4 ms·
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 bas
by 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 agoThat 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 agoI 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 agoTake away at least $5 per day per scooter, paid to the chargers, to take it off the street every night.
- fernandotakai 8y agonow that's interesting "The owner of this website (www.bird.co) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (BR) from accessing this website." i understand them not shipping stuff to brazil, but full on block? c'mon. what if i wanted to see this and recommend to a friend that lives in the us?
- blacksmith_tb 8y agoI see they're using Cloudflare - likely it's a tradeoff for them between banning attackers and alienating legitimate visitors - and they don't do business in Brazil, yet. They block my (US) VPN exit, too.