[glitch003]

>Instead of buying 19-month-old scooter company for $2B

Actually, Lyft has a scooter program that is the result of an acquisition.

"It wasn’t until July, when Lyft acquired Motivate, the nation’s largest bike-share operator, that the company began to send signals that it was considering joining the frenzy."

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17824040/lyft-electric-sco...

[pmart123]

Interesting. 2.5x revenue though and has exclusive city contracts. I still view this differently than paying $680M pre-revenue for Otto. On the scooter side, at $300/scooter, Uber could buy 100k scooters and stick an UberScoot button on their app and probably can more ridership than any of the year old startups.

[metildaa]

This assumes those scooters aren't impounded, damaged or left with dead batteries. There are no human drivers constantly maintaining these scooters, at best a random person may come by and charge them (for a fee OFC), but no quality assurance or maintenance is happening in a timely manner. This is why scooter companies are seeing their average scooter break after 4 months, there is no maintenance plan and they aren't built to be on the street, unsheltered 24/7.

[pmart123]

If Uber wanted to operate a scooter division, I still think it makes way more sense to do it themselves at this point given Uber has no barriers to enter this market. Millions of people already have Uber on their phone and a number of drivers are probably willing to pick up scooters to charge them or transport them for maintenance if needed. I'm just saying it seems way cheaper to roll out a pilot program with 10,000 scooters than investing hundreds of millions to a couple billion dollars in another company that effectively is letting you white label its scooters (that are manufactured by another company). Is a scooter maintenance company worth $2B?