socalledunitedstates:

You Wouldn’t Download an E-Scooter

Many cities have banned e-scooter short-hire vehicles and are impounding them, and in other cities, repo men have been busily seizing scooters left on private property, and the e-scooter companies, who already lose money on every scooter (they’re making it up in volume!) just abandon their scooters to rust away in impound lots and turn into e-waste.

Which means that you can pick up scooters for pocket-change in municipal auctions! There’s only one problem: the control units of these scooters only take orders from companies like Bird and Lime, so even after you own one of these things, you can’t ride it without paying an overcapitalized bezzle for the privilege.

That is…not unless you swap out the control unit! For $30 or less, you can get a conversion kit that swaps in with just a few screws’ worth of fiddling. Once you do that, that city impound scooter becomes your scooter, at a price so cheap you can buy two!

This strategy is totally legal, and totally toxic to Bird and Lime’s business model, and boy do they know it: last year, Bird threatened to sue me for writing about this in a bid to keep the news from spreading. Luckily, we recognized the hollowness of their threat and, with help from our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we were able to force them to back down and issue an apology (albeit not a very good one).

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