It turns out that, much like the Gypsy cab companies Uber and Lyft, e-scooters have no path to profitability.
Scooters break, and they break after only a few months, which makes the plague of rental scooters unsustainable:
E-scooters really are the vaping of public transportation. They're a safe alternative that's somehow even more dangerous, and they're incredibly popular despite being despised by every human being on the planet. They also make you look like a spoiled 15-year-old douche. But that's not what's hurting the e-scooter brand, which claims it's close to becoming a billion-dollar industry ... if only they could stop burning through scooters at breakneck speed.I just love the phrase, "E-scooters really are the vaping of public transportation."
It nails the situation in a nutshell:
………I've increasingly come to believe that Silicon Valley venture capitalists have no interest in the viability of a business, they just want to just hype the company until sufficiently stupid people purchase shares at the IPO.
So what's causing Lime to leak money faster than the fluid out of one of their scooter's cut brakes? According to them, it's a matter of scooter "depreciation" -- a shareholder-friendly way of saying that their product gets treated like crap. Rideshare companies have to spend a fortune picking up their scooters from whatever random patch of sidewalk their scootees ditched them like so much spent chewing gum. And then there are the constant repairs. According to Lime, their scooters only survive the mean city streets for five months (which is about four months longer than some other reports), thanks to a corrosive combination of elemental wear and tear, heavy/irresponsible usage, and people getting so mad at douches dropping them in front of their homes that they've started sabotaging them.
As strange as it seem, it appears that they have actually begun to start run out of stupid people.
I do not see how this does not meet the legal definition of fraud.
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