Hey beautiful people, welcome to Besticious’ new post.
And today, we are talking about How Electric Scooters Are Going Worldwide?
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Scooter Companies:
Bird, lime, jump, skip, scoot and spin. The world of electronic scooter rentals has been absolutely blowing up lately, and not in a good way.
In cities like San Francisco and Santa Monica, scooter companies have flocked in to help revolutionize urban travel. At only a few dollars per ride, they offer a greener and cheaper alternative to normal modes of transportation in urban areas such as public transit and ride-sharing, at least on paper.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with how to rent these scooters, it is a very, very simple process.
All you need to do is download the app, go track down wherever the scooter is, which will be located via GPS, and then you just need to scan the QR code on the scooter, jump on, and away you go.
Scooting straight into the sunset of your happy, happy dreams.
yeah, I scoot into my happy dreams leave me alone that’s the way I do it
Profit Margins:
As you might imagine these scooter companies have very high-profit margins. Most of them, like the bird, use a slightly modified off-the-shelf scooter made by Xiaomi, which, fun fact, is the exact same scooter that can rights to work every day.
These are actually fairly cheap in the grand scheme of things. They cost about five hundred dollars on Amazon if you want to buy one for yourself, although if you’re a company who’s buying thousands and thousands of them at a time, you might just get a little bit of a discount.
Scooter Parking is a Problem?
Unlike competition from bike rental services, scooters don’t have specific zones where you have to park them. You just get off and go about your day, which, as you might imagine, causes some problems.
The way this is supposed to work is that with freelancers, nicknamed juicers, are paid at night to go out and collect the scooters, bring them back and charge them, and once they’re ready, then they are delivered to the nests that are spread all around the city, ready for another hard day of scooting? Riding? Zipping?
Scooters Business is Money Pumping?
These scooters quickly pay for themselves and are easy to deploy. Because of this, Silicon Valley has been pumping money into scooter companies for the last couple of years.
Even automakers have started to take notice. Recently, Ford acquired Spin, expanding their share of the micro transit market. With so much hype, it’s no wonder the companies such as Burton Lime have skyrocketed all the way to unicorn status.
And for reference, a unicorn is a start-up which is valued at over 1 billion dollars. unicorns aren’t unheard of. However, the bird is the fastest ever company to reach unicorn status, taking just over a year to do so. Think about how crazy this is.
The bird is a company that didn’t even exist at the beginning of last year, and yet now here in 2018, they’re worth over 1 billion dollars.
Despite all this traction, the overall feeling towards scooter companies is a little bit of a mixed bag. The way they’ve been able to hit these multi-billion-dollar valuations is to expand.
When I say expand, I mean aggressively expand.
Scooters and Safety:
Think about putting hundreds, if not thousands of scooters in a city literally overnight with absolutely no infrastructure to take care of them, except for those sweet, sweet VC dollars.
This has posed an issue for public safety. since there’s no dedicated place to leave the scooters when you’re done with them, a lot of times people just get off them like when they’re in the middle of the sidewalk, for example, or throw them into a tree, whatever the case is, which is obviously not what you should do with your Chinese scooter that you’re borrowing for five minutes.
This has led to a number of injuries not only by riders, of course, but also by pedestrians by maybe tripping on a scooter or being run down on the sidewalk by one.
But in the terms and conditions says, you’re not allowed to ride on the sidewalk, you must have to ride in the bike lane.
Francisco Scooter-Gadon?
San Francisco is definitely the city which is seeing the biggest backlash from Scooter-Gadon. Here, scooters are regularly destroyed, thrown in the ocean, or fined even worse fates than that.
In April, the city of San Francisco officially ordered a cease-and-desist for the bird, lime, and spin, citing them as a public nuisance.
Technically, a lot of these companies are operating in a little bit of a legal gray area with the bird, for example, just paying the fines that they were issued all the way up into the point where San Francisco just take them out of the city.
So, how are multi-billion dollar studio companies taking over the world?
Well, it is a legitimately cool concept. You have the potential of cutting down on traffic and congestion in cities and there is a lot of fun.
But as of right now, the entire boom is being fueled by an absolute flood of venture capital investment, which will keep it going, for now, at least.
Bottom Line:
So, what do you think?
Are scooters the wave of the future? or is it some dump that we’ll all forget about in a couple of years?
Let me know in the comments below, and we will catch you guys on the next blog post of Besticious ?
Jay is a freelance journalist, editor and writer who currently lives in London. He has written for a variety of newspapers, magazines and online publications. He also writes for UK leading eSports website Teamliquid.net, covering StarCraft 2 and League of Legends. Jay is also a regular columnist for gaming magazine Game Informer. Jay’s first novel, Allegedly, centres around the world of eSports and follows the story of Duncan, who is faced with the prospect of leaving his university course and following his passion to become the best
