The Scooter Wars will be a bloodbath — and Uber will win
Picture this: An Uber driver picks up a few scooters at the end of his evening in his Prius, charges them overnight, then deploys them in a location the next morning where people will want to scooter to work. That is also the same location where some people will want a ride to work. Uber has spent years optimizing its algorithms to understand these locations and times. Will that information be dramatically different between rides and scooters? No, because people who want to get from A to B are willing to try different modes at different times. This is especially true of early adopters who are the core of the current scooter users.
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
Wrong.
Uber still only knows what it knows.
Hailing a car is damned different from finding an eScooter to rent.
Uber only knows where it’s been. It doesn’t know the hidden value of where it’s never been.
Here is something that’s very interesting and perhaps even correct:
So look for the ride-sharing companies to test free or subscription-based scooter rides as a way to cut their own customer-acquisition costs. If it works, the scooter companies are toast. Their economics will suddenly be upside down, as consumers realize a nearby scooter is available through a ride-sharing app for free or very low cost. While scooter rides might be a bit peripheral to ride-sharing, customer-acquisition cost is not.
But what would the economics of an eScooter “subscription” look like? eScooter manufacturers would have to decide that their future is linked to bulk sales, not sales to the public. That would jack up the price of an eScooter, making a “subscription” more attractive than ownership.
Previously here:
Chronological List Of Electric Scooter Posts
eScooters category
Mike Cane's Atomic Supermen 