Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Pramak. On today's show, the latest trouble for Tesla and a very blue steel industry.

But first, scooter wars. Okay, yeah, look, at first I thought it was dumb too. All of these electric-powered

scooters showing up in big American cities, able to be located and unlocked with the same sort

smartphone app used by companies like Uber. Yeah, they're scooters. It's the transportation

choice of children and I guess late 90s hipsters before the dot-com crash.

But the truth is that this has become, amazingly, a legitimate form of hyper-local

transportation.

Basically, the way to move from point A to point B went too slow to walk but too short to

hail a car.

And lots of people love them, which is why venture capitalists have plugged hundreds of millions of dollars into companies like Bird and Lyme at big billion dollar

valuations, believing scooters could become the new ride hail. And in fact, ride hail companies are

doing it too, Uber and Lyft want permits. The problem, though, is that city officials have long

memories, and many don't want to repeat what they consider to be their failure in regulating ride hail back in the early days. So some of them

now begun putting caps on scooters or prevented certain companies from operating, basically

managing to put the toothpaste back into the tube. For example, look at what happened in San Francisco,

where six months ago it was almost impossible to walk down a sidewalk without hitting a scooter.

Then all of a sudden, there were none, zero, because the city said it was going to figure

out who would get permits for a pilot program and who wouldn't.

Now scooters are back in San Francisco, but far fewer than before.

And we saw a similar thing happen in Santa Monica, which actually is where

Bird, maybe the leading scooter company, is headquartered. Why all of this matters is that until a

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