Bird has raised $100M for electric scooter sharing

“Our fund has too much cash. What can we invest it in? These software startups don’t need much capital....”

“I know. Scooters. They cost money, right? And it’ll need a ton of marketing!”

In the course of the last month a few different electric scooters have descended on downtown San Diego, this being one of them.

I dunno, they're all over the place and people seem to love them. For getting around a city center they're more convenient to rent simply because most of your destinations won't have a good solution for storage. You can pull up right to where you want to go and when you're ready to leave can usually find another one within a block or two.

They're not really that cheap to rent, although they're competitive with bike share prices.

If you, say, used one to get to & from work on a commute of a few miles you'd break even on buying your own scooter pretty quickly.

The big advantage is not having to deal with storing or charging the scooter, ever.

In Santa Monica & Venice there is usually a Bird or two within a block of you at all times.

They don't make money. Ridesharing subsidies are like uber/lyft's but on an even bigger scale.

In china, Mobike charges $1.58 per month for unlimited* trips on their ridesharing bikes. Given how their bikes cost ~$100 each, and how they operate millions of bikes, they are losing massive amounts of money.

Investors have the same mentality (once we are a monopoly, we can charge more) but until then they are incinerating cash.

*Mobike rides have the first 2 hours of each trip free. If you stay on longer you need to pay. However, you can just switch bikes after 2 hours to avoid the fee.

I have put some thought into this. Particularly the bike business. Making money out of the bikes isn't hard. These bikes are super freaking cheap:

75 USD - 90 USD for a Bike (https://m.alibaba.com/product/60710077310/export-EU-standard...)

1 USD - 25 USD for the remote lock (https://m.alibaba.com/product/60623794401/GPRS-Bluetooth-Cho...)

At this scale I wouldn't be surprised that they could get a whole painted bike + the lock + all the importation costs and taxes for 100 USD (maybe even less).

One ride costs 1 USD... That means they just need 100 rides to break even on a bike... If they get an average of 1 ride per bike in all their fleet (which is low imo), they just need 100 days of operation to break even on all their fleet. (These calculations don't take into account the operational costs, but you get the idea. As you grow and start creating more network effects and gaining economies of scales these costs will only grow linearly).

According to Seattle City Data, the average ride per bike here is something around 0.6 rides per bike (daily). That would likely improve again once it starts warming up.

Now regarding the Scooters, you could do a similar analysis. I was able to find foldable electric scooters at very cheap prices in bulk (45 USD, 80 USD, 70 USD, 120 USD, etc...). So it's also technically possible to break even very fast with scooters as well -> https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...

Finally, there are more angles to a business like this. There's a huge component which is gov subsidies. Local governments love this crap and I can totally see them paying these companies for providing a reliable alternative transportation. Another angle is just plain cheap advertising. You can basically wrap these crappy bikes and scooters with ad decals. You could also monetize based on geo-location and sell contextual ads as well as selling the data to brands.

You also made other good points like why wouldn't someone simply buy a scooter. What's appealing about this model is that you can just leave it anywhere. You don't have to get worried about this thing getting charged, or someone robbing it or vandalizing it. You use it when you need it and you continue with your life. Owning one adds an incredible amount of burden to something as mundane as moving from point A to point B.

Even the business model of getting people to try them for a while before they move on to owning their own is probably a profitable one.

One scooter could easily have 5-10 trips per day. At $2/trip, the payback period on a $400 scooter is 20-40 days. The economics here (and with dockless bikes) are quite impressive, which is why billions of dollars has been dumped into dockless electric personal transportation companies over the last few years.

The bigger question here is whether people will adopt scooters when they are more comfortable on bikes.

And don't you need a helmet and do you need a separate test /licence in the USA?

In the UK any one who got their driving licence after 2001 must pass the CBT before they can ride a scoter and that's limited to 50cc

Yep! Just posted the same sentiment. I have friends (and friends of friends) that have already gotten fined.

Helmets should be fitted for each individual's head size and shape. Generic helmets supplied at the sidewalk won't fit everyone.

Helmet rental? Not a hard problem to solve. Already being done at ski resorts and go kart tracks across the country. They usually give you a "sock" to put over your head.

Also, if you rent a "real" scooter or motorcycle they usually have helmets you can use.

Anecdotally, my sense as a Santa Monica local is that the helmet requirement is no longer being enforced in Santa Monica. I've ridden by cops several times in the last few days, no issues.

So I think it has somehow been negotiated with the authorities.

So this is what I thought, but if it's enforced as much as needing helmet to ride a bike is enforced, then it's less of an issue.

> if they change the law, it'll be super profitable

It sounds like the Uber model: ignore the law and try to get big enough to change it. Honestly, how much would it cost them to equip each garbage scooter with a garbage helmet? An extra dollar or two?

Santa Monica and West LA were bad enough before becoming infested with incompetents on scooters.

Unfortunately, the mindset is 'everyone else is doing it'. I'm not sure where I stand on legally requiring helmets, but man I would not ride one in the company of cars without one.

Have you ever used one?

There's also D3O material. [1] I wear a hat using this when I downhill ski. (Not really interested in a skiing helmet debate. I skied for years long before anyone besides racers wore helmets and I downhill ski very little these days and not very aggressively.)

