Oversharing is a Substack analyzing the economics of ride-hailing, scooters, and autonomous vehicles, including Uber's IPO filing and unit economics.
Commenters recommend it as good Substack writing and cite its scooter lifespan analysis as evidence that shared scooters lose money per unit.
Here are some estimates:
https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last-long
These scooters are already at a fairly decent economy of production. Chinese factories are producing these in the thousands and companies are buying wholesale.
The core technology (batteries especially) is expensive, full stop. I’m curious where you think they could save money in larger scales? That’s not even to mention to get larger scale, they need more consumer adoption. I don’t have reliable data for this, but anecdotally I’ll say consumer interest is stagnant, and that’s already at unprofitable/heavily incentivized margins.
> Amazon, the company that everyone loves point to as an example of how losing money eventually makes money, lost a combined $2.8 billion over its first 17 quarters as a public company, significantly less than the $4.5 billion Uber lost in 2017.
Source: https://oversharing.substack.com/p/bird-raises-prices-to-trim-to-scooter
> Can anyone recommend good writing on Substack to follow?
https://nathantankus.substack.com/
https://oversharing.substack.com/
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
https://sirota.substack.com/
https://gwern.substack.com/
It looks like they are losing money per scooter [0]. I doubt the strong markets make enough to offset the losing ones.
[0] https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last-long
Someone discovered shared scooters don't last long, and thus don't make anything even remotely approaching a profit.
https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last-long