Ford Buying San Francisco-Area E-Scooter Startup Spin

Of the scooter companies that have launched in the Bay area, Spin were by far the least technically advanced - the scooters were basically unmodified Xiaomis, to the extent of still having power buttons. Rather than an integrated location and management system, location data came from a off-the-shelf GPS tracker spliced off the battery lines. Since the scooter control board had no cellular link, there was no mechanism for Spin to directly manage the scooters which meant that handshaking involved the app notifying Spin&#x27;s API that the user was going to hire a scooter and then sending an unlock code back to the scooter via Bluetooth. Locking was the inverse, which left plenty of opportunity for state to get out of sync (server thinks scooter is unlocked but the unlocking failed, or vice versa).<p>It&#x27;s possible that their launch was very much an MVP and they&#x27;ve been doing a lot of engineering work in the background, but they were <i>way</i> behind Lime and Bird at launch time.<p>(Edited to clarify that the unlock code is sent via Bluetooth)

All of the commenters saying e-scooters shouldn&#x27;t be allowed on sidewalks are right. Sidewalks in most densely populated US cities are too narrow and busy to safely allow a human gliding along at 15 mph within ~2 ft of a doorway where another human may be exiting, or past blind corners.<p>The bigger issue is that e-scooter parking is fundamentally broken right now. Despite being told not to, users still park them in the middle of a pedestrian walkway. Even if the user parks them correctly, they get knocked over or blow over into the walkway. This product is broken until these companies do what Jump did, and INTEGRATE A LOCK INTO THE PRODUCT, and make users lock it to something at the end of their ride. This almost entirely eliminates the problem of blocking a walkway, and also reduces the loss of product to theft, accidental damage, etc.<p>Since they&#x27;re required by law in California, I&#x27;d also like helmets to be integrated into the locking mechanism, but that&#x27;s a nice-to-have.<p>E-scooter companies: Build locks into your products. It fixes many of your problems.

What you&#x27;re seeing is car companies trying to transition to &quot;mobility&quot; companies -- the difference being the former is a manufacturing company with 3% margins and the latter being a services company with much fatter margins.<p>Autonomous car fleets are the main &quot;mobility services&quot; prize of course -- all the major OEMs have autonomous research labs -- but you&#x27;re seeing more interest in scooters and bikes (there was a headline about GM releasing an e-bike last week).

I used Bird, Lime, Lyft, and Jump scooters over the weekend in LA and they were great for getting around when I&#x27;d have otherwise considered driving (over a 45 minute walk). I tried a Skip scooter again when I got back to SF, and once again, it simply could not handle a minor (for SF) hill. I don&#x27;t know what the solution is, since it seems like a bad idea to power them more to handle hills given the dangers that would pose on flat (or downhill) terrain, but I can&#x27;t imagine them really taking hold in the same way in hilly cities.

Am I the only one who wants to see more <i>seated</i> scooter innovation? I would much prefer riding one of these self-balancing scooters&#x2F;microcycles to the standing scooters that everyone is using.<p>1. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rynomotors.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rynomotors.com</a> (launches April 16, 2019)<p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alibaba.com&#x2F;product-detail&#x2F;newest-fat-tyre-electric-unicycle-one_60748336939.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alibaba.com&#x2F;product-detail&#x2F;newest-fat-tyre-elect...</a><p>3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZcZk9zn82-g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZcZk9zn82-g</a>

I just wanted to point out that Hyundai Motor demoed a electric scooter as an accessory for the Ioniq line in Jan 2017 at CES.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;roadshow&#x2F;pictures&#x2F;hyundais-ioniq-scooter-concept-looks-more-fun-that-its-car-ces-2017&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;roadshow&#x2F;pictures&#x2F;hyundais-ioniq-scoote...</a><p>And BIRD was founded in Apr 2017.<p>Some staff PM&#x2F;engr&#x2F;marketer folks at Hyundai Motor had the right idea. Too bad they were not in a position to start a startup.<p>edit: I&#x27;m not saying BIRD or any other copied Hyundai. Coming up with the idea and executing it is a big accomplishment. Electric motor scooters have been around a long time too.

These e-scooters could be a really great way for many cities to decrease short-haul car dependency, but they really need to be off the sidewalks.<p>A motor-propelled machine going 15 mph doesn&#x27;t belong on the same surface as a baby stroller, a senior citizen, or a person with a disability.<p>They belong in the bike lane (which should exist in the first place), and their speed should be capped in areas of dense foot traffic.

