Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

"completely unstealable"? I have my doubts

"It is absolutely impossible to turn your Äike on and ride without turning it on through your personal account on our app."

Ouuufffff.....this will be proven wrong in about 4 hours after release

"Don't worry, we will notify you if someone is dumb enough to try abducting your Äike. In fact, we'll notify the whole street with our built-in alarm system."

Yes, because that totally worked great for car alarms.

"With our connected app and custom GPS tracking system, you'll always know where your scooter is."

GPS/GSM jammers are about $50 on many foreign trading sites. Obviously illegal to use but I doubt thieves care.

View on HN

> Yes, because that totally worked great for car alarms.

At least in Europe, nuisance car alarms are extremely rare nowadays. This is likely at least in part due to them being extremely regulated. The most error-prone sensors have been banned altogether, and there are limits for how long it is allowed to make noise, and how often it can make noise before it has to turn itself off until it is manually disarmed and re-armed.

I hope police will confiscate scooters that violate these rules and "notify the whole street" (or issue guidance that self-defense is allowed against such nuisance noise after some point).

Reading this is hilarious. Clearly it was made by europeans if their only concept of a thief is someone taking their vehicle and attempting to use it for themselves. In the US on the other hand, the bike/scooter/ebike thief does not care about the serviceable condition of the vehicle. It could be hit by a car and they'd want it. They want scrap metal which is priced by weight, so they take apart the vehicle and part out everything of value on the sidewalk in the open air, then leave the scraps behind. The police/DA do not seem to enforce petty theft, so this goes on in broad daylight unencumbered. You'd follow your GPS signal from the app to this encampment where your bike is being parted out, and you are liable to have your phone and wallet stolen or worse.

So you jam the GPS (and/or the Internet connection), take the scooter to your garage then what? Always ride it with the jammer?

I don't know how these ones are made but the electronics can be made hard to remove without damaging the scooter. Or say the manufacturer can make the cost of the operation so high that it won't make sense to steal them. Or, the tracking and control components can be so tightly integrated that removing the tracking ones you'll make the scooter inoperable.

Not saying these particular scooters are well protected from all this because I have no idea, but theoretically possible to achieve.

If it's like modern cars - you drive it to a garage, then plug in a special USB/OBD2 gadget that just disables all tracking and app control. I imagine on a scooter if might be a special cable you plug in somewhere on the motherboard(Playstation modchips anyone?). Unfortunately the underground market is perfectly adept at producing any kind of security override tools for cars, and I can only imagine that once a scooter company like this gets big enough you will be able to buy a $20 "safety override" dongle off Alibaba.

I have no idea why cars are so vulnerable but it is possible to achieve a pretty high level of protection in electronic components. Have a ROM that verifies the integrity of the Flash memory for example. I just found a patent for that even though it's sort of trivial. Overriding ROM is theoretically possible but can be a very costly operation.

In hacks, it's always about the costs. Make the device cheap enough to make the hack expensive enough to discourage theft.

also:

"run smoothly on air: our pneumatic tires are shock-absorbing things that make for a less bumpy ride" No proper shock absorber is a deal-breaker. Especially in Europe with stone paved streets.

"Setting new standards for user experience with customized end-user App" What a nice way to spell "vendor lock-in"

Oh yes, that's the other thing - since apparently there is no way to start the scooter without the app, expect it to turn into a brick in few years time when the company/app disappears or if they simply decide it's not worth supporting a few years old product anymore.

Yeah, as soon as I saw a mention of an app I stopped reading.

Why can't these things just use a key like most other powered vehicles!

> No proper shock absorber is a deal-breaker.

Not to the millions of cyclists in Europe.

The size of the wheel matters.

I have both a bike and an electric scooter, and any small bump, twig, or slightly deteriorated road can be felt much more to the point that I specifically avoid a part of my way to work to avoid a deteriorated road. With my bike before having my electric scooter, I didn't even notice the road was bad.

I simply can not drive on stone paved streets more than 5min, its really insufferable. And my electric scooter have shock absorber on the front but not the back. My next one will have shock absorber on both wheels, it's non-negotiable.

Translate this as "we did the math and we think we can afford insurance". A main reason one wouldn't buy those is theft. The market they gain will probably offset the insurance claims.

Or "we didn't do the math but have an excessive confidence in our security".

Or "this thing costs us $300 to make, we can replace it 5 times and still make a profit".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com