Uber Destroys Thousands of Bikes and Scooters (bbc.com) 102
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Uber is destroying thousands of electric bikes and scooters, after selling its Jump business to Lime. Videos of its red bikes being crushed at a recycling centre were shared on social media, angering cycling advocates. Uber said it had decided to destroy thousands of its older-model vehicles due to maintenance, liability and safety concerns.
In 2018, Uber said it would focus more on its electric bike and scooter business than on cars. But on May 7 this year, Uber announced a deal that saw Lime take over the Jump bike business. As part of the deal, Uber invested $170 million in Lime, while Lime acquired "tens of thousands" of Uber's Jump bikes -- and the associated intellectual property. Lime's chief executive Wayne Ting has said he prefers the design of Uber's bikes and will deploy more of them in the future. However, there were also "tens of thousands" of older-model bikes that Lime did not inherit as part of the deal. Videos shared on Twitter show the bikes arriving at a recycling facility in North Carolina to be destroyed. "We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes," Uber said in a statement. "But given many significant issues -- including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment -- we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them."
The decision to destroy these bikes comes amid a national bike shortage. "We have never seen anything like this in a very long time," said Dave Nghiem at College Park Bicycles in College Park, MD. "We have never locked down half the planet like this so they can't do their jobs to build bikes. So, no one has been building bikes for three months. If no one is building bikes, there's no bikes on the continent," said Dave.
Kurt of Bike Share Museum seems to think it is all about killing Jump, "destroying every bike they can, and slowly taking Lime down in the process." He adds: "We also can't emphasize enough how disgusting it is for UBER to scrap 20,000 bicycles in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic where bicycles have literally become an object of survival. Heavy as they are, these could be transportation for the many who have been brought to financial ruin during COVID-19."
In 2018, Uber said it would focus more on its electric bike and scooter business than on cars. But on May 7 this year, Uber announced a deal that saw Lime take over the Jump bike business. As part of the deal, Uber invested $170 million in Lime, while Lime acquired "tens of thousands" of Uber's Jump bikes -- and the associated intellectual property. Lime's chief executive Wayne Ting has said he prefers the design of Uber's bikes and will deploy more of them in the future. However, there were also "tens of thousands" of older-model bikes that Lime did not inherit as part of the deal. Videos shared on Twitter show the bikes arriving at a recycling facility in North Carolina to be destroyed. "We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes," Uber said in a statement. "But given many significant issues -- including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment -- we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them."
The decision to destroy these bikes comes amid a national bike shortage. "We have never seen anything like this in a very long time," said Dave Nghiem at College Park Bicycles in College Park, MD. "We have never locked down half the planet like this so they can't do their jobs to build bikes. So, no one has been building bikes for three months. If no one is building bikes, there's no bikes on the continent," said Dave.
Kurt of Bike Share Museum seems to think it is all about killing Jump, "destroying every bike they can, and slowly taking Lime down in the process." He adds: "We also can't emphasize enough how disgusting it is for UBER to scrap 20,000 bicycles in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic where bicycles have literally become an object of survival. Heavy as they are, these could be transportation for the many who have been brought to financial ruin during COVID-19."
Psychopathy In Action (Score:5, Interesting)
All psychopaths executives know is their greed and ego and the entirety of human society must serve it, as well as the planet. Consume and destroy, they destroyed the bikes, so the bikes would not compete with their business. Just like products are designed to break, so more can be sold, more resources consumed and more pollution generated, the glory of psychopathic mass consumption in capitalism, the more consumed and the more pollution generated, the higher the GDP, God bless the dollar, the dollar is GOD (bunch of psychopathic Grumpy Old Dude capitalists, genetically defective, can not fell happiness and demand that the rest of us not be happy, in fact they act to destroy our happiness on purpose, it feeds their psychopathic ego).
Re:Psychopathy In Action (Score:5, Insightful)
It's probably the same issue faced by stores that dispose of edible food. It takes just one massive raging thundercunt to ruin it for everyone else by claiming he got "food poisoning" and demanding a check with plenty of zeroes. It would be easy for Uber to just say "We're leaving these scooters and bikes in this parking lot, help yourself" and clear out overnight, at least until the aforementioned massive raging thundercunt smears dirt on the chain, loosens a few bolts, and rides down the steepest hill in the state causing the bike to collapse, him to break a few bones, and to sic a lawyer on Uber to the tune of a few million.
