Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business
I want to hear more about Bird's business model. How can it be worthwhile for them to give hundreds of dollars out to have the scooters charged? What do people pay for using the scooters?As per the article, it also seems incentives are not quite thought out yet, so people can grab the $20 "hard-to-find" fee reasonably easily. It sounds like you can have a friend stash them until the fee goes up, then go and collect it. If this happens to every bike, that's maybe $20 per week? $1k a year per scooter? And I would guess a scooter itself costs a few hundred, as well?Can you rent out a scooter for a sensible amount? My guess would be that the scooters are not at 100% capacity, otherwise it would be hard to find one. Kinda like the Boris Bikes in London. There's also infrastructure costs involved with maintaining the fleet, making sure they're where rides are likely to originate, marketing, and so on.