Shared Scooters Don't Last Long (substack.com)

Alison Griswold, writes on her newsletter Oversharing: I took a look at data on scooter rides in Louisville, Kentucky, shared online as part of the city's open data policy. The latest data is available here. The data set I used was older and included monthly data on scooter trips from August through December. It also included a unique "ID" for each scooter, a detail that was key to my analysis and has been stripped out of subsequent data sets published by Louisville. The data doesn't differentiate between Bird and Lime, but as Bird started operations in August 2018 and Lime that November, you can assume it skews toward Bird.

With that preamble, here are some things I found: The average lifespan of a scooter in Louisville from August to December was 28 days. Median lifespan was 23 days. If you stripped out scooter IDs that first appeared in December, to focus on older vehicles, the average lifespan increased slightly to 32 days and the median lifespan to 28 days. Still stripping out scooter IDs that started in December, the median scooter took 70 trips over 85 miles.

Scooter lifespan is a key factor in scooter unit economics, as you may recall. The more trips and miles a single scooter can cover, the better for shared scooter companies, which have to recoup the cost of each vehicle before they can start making any money. In October, The Information reported that Bird was spending $551 per scooter with a goal of reducing that cost to $360. At the time, I said that meant Bird needed five rides a day on a $551 scooter for 5.25 months just to recoup the initial cost. The picture painted by the Louisville data is even worse.

[...] So, our scooter company walks away with $2.32 in revenue per day from the average scooter in Louisville. As we said at the beginning, Louisville data indicates that the average scooter was around for between 28 and 32 days. That means the typical scooter generated something like $65 to $75 in revenue for the company after most operating costs over its lifetime.

Comments

unnecessary buzzword

[Iamthecheese]

There's nothing special going on here. This isn't some kind of new economy. Things have been rented for millennia. These aren't shared scooters. They're rental scooters.

Re:A lifespan of only 23 to 32 days?!

[Registered Coward v2]

I am a volunteer at a local electronics museum. We use tesla coils and van de graf generators for demonstrations. We learned long time ago that you don't use consumer hobby grade stuff for public demonstrations. During my three year (so far) tenure there, we went through three cheap van de graf generators before settling on one that is more institutional grade; costing about twice as much. That unit is still going strong.

It generally pays to buy quality. My blender is much more expensive than many you see in stores but blends stuff that would strip a cheaper one's gears in a second. That doesn't necessarily mean buying the absolute best when a high quality less expensive item will work, it's a cost tradeoff and at some point the added value is less than the added costs.

Same goes with tools. Please don't get me going on Harbor Freight. Put it this way. A jewelry maker told me that he will not be caught dead inside a Harbor Freight store.

While I am in wholehearted agreement with you in tools and have had a "Buy quality once or cheap forever" mentality ingrained by my mechanic father; Harbor Freight has its place. It's perfect for when you need a cheap one time use item. For example, I built a fence using a HF nail gun. I ran quality nails through it and it lasted throughout the project, in fact it still works but is basically relegated to hanging on the wall. For about $60 it was cheaper than a rental and way cheaper than a quality nailer that would drive nails long after the HF tool died. I would not use a HF tool for something I made my living on and needed to run reliably and the cost of lost productivity exceeded the tool's cost.