6 ms·
I own a Xiaomi Mi m365 scooter that I use daily for commutes around downtown Denver and while it's lighter than this bird, it is by no means lightweight. It won
by condiment 7y ago
I own a Xiaomi Mi m365 scooter that I use daily for commutes around downtown Denver and while it's lighter than this bird, it is by no means lightweight. It won't fit under a desk. It attracts funny looks if I bring it into a business or restaurant, and locking it up on the street is annoying and time-consuming. Even when it's folded and locked up, people try to steal it.
The Bird One marketing document doesn't really go into detail, but the huge battery and GPS functionality suggests to me that the expected approach for using these scooters is to park them on the street and leave them there. If they borrow the anti-theft functionality that you see in VanMoof bicycles, this scooter makes a lot of sense. You ride it around town. You charge it in your garage. You leave it on the street when you're done with it. If it's stolen you look up its GPS location and the police help you get it back. There's low urgency to charge it. If it breaks, they'll fix it for you. And if you don't have it with you, Bird comps your rental scooter.
That's a lot more compelling of an offering than just a "heavier, faster, longer-range" scooter.
- Sir_Substance 7y ago>If it's stolen you look up its GPS location and the police help you get it back. Do your police do that?
- riantogo 7y agoI want to know the answer to to this. Must be a nice place to live.
- xkcd-sucks 7y agoHaha I live in a stereotypically "wealthy white/Jewish" metropolitan area and I strip Birds/Limes on the street. It's also common for young men with black skin to drive around and load up cars with scooters-- presumably it's for charging, but the cops never hassle them either.
- themmes 7y agoIn the Netherlands the police definitely will not. Vanmoof has their own team to track down bikes and retrieve, but so far this seems more like a marketing stunt than actual service (they have a youtube channel “Van Moof Bike Hunters”).
- King-Aaron 7y agoThey do in a lot of cases in Aus.
- Sir_Substance 7y agoNot in Adelaide they don't. Never in 25 years of living there have I ever heard a case of the police recovering stolen property. Heard several cases of people find it themselves and recovering it on their own, but not once of the police helping. My own personal experience was that they noted my report, duly filed some paperwork in their write-only document storage system, and then went back to issuing traffic fines.
- pnutjam 7y agoEven if they recover your property later, like during a big arrest, you won't get it back. It will sit in evidence, for years, then it will be destroyed because nobody picked it up. Chances are, you were never informed; even if you filed police reports with serial numbers.
- StavrosK 7y agoEven if they do, who has a day to waste chasing thieves? I'd just lock up the scooter and save myself the potential hassle, especially since the GPS isn't a deterrent (the scooter doesn't look obviously theft-resistant so thieves won't notice until after they've stolen it).
- 8fingerlouie 7y agoOr to make theft as unappealing as possible, do an “Apple” on them, and require proximity of a “recognized” device for them to turn on, and require a long password, unique to each scooter, to reset the pairing. They’ll still get stolen, but after apple implemented its current “find my iPhone” scheme, thefts of those devices has plummeted compared to what it was before.
- kerng 7y ago1200 dollars - I wouldnt just park this on the street, given the battery and other useful things that might be mistaken for a ride share offering.