Title says most of it. Spin electric scooters exited the Seattle market and abandoned their scooters all over the city and apparently they have a pi 4 in them!
Title says most of it. Spin electric scooters exited the Seattle market and abandoned their scooters all over the city and apparently they have a pi 4 in them!
In my European city they’re still popular but imho it’s a grift to get money from investors with large pockets. I see brands popping out and go out of the market in 6 months. They just need to lose just the right amount of money in order to have the longest list of supported cities at the moment of raising capital. It’s an application that’s too expensive for every day use (1 euro unlock fee + 20 cents a minute in a city with a subway and extensive bus network???) but at the same time that ridiculous amount of money is clearly not enough to be sustainable. And they all use dark patterns. App forces you to register with email and sms verification just to see prices and you need to recharge credit that you might be never be able to use. Most they auto charge the credit card for 10 euro as soon as the credit goes under 5 euro.
Maybe the real money making activity is unusable credit in user accounts?
Yeah the pricing only makes sense for occasional use, yet of course they market it for your daily commutes as well. It would cost me about 5€ to ride to work with those, another 5€ to ride back, which would total something like 100€ per month.
I just bought my own instead as, it’s a fun, practical and cheap way to commute if you own your own. I can easily carry it with me to my apartment so it doesn’t get stolen and costs next to nothing to use compared to a car.
Yes, for commutes don’t make any sense
I got a 60 min coupon to try the service, to go home I take the subway then I choose between bus + 2 min walk or just 10 minutes walk. With the scooter I can do it in 5 minutes but:
It took one minute to unlock
I could be fined as my city requires all riders to have an helmet
It takes 5+ minutes to lock because the app is “smart” and uses ai to see from a picture if you parked it correctly. No signal or bad lighting makes the photo unclear? Try to park in a different neighborhood…
So I pay 2 euro for do the same route in the same time that I would take by foot. Not good for commutes, not good for short routes, not good for long routes
Not living in a city with these scooters but in a country that has 10+ different virtual wallets services. I can tell you 101% it’s all about the credit sit in the customers’ accounts that obviously easy but not straightforward to pull out and stay there a long long time.
It was never about the “convenience” for anyone. It’s the same scheme of holding people’s credit.
Same in my smaller UK city. If you’re a tourist, it’s probably a decent idea. Might work in London or somewhere like that. But Nottingham? Who is going there to see the sights? There’s only a slightly rubbish castle. Don’t take long to see that. Most of the Robin Hood tat is up at Sherwood Forest, and you ain’t taking a toy scooter to go and see that.
For a commuter, that scooter would be taken to their office, would sit outside all day, then they’d take it back. Just the regular 9 to 5 workday. That’s not a sustainable business model. They’d need to be just in a really busy area, and in use all the time.