There is psychopathy, but it's not from the executives.
Good news (Score:5, Informative)
Donated food has been granted strong protections from liability. If being two decades old can be called 'news'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Good news (Score:4, Insightful)
Strong does not mean invincible, and even if they win it will be a PR debacle that the media will spin as "Supermarket poisons homeless veteran with rotten food, refuses to pay for tums to cure upset stomach"
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Given the law has been around for about twenty five years you should either accept that it has stood the test of time or be able to cite evidence that it has not.
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The fact remains - it does not prevent a lawsuit.
You can get sued and win under the law. But you'll likely still lose because you had to pay your attorney and all that. And the people who sued likely don't have enough to reimburse you for attorney's fees. So either way, you lose.
The amount of food thrown out by a supermarket in a year can easily be
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Here's some 2018 support for your position.
https://thecounter.org/harvard... [thecounter.org]
Grocery stores could be donating way more of the food they donâ(TM)t sell. Whatâ(TM)s stopping them? A patchwork of inconsistent and unclear food safety laws.
However there is a Federal Law on food donations many are not aware of
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
The first reason is liability. Many vendors mistakenly believe they'll get sued for providing food that gets somebody sick, even if they think that food is safe. The
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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You mean this? [theguardian.com] Seems reasonable for people to sue if they're exposed to powdered asbestos.
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A lot of psoriasis is actually autoimmune thyroid disease. Bring that under control and the psoriasis goes away. (Voice of experience, and many hours reading the literature.) Your relative needs to get a complete endocrine workup, including ALL the thyroid tests (NOT just the TSH test) as well as parathyroid and cortisol, but most especially test for Hashimoto's antibodies. And if he goes on treatment, use natural desiccated thyroid or at least add some T3, not just synthetic T4.
I'll bet he has a bunch more
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Using the Christian definition of slut as a woman having sex at all. Too bad your slut* of a whore mom didn't believe in the right to abort parasites.
(* apparently what you believe, I don't)
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Worthless cunt...objectifying women. Pathetic slut...slut-shaming. What sort of progressive are you who freely engages in such ugly misogyny?
People get the most out of diverse environments when there are clear measures in place to prevent overwhelming and potentially harmful challenges to one's perspectives, to restrain ideas that are highly offensive to a majority of people (e.g., Holocaust or Sandy Hook deniers), to neutralize power imbalances between participants, and to curb hostility that could under
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Donated food has been granted strong protections from liability. If being two decades old can be called 'news'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Around here they're required by law to put the food in a dumpster.
They put it inside a nice plastic bag to protect it, people will be standing in line to fish it out as soon as the employee closes the lid and leaves, but they're protected from lawsuits because nobody can sue over food that came out of a dumpster.
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If you really want him to stop posting here, that's not the way to go about it.
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I'm sure they could have donated them to a charity who would have been happy to refurb and sell them on at near cost. You can actually buy kits online to do it yourself.
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But then how would they claim their tax writeoff?
Re: Psychopathy In Action (Score:2)
I doubt there is a charity that could temporarily bring up and dismantle the inventory, logistics, and man power to accept a delivery of 20k units. Even if there was, the per unit cost, even if shared would be higher than the disposal costs.
If there was such an option, a 3rd party e-cycler would have happily taken these for a small fee even if they didn't have a charity lined up at that moment.
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Maybe not one organization, but you could probably find 200 charities who would tackle 100 bikes each. I'm sure that bike shops would love to take a few, as bikes are in short stock with the pandemic. They could refurbish and sell them at cost and make up the difference on selling helmets, locks and other accessories.
Re: Psychopathy In Action (Score:2)
If you said 10 or even 20, that would be doable. But more than that, you are looking at a logistics challenge. And I am talking about the 3rd party that got them all, who is an expert at this, and would coordinate all. And you need to keep paying the inventory costs to keep the units on hand before pick up from each buyer. It's far cheaper to just junk them with such a poor supply chain.
With cell phones for example, there are 3rd party vendors jumping over each other to take in such a volume. 20k would be g
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I'm sure there would be somebody willing to pay for and recondition these bikes rather than having them crushed. Many of the parts are interchangeable and in completely perfect working order. Send me a couple, I'd even pay the shipping and logistics fees associated with it. I could get them working and in a good home without much trouble. Instead they decide to crush them.
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Tom Paxton, in the 1980s, foresaw this coming.
