7 ms·

Taxify is entering the e-scooter game

41 points by mariushn 8y ago

_ph_ 8y ago
I am looking forward to watch how this develops. I think small electric vehicles have a huge future to reduce traffic congestions and pollution. With small electric vehicles, I think of all new mobility enabled by the progress with battery technogoly, ranging from e-Bikes, Segways, e-Scooters to whatever else might be invented. E-Scooters look like great devices for the typical short distances in urban regions.
mmjaa 8y ago
I've been using the local Electric Moped rental to get around my large metropolitan city, and I have to say it is really delightful to use and experience. I have all the best parts of having a moped to use, without any of the ownership issues. Of course, it helps that the provider has deployed thousands of the things .. but with every ride I'm ever more convinced this is the future of transportation. Easy to use electric rentals, just great ..
rubidium 8y ago
Even if the scooter craze crashes and burns (either due to regulations, insustainable business model, or lack of sustained customer demand aka here comes winter) it's gotta be helping drive down prices to manufacture and improving electric scooters and bikes technology. Scooter rental isn't super appealing for my use case, but buying one to use for commuting now is much more attainable than even 5 years ago.
- ashelmire 8y ago
  Scooters and electric bikes are the new hoverboards and segways. Do your health a favor and buy a regular commuter bike instead.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Or even a regular foot-powered scooter. It will last forever and if/when it wears out it won't be full of e-waste.
    - blacksmith_tb 8y ago
      Hmm, my daily ride is 8mi / 13km - and I often want to pick up groceries, library books, etc. A scooter (even an electric) is still much less practical for these use cases.
- kawfey 8y ago
  I know a person who works on Bird's freight team, they apparently have been moving 2 full Boeing 747s of scooters (I estimate that to be about 12,000-14,000 based on weight) every day from China, at one point about $150 a pop). I think it's a sustainable model because after being shipped, delivered, and released (estimating about $80 more per scooter), it's ridden until dead every day on average 10 times (1.43mi/ride average, range 15mi average), earning it $10 plus $0.15/min, or ~$23.50/day. It breaks even after 7 rides, and they have at least 20 rides in them before they're toast. I haven't factored in other parts of the economy, like oversupply, theft, premature damage, and payroll for the employees including chargers, but seeing they're in 100 cities with at least 3 million scooters on the streets being ride. I also based my guesses from https://www.bird.co/blog/birdyearone https://www.bird.co/blog/birdyearone.
  - CompelTechnic 8y ago
    That is amazing. I had a training class on lean manufacturing about a year ago. The low cost enabled by production-line mentality of scooter production combined with the ad-hoc resource allocation enabled by the app for both riders and chargers makes this so darn efficient it is crazy. Very lean.
  - dlhavema 8y ago
    > and they have at least 20 rides in them before they're toast. are you saying the scooters electric part dies after 20 rides?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - gnicholas 8y ago
      I think kawfey meant that in a given day, each scooter can be ridden 20 times before the battery is depleted. I don't think this was a description of the lifetime of the battery — just its daily capacity.
  - tomjakubowski 8y ago
    Take away at least $5 per day per scooter, paid to the chargers, to take it off the street every night.
toastal 8y ago
I know it's a combination of 'taxi' and '-ify', but it reads too much like 'tax' and '-ify'. Taxes generally have a negative or necessary evil connotation which doesn't seem like a great company name. It's a good thing the scooters are not slated to go to the US, where 'taxes' are a four-letter word, or they might end up in the Boston harbor.
- frockington 8y ago
  I was really wondering how taxes, an app, and e-scooters were going to somehow come together when I first clicked on the link
- bogomipz 8y ago
  I had the same visceral reaction, the notion of a transportation service get's lost in that name.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >It's a good thing the scooters are not slated to go to the US, where 'taxes' are a four-letter word, or they might end up in the Boston harbor. Maybe Portsmouth harbor. For the past century or so the people of Boston have been generally welcoming to taxes, nosy government and all the other things the Bostonians of the 1700s resented the British for. Their northern neighbors, not so much. That still doesn't make "tax-$anything" a good company name for any business that doesn't have to do with taxes. Better to have a neutral and boring name than a name that some people associate with bad things.
  - throwaway5752 8y ago
    It was historically about "taxation without representation", not taxes per se. It was a about democratic representation when creating the laws (and taxes) that were imposed on them.
- germinalphrase 8y ago
  Agreed. Something as simple as TaxiDash would be more communicative while avoiding that obvious pitfall.
CompelTechnic 8y ago
I am really excited to see whether this business model is sustainable or not. I have found it interesting that some of my left-leaning friends oppose these scooters on the grounds of them being a public nuisance. For anyone who wants to curb global warming, these scooters are a darn good way to do it. The tradeoffs are easily worth it. Some people want to act like the tradeoffs don't exist/ if they just wish for something hard enough, the solution that has no tradeoffs will appear, despite institutional inertia.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I have to say I think the impact of scooters on global warming will be nil if not negative. Those little stand-up electric scooters mostly substitute for walking, not driving. And in that sense they are worse for global warming because they actually use electricity, in many places generated by coal. And consider the warming impact of making the things. Metal forging, paint, tires, batteries, electronics.
  - zhoujianfu 8y ago
    I think you may be underestimating how many car rides they are removing. They’re great to not deal with parking and traffic, and they’re not taking people away from walking/riding bikes. I scraped bird vs bike share data in Santa Monica for a while and bird did seven times as many rides as the bike share with the same number of devices in the same area (and the bike share was doing roughly the same amount of rides as before bird showed up).
  - Reedx 8y ago
    Maybe, I think it depends on how durable they are. And how much they help with the last mile problem. Consider the cases where someone has the option to take a bus or train, but there's a mile gap on both sides of their commute (or even just one side). So instead they drive the whole distance. If they can hop off the bus/train onto a scooter to close that gap, it can tip the scales to public transit vs taking a car.
  - maherbeg 8y ago
    https://medium.com/uber-under-the-hood/understanding-multimodality-an-analysis-of-early-jump-users-4a35d647b7e6 https://medium.com/uber-under-the-hood/understanding-multimo... This is a great early analysis on the roll out of jump bike shares on the uber platform. During business hours / commuting hours, uber usage dropped by 15% in favor of jump bicycle shares. Many of the trips seem to replace commutes within the city, and this is while the number of bikes is limited. If the number of bikes explodes, and they can politically shift the landscape to enable safer biking/scootering etc., then that can make a huge dent in denser cities in America.
andrewla 8y ago
This is definitely a time when I'm annoyed to be a New Yorker -- we're shut out of all of these developments. We committed to Citibike (provided by Motivate), and now we're stuck trying to protect the granted monopoly by shutting out all the dockless e-bikes and electric scooters in favor of the overpriced incumbent.
- sieabahlpark 8y ago
  Vote out your ridiculous government then.
- ihuman 8y ago
  How come Citibike stops New York from having dockless alternatives? DC has the Capital Bikeshare docked bike system (also by Motivate), but still has rentable dockless bikes and electric scooters.

