[colbyaley]

This post on Bird's unit economics is pretty good. https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/10/how-to-understand-the-fina...

[jpao79]

Interestingly since charging the electric scooter is such an additional complication w.r.t. unit economics, it'd be great to see them just make them kick scooters (i.e. foot powered with no motor like the OG Razor scooter) with the only electronics being the GPS/cellphone locator unit?

You then mitigate the speed/helmet concerns somewhat as well.

[clairity]

companies like http://immotor.com/ are trying to solve that with swappable batteries that the user owns rather than the rental service.

interesting idea, but i haven't really thought through it to figure out if it makes more sense or not.

[ryanwaggoner]

Given the terrain, these would flow downward to collect like pools of water at the lowest points in San Francisco :)

[djrogers]

Then you’re basically renting a 3lb $50 commodity- anyone who wants one could gave one with them at any time. There’s no real market for mass rentals of that type of thing - cheap and portable.