These scooters aren&#x27;t suppose to replace lyft or bart or muni. They&#x27;re suppose to let you get from 24th mission to 16th mission with minimum context switching &amp; waiting. This translates less well to manhattan but would (if theft weren&#x27;t a problem) to Brooklyn, most 2nd tier cities in the U.S., and college campuses. I think it&#x27;s a good investment.

There I was, sitting at the busy intersection of Sacramento and Ashby in Berkeley, when I saw two boys that couldn&#x27;t have been more than 8-10 years old fly by on Bird Scooters. And I thought to myself, some kid is going to die.<p>And lots of people do die on these things: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=bird+scooters+deaths" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=bird+scooters+deaths</a><p>These scooter companies suck, I wish they&#x27;d all go away. If they weren&#x27;t all going for hypergrowth, they&#x27;d be less of a menace. I can see the boon for commuters on the last mile, but when I weight that against how they endanger children, encourage illegal usage of sidewalks, ruin pedestrian experiences, and don&#x27;t provide helmets - I think the industry is in need of a reckoning.<p>They also totally wrecked the coastal street&#x2F;&quot;boardwalk&quot; in San Diego. As a pedestrian, you&#x27;re constantly looking over your shoulder for drunk idiots on scooters.

Are any of these electric scooters worthwhile for hilly commutes?<p>I live about a mile from the closest train stop, and currently I walk to and from because the entire way is steep coming back, at 10% grade.<p>My gut tells me a scooter would need to be unreasonably powerful to work in this area.

First Chariot and now Spin (also investments and partnerships with Lyft and Zoom Car in India). Seems like Ford is betting on a future where they see people rejecting the idea of owning a car and where car companies are just mobility providers.

I’ve recently visited Santa Cruz, where I rode my first jump bike. I had an absolute blast with it, raved about it to friends non-stop for weeks. More recently, I experienced my first Bird scooter (and Lime) in Indianapolis. I did many fun things there so I didn’t expect that these silly scooters to be the highlight of the trip, but they were.<p>Aside from being an insanely fun and effective way to get around a city, my favorite thing about them stems from my hatred of cars. I own a car. But selfishly only like cars when its _my_ car and _I_ am driving it. Other than that, I think they’re dangerous, loud, expensive, terrible for the environment, and far too plentiful in crowded city streets. They crash and congest roads shared with public transit, wreaking havoc daily commutes, oh and they frequently murder the more tender specimens on the road.<p>I get disappointed when I see people complaining about these scooters and bikes “cluttering up the walkways” and pedestrians having “dangerous encounters”. I will admit it I saw a fair number of scooters that had fallen over on walkways. It really didn’t faze me. Walk around it. Step over it. Pick it up if you’re in a great mood. Maybe society needs time to adjust and develop more etiquette. It could be handled better, but to call this an immediate “problem” is just wrong— And what are the stats on scooter vs. pedestrian fatalities?<p>This debate reminds me of the hiker vs. equestrian vs. mountain biker tension. We all want to use the same trails and it’s a bit contentious. Hikers feel threatened by the fast moving bikers. Bikers are inconvenienced by people walking slowly on the trails. The horses are just taking 6LB dumps all over the path for everyone else to step in and ride through. They all try to lobby and ban one another from using the trails. Nobody seems to care about anything they aren’t partaking in.<p>In the end, people should be open to alternative forms of transportation that are effective regardless of whether they utilize it. I think these bike and scooter shares represent a massive objective improvement over cars, and even public transit. It might take some time for etiquette and city planning to catch up, but we need to check the hall monitor mentality and give it time, for the greater good.

Interesting scheme. You corner a scarce resource and then sell it. I wonder what new permit schemes we’re going to see and how we can capitalize on this.

I talked to a self-driving PM recently and he said that self-driving cars are a extremely expensive and complex way to reduce cost per mile urban transit&#x2F;taxis and admitted scooters might be a much cheaper way to accomplish the same thing.

Would be really nice to see F turn around: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;f?ltr=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;f?ltr=1</a>

Congrats to the Spin team!

Can someone explain the valuation on these scooter companies?

How does the investment in Spin compare to the one in Argo AI? Are electric scooters hotter than self-driving cars?

Perhaps we need a self-driving scooter?