41 points by mariushn 8y ago

_ph_ 8y ago

I am looking forward to watch how this develops. I think small electric vehicles have a huge future to reduce traffic congestions and pollution. With small electric vehicles, I think of all new mobility enabled by the progress with battery technogoly, ranging from e-Bikes, Segways, e-Scooters to whatever else might be invented. E-Scooters look like great devices for the typical short distances in urban regions.

mmjaa 8y ago

I've been using the local Electric Moped rental to get around my large metropolitan city, and I have to say it is really delightful to use and experience. I have all the best parts of having a moped to use, without any of the ownership issues. Of course, it helps that the provider has deployed thousands of the things .. but with every ride I'm ever more convinced this is the future of transportation. Easy to use electric rentals, just great ..

rubidium 8y ago

Even if the scooter craze crashes and burns (either due to regulations, insustainable business model, or lack of sustained customer demand aka here comes winter) it's gotta be helping drive down prices to manufacture and improving electric scooters and bikes technology. Scooter rental isn't super appealing for my use case, but buying one to use for commuting now is much more attainable than even 5 years ago.

ashelmire 8y ago
Scooters and electric bikes are the new hoverboards and segways. Do your health a favor and buy a regular commuter bike instead.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Or even a regular foot-powered scooter. It will last forever and if/when it wears out it won't be full of e-waste.
  - blacksmith_tb 8y ago
    Hmm, my daily ride is 8mi / 13km - and I often want to pick up groceries, library books, etc. A scooter (even an electric) is still much less practical for these use cases.
kawfey 8y ago
I know a person who works on Bird's freight team, they apparently have been moving 2 full Boeing 747s of scooters (I estimate that to be about 12,000-14,000 based on weight) every day from China, at one point about $150 a pop). I think it's a sustainable model because after being shipped, delivered, and released (estimating about $80 more per scooter), it's ridden until dead every day on average 10 times (1.43mi/ride average, range 15mi average), earning it $10 plus $0.15/min, or ~$23.50/day. It breaks even after 7 rides, and they have at least 20 rides in them before they're toast. I haven't factored in other parts of the economy, like oversupply, theft, premature damage, and payroll for the employees including chargers, but seeing they're in 100 cities with at least 3 million scooters on the streets being ride. I also based my guesses from https://www.bird.co/blog/birdyearone https://www.bird.co/blog/birdyearone.
- CompelTechnic 8y ago
  That is amazing. I had a training class on lean manufacturing about a year ago. The low cost enabled by production-line mentality of scooter production combined with the ad-hoc resource allocation enabled by the app for both riders and chargers makes this so darn efficient it is crazy. Very lean.
- dlhavema 8y ago
  > and they have at least 20 rides in them before they're toast. are you saying the scooters electric part dies after 20 rides?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    I think kawfey meant that in a given day, each scooter can be ridden 20 times before the battery is depleted. I don't think this was a description of the lifetime of the battery — just its daily capacity.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  Take away at least $5 per day per scooter, paid to the chargers, to take it off the street every night.

