> Riders can locate and unlock scooters using the company’s smartphone app, and after paying the $1 unlocking fee are charged 15 cents per minute during use.
Back of the napkin calculations suggest that, in order to break even just from the charging costs alone, each scooter needs to be ridden for at least 2 and a half hours. Based on some quick googling (but without taking into account the terrain and the rider's weight and riding style), a scooter with a full load can be ridden for about 6 hours.
Looks like you're assuming every charge costs them $20. From my (admittedly skimmed) reading of the article - that's a special case for scooters that've "gone missing", and is effectively a "reward for finding and returning it".
6 hours is nowhere near accurate, it's closer to 2 hours in ideal circumstances. 1-1.5 hrs in most usage scenarios. 6 hours is about how long it takes to charge.
The Xiaomi M365 that is used as a base for many of these e-scooters has a real-life range of around 20km and a top speed of 25km/h (a 280Wh battery and a 250W motor with 500W peak performance).
So the battery can be drained in one hour if you're moving quickly.
So best case scenario, let's assume that each ride is 15 minutes, that means 24 rides in the 6 hours. If we also assume full 6 hour usage, we end up with (24 rides * $1) + (360 min * $0.15).
That's really a best case and that's not counting the maintenance costs (replacing the broken/stolen scooters in particular). They seem to pay the "chargers" extremely well currently, I'm sure they're still in the bootstrapping stage and not actually trying to make money. One person quoted in the article even says he expects the reward to be lowered eventually.
Your calculation is completely off. 150 min * 0.15 $/min = $22.50. In the US you can get a kWh for about 12 cents. That means you can get 187.5 kWh. The largest Tesla Model S has a 100 kWh. I don't know what kind of battery these scooters have, but I am sure it's not nearly as big as a Tesla battery.
> I don't know what kind of battery these scooters have, but I am sure it's not nearly as big as a Tesla battery.
280Wh. They have nowhere near 6h range either, the machine is advertised for a range of 18.6 miles and a top speed of 15.5, though it has regenerative braking which can improve the range a bit.
The electricity costs aren't the problem, the big cost here is paying people to collect the scooters up and charge them. As the article points out the cost of electricity makes up such a tiny amount of this cost that it's not even worth calculating.
And, from reading the article, the cost of the electricity comes out of the "finders fee". So those that charge them receive $5-$20 each, minus their cost of electricity to recharge them. So if most scooters only receive the $5 "finders fee" then Bird is paying a flat $5 per scooter for finding, recharging, and returning the scooters.
It costs $1 to 'unlock' and $0.15/minute after that. So a $5 payment requires: 1 unlock $1 and $4.00@0.15/min = 26.7 minutes of "usage" (note, not ride, usage, the 0.15 is paid per minute that a user has the scooter "unlocked") before the $5 "finders fee" is repaid by one scooter and one rider.
The numbers shift of course if the same scooter is "unlocked" by plural individuals during the day, due to the $1 unlock fee. Five usages of a few minutes each for a single scooter in a single day repays the $5 "finders fee" just with the $1 unlock fees alone.
>And, from reading the article, the cost of the electricity comes out of the "finders fee". So those that charge them receive $5-$20 each, minus their cost of electricity to recharge them.
To be picky, since these chargers/gathererers are largely teens living with their parents, the cost for recharge comes from the household utility bill (not paid by the kid).
Surely it is a trifling amount, but to it you must sum the miles with the car/minivan used for the search and pickup (which costs is as well at least partially subsidized by the parents).
> Surely it is a trifling amount, but to it you must sum the miles with the car/minivan used for the search and pickup
I suspect the cost of driving easily overshadows the cost of electricity, considering that even inflated California electricity rates price a kWh (of which these scooter batteries hold about one quarter) about the same as the incremental cost of driving one mile.
Whether it's trifling depends on how far they have to drive for each scooter. That cost is sunk if they "recover" it or not, unlike with the electricity. According to the article, the company has made it a bounty-hunting model, so even if the total area is only a few miles across, just getting there is no guarantee.
* Another poster provided a technical sheet asserting a 280Wh battery and 250W motor [1], which means the scooter can be discharged in slightly more than an hour.
* Getting electricity at $.15/KWh [2] means that you essentially have no cost recharging the battery.
This means that, while there is no business riding and reloading (aside from, essentially, having rides at 40% off), it is profitable to empty a scooter and reload it yourself, provided you can trigger the increased fee.
There's another important task they do though - they collect them up from random locations, charge them, and then drop them off at pre determined locations, "nests".
I reckon the bicycle ride rental (no it's not "sharing"!) companies would be less hated here if they had a crew of teenagers making good pocket money returning all the out-of-the-way (mostly at-the-bottom-of-hills) bikes to locations where people expected/wanted to rent them...