters that will
| probably be 1/3 the cost of whatever they were using back when
| they invested.
|
| And "sharing" is kind of stupid. If you own your escooter, the
| battery will probably be removable (for easy recharging) and you
| just lock up the shell. Sharing is basically only good for
| tourism. E-bike sharing? It is bigger/heavier, that does make
| slightly more sense.
|
| I don't think their investment jumpstarted some fundamental
| movement either, maybe it helped nudge it a few years earlier,
| but ebikes/escooters are simply an inevitability of cheap dense
| batteries.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Afaik Taiwan has a network of swappable batteries for their
| (road) scooters so you can plug a fresh pack and go. Seems way
| more sensible than that SV shared scooter nonsense.
|
| Edit: https://www.gogoro.com/
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