"The world shook with dread of Attila the Hun
As he conquered with fire and steel,
And Genghis and Kubla and all of the Kahns
Ground a groaning world under the heel.
Disaster, disaster, so what else is new?
We've suffered the worst and then some.
So I'm sorry to tell you, my suffering friends,
Of the terrible scourge still to come.
[Chorus]
In ten years we're gonna have one million lawyers,
One million lawyers, one million lawyers.
In ten years we're gonna have one million
Uber Bike Commercial (Score:5, Insightful)
Were you or a loved one injured using an Uber bicycle? A flaw in the motor controller would cause unintended acceleration, potentially causing harm, or even death. Uber refused a recall, claiming the bikes were sold as-is, but 1800Lawyers.com is starting a class action lawsuit to bring justice to those harmed by this evil corporation....
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We usually blame Wall Street (and rightfully so) but this is the mindset that modern Silicon Valley has created (since the bubble).
Advertising/anti-privacy and middlemen companies dominate the Nasdaq
Little of value is created, the opposite of the pioneering days
Fraud is ignored and even celebrated
Free VC money is king...
and everyone thinks they're special.
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The bikes also have electronics which need to be disposed properly.
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Not as responsible as giving them to a charity for professional refurbishment. They could even stipulate that they can't be sold in countries where Uber operates to avoid competition.
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There is a misconception that charities are just out there to take our junk and make us feel less guilty. That we can consumer with abandon, buy anything we want, because there are hordes of poor people who can
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They also understand sociopathic "victims advocates" with law degrees
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Just like products are designed to break, so more can be sold
This is not a given fact and cases of this are extremely rare. You just think products designed to break when in reality products are designed in a never ending race to the bottom for cost, profit and price. Uber's actions lie in the stupidity of psychopath executives, but this part of your comment is far more focused on stupid consumers.
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Planned obsolescence and breakage are why we have laws mandating that parts and service are available for at least X years, and that service manuals must be published.
Companies keep coming up with new ways to limit the lifespan of their products, e.g. mandatory online services or compatibility breaking firmware updates.
It's not just a race to the bottom, it's ensuring that people keep buying new stuff.
It doesn't have to be that way either. In Japan products are expensive but last and service is available fo
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> we have laws mandating that parts and service are available for at least X years, and that service manuals must be published.
What law is that?
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At the moment it's a patchwork of laws and case law but the EU is changing that: https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]
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Planned obsolescence and breakage are why we have laws mandating that parts and service are available for at least X years, and that service manuals must be published.
Planned obsolescence for after market parts is a completely different concept from "products designed to break". Please stay on topic.
Companies keep coming up with new ways to limit the lifespan of their products
That's not products designed to break. But yes, companies come up with new ways products break, why? Because you and I and everyone around us is a tightarse who would happily buy a $2 power brick from Aliexpress accepting that it may burn down our house rather than spending $30 on a decent product.
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I think it is a case this was the easiest course of action.
If a company give away product, it is different than the guy who gives something away on cragslist.
1. Liability: If something happens to a person with those scooters, and they put a legal claim, their insurance wouldn't cover it anymore as it isn't part of their business model.
2. Branding: They will have to remove all the Uber branding. We had a McDonalds in my area go out of business, in less than a few days, All the McDonalds branding was taken d
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Can't blame them really... (Score:5, Informative)
This is nothing but liability management and you can't really blame them. They're highly recognizable bikes associated with their brand that require maintenance and lack any sort of consumer facing support infrastructure to facilitate independent ownership or even charging and use. It's not worth the blow back on their brand image or the potential financial liability to sell them, give them away to individuals, or otherwise donate them to anyone and risk having one burn down someone's garage or get a stuck throttle and mow down some kids on a sidewalk in the litigious climate that exists today.
And trying to tie this back to some "bike shortage" is idiotic. No one looking to buy a bike has any interest in buying one of these and there really isn't a bike shortage, I literally just finished building a new bike (https://ep1.pinkbike.org/p5pb18730647/p5pb18730647.jpg). Took a couple extra weeks to get the frame from Santa Cruz and about an extra week waiting on parts from RockShox but otherwise business as usual. What there is, is a shortage on open bike shops who can do this work for people who lack the tools or know how to do it themselves thanks to forced business closures resulting from COVID. Shops are overwhelmed and understaffed where they are open, and they're faced with backlogs of work to be done that hampers building new bikes for new customers.