I don't have a real opinion on when people "ought" to wear helmets. It's a tradeoff. People do have falls walking and accidents in cars where serious injury would have been prevented by wearing a helmet. And many of these sharing services are not practical if one is required to wear a "real" helmet.

[1] https://www.d3o.com/

This could work [0] but it's probably too expensive to include with the bikes/scooters since people would walk off with them. Certainly feasible for an individual to wear around the city though in case of need. I wonder if you could design some sort of airbag system into the bikes themselves.

[0]: https://hovding.com

Reduced from 22mph to 15mph.

In my opinion the law should change in that bicycle riders should wear helmets, too. It's not how much you can control your bike/scooter/segway but what happens if something unexpected happens. Blown type, hitting a curb or large stone, or a car.

I've seen what happens to adults when they don't wear helmets while biking. It's not a good idea. Be it your fault or someone else's fault, in the end your head is at risk.

Interesting position to take on those two things, since wearing a helmet makes an awful lot of sense since flying off a scooter onto a pavement at 20km will cause massive head injuries...

...and a scooter hitting a pedestrian is not as traumatic as a car hitting a scooter. ..given the relative speed differences of people/scooters/cars and humans ability to process objects at speed remaining the same.

> However people should definitely not ride Birds on sidewalks (although a majority of people do).

This, is why we can't have good things. Because assholes ruin it for everyone.

Most electronic scooters I've encountered are on sidewalks and pavements, travelling at speeds that can injure pedestrains pretty badly.

It does seem (to me at least) that alot of these idiots take pride in their turning skills, weaving left and right, avoiding people at the last moment possible. Most people just have to stop moving and wait for the bikes to pass because their speed these things are travelling at, coupled with the distance they are away from them, leaves pretty much zero margin for their (the rider's) error. Theres literally nothing much you can do, except to hope they don't hit you.

Furthermore, these bike are pretty silent. When they come from behind, it's quite a shock to the pedestrain.

Its a nice innovation, but I'm inclined to towards heavy handed regulation towards these things because of assholes.

There’s even an argument bike helmets make bike riding less safe (or at least don’t help at all): https://bicyclesafe.com/helmets.html

Reminds me of this: https://www.ecohelmet.com/

Essentially an origami helmet. Does anyone have some data points as to the efficacy of such a thing?

You are totally right, helmets should be mandatory for bikes too :)

I don't find $100m that surprising, and honestly don't think it's enough. They need the cash to expand to new cities. Motorized scooters are not cheap at all and cost $200-$300 each.

I'm in Santa Monica at the moment and encountered these scooters for the first time upon my arrival. I've been paying attention to how they're used by people and where I see them, and playing around with their app. I've no particular reason for doing so, other than base curiosity.

Leaving my hotel one morning this week, around 6:30am and before commuter traffic had really started, I noticed there were eight of their scooters line up just outside the exit of the hotel. I maid a point to walk by other hotels on the way to work and about half seemed to have them outside. By 8 or so, they were gone.

So, to answer your question: I assume there are a bunch of couriers or "Field Agent" style gig employees that walk around the downtown and collect them, and that they have an app that shows the last known location of each one. I also assume that there is a van somewhere that picks them up once they're collected, takes them somewhere to charge at night, and then drops them off at hotels and transit stops before the morning rush begins.

AFAIK, people are paid to charge them in their homes.

What would homeless people do with the scooters? They can’t ride them without paying, because the scooters need to be unlocked in the app, and there doesn’t seem to be an incentive for them to vandalize the scooters.

You don't even need to turn it off. Just wrap the GPS device in aluminium foil and you're done.

Social acceptability is part of it. But the bigger issue was likely part of what you see people arguing about here. Segways didn't belong on sidewalks and they didn't really work very well on roads. (And you can debate how great a fit they are/were even for bike lanes.)

For one, if personal mobility sharing services becomes a real estate problem (i.e. the footprint that docks or dockless bikes occupy), it makes sense that those with the smaller footprints will achieve better unit economics and be able to place their stations in more spots. Also it's way more efficient to move a bunch of scooters to a high-demand location than it is a bunch of bikes.

The usability difference between scooters and bikes is meaningful. They fit into a totally seamless user experience that would be very difficult to manage with bikes. They’re more tamper-proof, smaller, easier to hop on and off of, easier to manage in crowds, etc. Anectdotally, Bird scooters have melded into the environment in Santa Monica, Westwood, and the UCLA campus in a way that I can’t imagine happening with bikes. Bird scooters are all over the place these days without being nearly as cumbersome as I imagine bikes would be. As a few others have noted in this thread, Bird is exploding in LA right now, and I believe it’s because of their approach to a seamless user experience. The 10% difference in usability between bike sharing and electric scooter sharing seems to make all the difference.

Your concern is 100% valid but I think what we're headed for in urban areas is something like a free-for-all until the adoption of non-vehicular transportation gets so high that streets are bifurcated: cars over here, everything else, over here. It's going to be messy, but if Uber has proved anything it's that laws will change to accommodate revolutionary utility.