Bird One - $1299 (opens in new tab)

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19859632

I think electric unicycles are superior to electric scooters in most of the ways. If you're thinking about buying an electric scooter I'd recommend you to consider a one-wheeler instead. Once you learn how to ride, which takes about a week, it's much more comfortable and mobile than a scooter. You can take your wheel with you to a mall or a cinema and be on the go whenever.

Successful pivoting from service to products isn't common. I'm guessing their financials on the rental model aren't panning out.

This is an attempt to Tesla/iPhone the scooter market. Let's see what the consumer appetite is. I'm guessing the Bird brand is already tarnished with adjectives like "cheap" and "broken" so this may be an uphill battle.

I bought a Xiaomi Mi scooter on Amazon last year for $499. This is the same scooter Bird started with.

So far it’s been great. There’s a “Mi Home” app that shows you remaining charge and an estimate of miles left, plus total miles driven. It’s also got a charge indicator on the scooter itself.

The owned scooters go a bit faster than the rental ones, and the battery lasts about 15 miles total.

So far it’s been useful to eliminate short drives or Lyfts (coming back from dropping off the car to get new tires is one example; going to local restaurants is another.) It folds up easily and can lock to a bike rack or stow under a table at a restaurant.

We’ve put 110 miles on it so far, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but considering most of our trips on it are far less than a mile, it’s been worth the money.

At $1299, though, I can’t see why this Bird scooter would be worth so much more than the Xiaomi. This landing page doesn’t help; it seems to assume the people reading don’t know about $500 scooters. Perhaps that is their target market, but in that case, I don’t think this will sell that well.

Part of me thought this is parody.

Won't people steal this?

20 free rides maxed at $5 per ride. They raised prices recently to around 0.25$ a minute.

Terrible incentive. Why be so cheap? Should be incentivizing purchase of a $1200 scooter with way more free rides.

Is this going to be $800 better than the cheapo Aliexpress scooters?

Please choose an informative title.

With all costs factored in, I wonder how many hours you would have to save on rented birds to start saving money?

Weird move for a rental company imo.

> The owner of this website (shop.bird.co) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (KR) from accessing this website.

Wonderful.

Are there specs anywhere? Some of my questions:

- Range on a charge

- Max hill slope with 150lb person

- Ground clearance

Marketing copy for scooter company selling a scooter: "This isn't a scooter"

Insert eye-roll here. Honestly this is so bad it feels like an April fools joke or something.

rather get a onewheel instead