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You piece of shit you need to be hated for wanting people to die.
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And? What says the 'victims' of the 'faulty' bike don't hire an American lawyer and file suit in the district where Uber is located.
IANAL... however I'm guessing in personam jurisdiction would apply.
If it was determined that shirts & hats for the losing football team at the super bowl were toxic and injured/killed some poor kids in Africa, we both know there would be suits, and in the US.
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There's tons of free/cheap hanky bikes even if there's zero new ones for a while.
It's like saying "somebody scrapped all the 80s LTDs, and there's no brand new cars available right now" they're different markets with almost no overlap.
That isn't to say it wouldn't have been nice to give them away to those that were interested, but the no new bikes is a red herring, as is the idea that there'
Something's missing... (Score:2)
They forgot to mention the dead hookers in the trunk [theguardian.com].
No bikes on the continent?! (Score:3)
"So, no one has been building bikes for three months. If no one is building bikes, there's no bikes on the continent,"
So according to this guy the average useful lifetime of a bike is - what, 2.5 weeks*? I know we live in a disposable economy, but that's ridiculous.
* Figuring 5 sigma is enough to have most all the bikes fall apart.
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Strange stuff, indeed. My bike is, geez, nearly 25 years old. Aside from regular maintenance, it's never had a problem, not so much as a flat tire. Still totally happy with it. Obviously it's not an e-bike, but so what? I've used it to commute off and on over the years: in most cities, a normal bike will get you where you need to go just fine. I really don't get
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He obviously meant "no *new* bikes on the continent", or at least very few in the NA supply chain.
Apparently somewhere between 15 and 20 million bikes are sold in the US every year, so around 1.5 million a month. However most are imported. Or at least so says statistica.
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Except when seeking to tax their income (alas), which is also their property.
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It's wasteful. Pollution and landfills affect us ALL. If they move to Pluto, I'll stop caring, okay?
Sure it is (Score:2)
We're not talking about arresting them. We're talking about condemning them. Hell, once they throw them away they're not even Uber's property anymore.
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Not your business.
Correct, as an arm-chair CEO, I wouldn't run MY theoretical business in such a shoddy manner.
They weren’t good non-electric bikes (Score:3, Informative)
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Not all of them.
http://desiknio.com/ [desiknio.com]
https://amplerbikes.com/ [amplerbikes.com]
Apart from the weight, those have the motor in the rear hub, where you don't notice it when riding without power assists. When it is in the bottom bracket shell, its resistance is noticeable without assist (and causes additional strain on the drive train under power)
Re: They weren’t good non-electric bikes (Score:1)
Because if the GPS/cell link is dead, they can't track 'em.
I doubt the bikes go completely dead. Likely a lock/sleep mode so the tracking will still work so they can find and collect them.
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Its because these bikes were designed to be strong, long lasting and cheap. As such you can see the tubes that make up the bike is probably normal steel at more than 1.0mm thickness. Most good bikes use a thickness below that because of weight. If I remember right the battery pack is locked beind another welded steel case. On top of that it uses big thick, off road wheels. Then there is the gear ratio, I didn't check them but it felt fairly high. With no way to change the gears on the fly, your going t
That's a terrible excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
How hard would it be to donate them and have people sign an agreement that Uber isn't liable for damages incurred by the bikes?
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If it were up to me these guys would be forced to walk everywhere for at least a few months until they see the value of these devices.
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*whoosh* thanks for playing.
It's the world we live in (Score:3)
Recycling (Score:1)
I wonder how they write them off (Score:2)
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American corporate culture in action (Score:5, Insightful)
This liability concern is laughably American. Those bikes are in many orders of magnitude better condition that what much of the rest of the world would acceptably use and more importantly *sell*. Hell I bought a second hand bike for cheap in the Netherlands that flat out had no working brakes. The extent of the "liability"? Store owner said, "don't ride this until you get it fixed".
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That lack of regulation and depraved attitude towards the consumer is positively libertarian. What kind of bike shop is allowed to sell an unsafe bike? People allowed to hurt each other through lack of government regulation, and you're bragging that it's some kind of paradise?
I'm not allowed to hurt anyone. In fact I would face a fine if I rode that bike in that condition. That shouldn't prevent someone from selling me the bike given that I am perfectly capable of fixing it or paying someone else to fix it.