toastal 8y ago

I know it's a combination of 'taxi' and '-ify', but it reads too much like 'tax' and '-ify'. Taxes generally have a negative or necessary evil connotation which doesn't seem like a great company name. It's a good thing the scooters are not slated to go to the US, where 'taxes' are a four-letter word, or they might end up in the Boston harbor.

frockington 8y ago
I was really wondering how taxes, an app, and e-scooters were going to somehow come together when I first clicked on the link
bogomipz 8y ago
I had the same visceral reaction, the notion of a transportation service get's lost in that name.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>It's a good thing the scooters are not slated to go to the US, where 'taxes' are a four-letter word, or they might end up in the Boston harbor. Maybe Portsmouth harbor. For the past century or so the people of Boston have been generally welcoming to taxes, nosy government and all the other things the Bostonians of the 1700s resented the British for. Their northern neighbors, not so much. That still doesn't make "tax-$anything" a good company name for any business that doesn't have to do with taxes. Better to have a neutral and boring name than a name that some people associate with bad things.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  It was historically about "taxation without representation", not taxes per se. It was a about democratic representation when creating the laws (and taxes) that were imposed on them.
germinalphrase 8y ago
Agreed. Something as simple as TaxiDash would be more communicative while avoiding that obvious pitfall.

CompelTechnic 8y ago

I am really excited to see whether this business model is sustainable or not. I have found it interesting that some of my left-leaning friends oppose these scooters on the grounds of them being a public nuisance. For anyone who wants to curb global warming, these scooters are a darn good way to do it. The tradeoffs are easily worth it. Some people want to act like the tradeoffs don't exist/ if they just wish for something hard enough, the solution that has no tradeoffs will appear, despite institutional inertia.

ams6110 8y ago
I have to say I think the impact of scooters on global warming will be nil if not negative. Those little stand-up electric scooters mostly substitute for walking, not driving. And in that sense they are worse for global warming because they actually use electricity, in many places generated by coal. And consider the warming impact of making the things. Metal forging, paint, tires, batteries, electronics.
- zhoujianfu 8y ago
  I think you may be underestimating how many car rides they are removing. They’re great to not deal with parking and traffic, and they’re not taking people away from walking/riding bikes. I scraped bird vs bike share data in Santa Monica for a while and bird did seven times as many rides as the bike share with the same number of devices in the same area (and the bike share was doing roughly the same amount of rides as before bird showed up).
- Reedx 8y ago
  Maybe, I think it depends on how durable they are. And how much they help with the last mile problem. Consider the cases where someone has the option to take a bus or train, but there's a mile gap on both sides of their commute (or even just one side). So instead they drive the whole distance. If they can hop off the bus/train onto a scooter to close that gap, it can tip the scales to public transit vs taking a car.
- maherbeg 8y ago
  https://medium.com/uber-under-the-hood/understanding-multimodality-an-analysis-of-early-jump-users-4a35d647b7e6 https://medium.com/uber-under-the-hood/understanding-multimo... This is a great early analysis on the roll out of jump bike shares on the uber platform. During business hours / commuting hours, uber usage dropped by 15% in favor of jump bicycle shares. Many of the trips seem to replace commutes within the city, and this is while the number of bikes is limited. If the number of bikes explodes, and they can politically shift the landscape to enable safer biking/scootering etc., then that can make a huge dent in denser cities in America.

andrewla 8y ago

This is definitely a time when I'm annoyed to be a New Yorker -- we're shut out of all of these developments. We committed to Citibike (provided by Motivate), and now we're stuck trying to protect the granted monopoly by shutting out all the dockless e-bikes and electric scooters in favor of the overpriced incumbent.

sieabahlpark 8y ago
Vote out your ridiculous government then.
ihuman 8y ago
How come Citibike stops New York from having dockless alternatives? DC has the Capital Bikeshare docked bike system (also by Motivate), but still has rentable dockless bikes and electric scooters.