Skip to main content
Today I learned of a young man who is legally blind and therefore can't get a driver's license, but guess what—he can ride an electric scooter! Who wants to be the next unlucky schmuck who happens to be ambulating in his direction? Help! —Harriet M.
One of the less well-documented side effects of income inequality is the proliferation of people who have become staggeringly wealthy without ever having done anything particularly useful or clever.
Such people are called "venture capitalists," and I suppose it's not surprising that, given their life experience, they've come to believe the road to riches is paved with useless, stupid shit. Do I really need to explain why we're having this conversation in the context of electric scooters?
I'm not claiming to have any inside information, but it certainly appears that the companies who've been clogging our streets with these scooters are pursuing the time-honored Silicon Valley business model of "lose money every day and sell the company to Google before anybody realizes what a stupid idea it is."
Let's do the math: A Xiaomi scooter (the kind used by scooter company Bird) retails for $599. Bird's boosters will no doubt point to economies of scale, but Bird also has to trick out each scooter with GPS and a payment system. Call it $500 all told.
You can rent a scooter for $1, plus 15 cents a mile. They have a range of around 18 miles on a charge. The companies pay contractors about $7 to recharge spent scooters overnight.
This means that if I embrace the scooter tao and use one for my daily commute (9 miles each way), the scooter folks will lose $2.30 a day on me, allowing them to recover their $500 investment approximately never. "Hey, we lose money on each transaction, but we make it up in volume!"
There's also the awkward fact someone in the U.S. dies on one of these scooters about once a month. While that's peanuts compared to cars' body count, I can't help noting that a new designer drug with this safety record would have already been banned by a Senate vote of 99-1. (Thanks, Bernie.) Maybe this nascent industry will find its footing, but right now it's hard not to think of Kozmo.com.