I didn't say it was a paradise, but given that no we're not allowed to hurt each other, that full information was known in advance (there's laws regarding disclosing what condition products are in), that we didn't senselessly trash something that could be reused, and that we d
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"What kind of bike shop is allowed to sell an unsafe bike?"
Libertarians are generally selfish idiots, but are you saying anything sold has to be 100% safe? Can an entity not sell something that needs repair even if they state that the item is in a state of disrepair?
Trace (Score:2)
Videos of its red bikes being crushed at a recycling centre were shared on social media, angering cycling advocates. Uber said it had decided to destroy thousands of its older-model vehicles due to maintenance, liability and safety concerns
"How outrageous! They should donate those bikes!"
"Then they can get sued. It's the same reason concept cars and other pre-manufacturing vehicles get crushed down rather than sold."
"Someone should do something about those lawsuits!"
"Biker of the left, shhhhhhhhhh. The lawyers donate a ton to our party."
"Yes, sir."
Seriously? (Score:2)
How resource-conserving this scooter business is! (Score:1)
Side note, one of the good results of Corona was when Lime removed it's fleet from Europe. Hope this stays like this
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its
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Side note, one of the good results of Corona was when Lime removed it's fleet from Europe. Hope this stays like this
That's ridiculous. Everybody knows, if you remove the Lime from Corona all you have is a Budweiser lite.
Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
People are jumping to unnecessarily negative conclusions. Believe it or not, this is just the lowest cost, most efficient method of closing this topic out.
Donating, giving away, etc takes up resources, requires on going budgets, and has a lot of unknowns. The liability issues can be mostly mitigated but still adds costs in vetting what must be disposed vs donated. At a 20k volume, the logistics alone wouldn't be offset by the residual value for tax write off.
The easiest thing for a company to do is to just dump it on an e-cycle 3rd party and wash their hands of it. That 3rd party has the volume and expertise to assess the various options and see if resale, donation, or destruction is the most cost effective path. Clearly they chose destruction.
Other items like used cellphones & cars have an after market logistics chain that is well supported by a consumer base to absorb the volume of end of life devices. But these things, like keyboard & mice, do not.
Damb these Bikes to Hell! (Score:2)
Uber is like Atari (Score:2)
When will they learn? When will they LEARN?!?
Have to side with Uber here. (Score:1)
Short of a blanket exemption of *all* liability carved in stone on well trodden legal ground, it's too risky for them to donate bicycles.
Some of you have never tried donating .... (Score:4, Informative)
I've been through the nightmare of deciding to donate large quantities of corporate owned product before. I worked for a company that had hundreds of PCs they upgraded and no longer needed, back in the early 2000's. They were all about 4 year old mini tower Dell machines, just outside their extended warranty period. We thought, "Surely, there are area schools who could really use these! We should ask one of them to come get them!"
Well, first problem was the financial red-tape, because all of them were not only in inventory systems of ours, but also on a depreciation schedule that was arbitrarily set up as 5 years. That meant, giving them away at year 4 meant giving away something that still had value on the books. So the bean counters weren't going to let THAT happen without a lot of additional paperwork.
Then, you had the bigger problem; nobody wanted to just take them from us! Schools would say, "Sure! We could really use them! But only if you install Windows on them for us and have them all ready to go with a working copy of Microsoft Office on them too, because we want to use that." Uh, nope! You get the computer with a blank hard drive that we wiped..... Others would say they had no means to come get them, so expected us to deliver all of them and set them up. Still others only wanted X number of them, and only the "cleanest ones". Eventually, we realized it was costing us FAR more in our valuable time just trying to call all of these places who kept rejecting us unless we met their qualifications for accepting the machines. They all went to a recycler.
I can understand why (Score:2)
Behold (Score:2)
The elegant efficiency of capitalism. Those bikes were sent straight to heaven so that some of the 10M+ people who starve to death in capitalist countries every year can ramp off of clouds in the afterlife. Included in the shipment was plenty of last year's unsold brand-name clothing, barrels of hyper-expensive medications sold in excessively large containers, and all the excess food those people really could've used earlier.
didn't uber say tech saves the planet? (Score:2)
I've been alive for 40+ years. I can list thousands of technologies that promised to make things better/cleaner/safer/greener/more efficient for the environment, and another list of thousands that promised to solve problems and make things easier.
The truth is that you won't find any on those lists that actually achieved that goal. Sure, they "solved" problems by changing the problem into a new problem. Or they "solved" problems by giving the problem to someone else. Or they "solved" problems by kicking