I am enjoying all of the comments here. I was lucky enough to study traffic-as-density-waves in younger days, and I think the future will be very positive. For this particular argument, I think the common themes to solve are lack of infrastructure, and the resulting safety hazards from casual users:<p>The setbacks: The infrastructure currently does not support the reality of the populous renting scooters (and bikes and mopeds). City planning was not developed around the recent technological availability of motorized personal transportation. Humans are irresponsible, and will leave scooters in disruptive locations. Humans are reckless, and a large portion won&#x27;t abide by the established traffic safety. This &quot;last-mile&quot; transportation movement is a result of public transportation being a poor experience: slow-moving, dirty, congested, mismanaged.<p>Positive thoughts: &quot;last-mile&quot; transportation is highly effective if it could be implemented properly. Proper implementation would require responsible user behavior and infrastructure compatibility.<p>An anecdote: The company Scoot, at least in SF, gave access to moped-like vehicles for casual commute. Great idea. Give people the ability to personally navigate dense populations without vehicle ownership.<p>The problem: driving a personal motorized vehicle in dense large-vehicle traffic is a major responsibility. For instance, riding a motorcycle is extremely dangerous, and the vast majority of motorcycle riders take their safety incredibly seriously. They vehemently abide by traffic laws because small mistakes can lead to major physical consequences.<p>Scoot riders have unilaterally behaved like inexperienced idiots in traffic. Running lights, making last minute decisions, and ignoring speed of traffic sensibility The casual nature of that commute style leads people to behave like they are on bicycles, when they are riding around already-frustrated car and truck drivers.<p>The same me-first attitude was clearly visible when scooters were widely available. Even with city permits, people are still selfish.<p>Solutions:<p>There are conscious decisions to make city-wide improvements in efficient transportation. Mass transit combined with low-impact personal vehicles would be a utopia. But no large city was designed with that reality in mind, and the &quot;disruptive&quot; companies that make these technologies accessible, often with the &quot;ask-for-forgiveness&quot; mantra, are very disruptive to both the pedestrian reality and the detriment of too many cars.<p>Tl:dr, people are selfish and reckless, and even smart and available technologies will be abused unless infrastructure is designed to handle human habits.

Nice one @newy, congratulations!

&gt;They belong in the bike lane (which should exist in the first place)<p>the problem is the existence of bike lanes. If public officials start saying &quot;scooters belong in the bike lane&quot;, then they have to confront the fact that their cities have no cohesive network of bike lanes that can actually support a real journey. This has been acceptable up until now, because cyclists are weird and it&#x27;s okay to tell them to just ride in amongst trucks travelling 40mph when a bike lane abruptly ends. But e-scooters are for &quot;normal people&quot; who aren&#x27;t as content with being told to go play in traffic.

&quot;Scoot&quot; is where it&#x27;s at anyway.

There is simply no space in most inner cities for this mode of transportation.<p>Which is fine, since inner cities are the most walkable places in the world, and the most well-served by public transit.<p>Unless we&#x27;re prepared to spend billions on new construction over decades, there is just no infrastructure for a mode of transport that conflicts with all of the existing modes.<p>If anything, we should be building more bike lanes (on a gargantuan scale) since they are proven, efficient and already have substantial infrastructure.

Own a Segway&#x2F;Ninebot ES2 w&#x2F; the extended battery pack. Top speed 20mph. Have clocked over 300 miles on it. I live in Boston, Bird tried to launch this summer and Cambridge&#x2F;Somerville local gov freaked out (rightfully so). I use my scooter for 10 mile rides on the bike path, communing and short haul trips. It gets locked up in my apartment when I’m done with it.<p>I honestly don’t know if I’d trust public scooters, purely for safety reasons. (I use Zipcar which is a hit or miss most of the time, some of the cars are really filthy and broken since you can use it at 18) How often are they inspected? Do the scooter companies keep maintenance logs? Who fixes them? Do they use contractors or have in-house staff? Where are they souring the parts? These things are used way more than mine. I’ve fallen off my scooter twice and really fucked myself up and I always wear a helmet. One fall I hit the back of my head behind my right ear on the pavement first. You can easily kill or cripple yourself or someone else. An adult at 165lbs going 19mph packs a punch. They are not toys. There’s huge liability here.<p>This feels like when Uber rolled out. Nobody trusted them and it took time for regulators to catch up. These tiny electric vehicles are awesome and represent way more to come. I just hope nobody gets seriously hurt in the process.