Juraj's blog

(Updated on November 4th, 2020)

Stockholm has seen multiple transport companies that exercise a sharing economy business model (Sunfleet, Car2Go, DriveNow, oBike, EU bike…). Back in September 2018 a new player emerged – Voi – and started a new wave with their electric scooters (or kick bikes).  At the time the service was started, the available information was scarce, so I decided to write a review of my own. I have since revised it on several occasions to keep it up to date, which has not been trivial as the development and changes in the electric scooter renting landscape have been swift. I would like to point out that the review is by no means backed by the company (or its competitors), it is purely my uncensored and uninfluenced experience. At the end of the article I also give an account of Voi’s competitors in Stockholm.

The idea behind the service is simple, there is a number of electric scooters spread around town. You open Voi’s app, locate an available scooter near you, approach it, unlock it through the app and away you go. When you are done, you park the scooter, end your rent through the app, and the fee for the ride is charged from your credit card. Which brings me to the price: 10 SEK to start a rental, plus 2.5 SEK per minute of riding. This is quite a lot, because for all but the shortest rides of up to a couple of kilometers, the subway is both cheaper and quicker. Maybe not as fun, though :-). In the summer of 2020 they introduced daily and monthly passes. The daily pass currently costs 129 SEK while the monthly one is 549 SEK. Whether that is affordable or not, it depends on your riding needs.

If we compare the minute price to aimo, a car pool enterprise operational since October 2018, which costs 2.82 SEK per minute without any start fee (calculated from the price per hour of 169 SEK), Voi is insanely expensive. Cars cost much more than electric scooters to purchase and to maintain, and they incur parking charges which scooters do not. When I had contacted the customer service back in 2018 and confronted them about the high price, I was told that they were “feeling it out” during the roll-out phase and that their competition offered similar prices across Europe and the US. I could not see these prices being sustainable after the initial “coolness” period. Despite the scooters being fun, after three days of testing I already knew I would not use them regularly in the long term. My bicycle in the spring / summer / autumn and the subway in the winter did not have their jobs threatened by Voi. However, even though I think the prices are too high and thus use the scooters only on rare occasions, I guess that there is enough demand for the service because Voi has been successful in attracting serious investment capital, and their expansion to new cities and countries has been rapid (the Corona pandemic has however slowed this down).

I had found out about the service by seeing the scooters around town. There were no commercials anywhere and the company’s presence in the media was quite shy back then (now they are very active, though). Their Web page did not contain much information either. All of this made me skeptical to share my e-mail adress and credit card information with them, but I still did. I really wanted to try the scooters and what could possibly go wrong, right :-)? In the beginning they were relatively scarce, except in the business center of Stockholm, but their number grew significantly with time and finding an available scooter is not a problem anymore. There is a phenomenon that I call a “phantom scooter” – a scooter that is visible on the map but does not exist in the real world. On several occasions I walked from scooter to scooter, only to realize that all were phantom ones. This was either due to a software bug or thanks to dishonest users ending their ride in spaces that are not reachable to the general public (like their own balcony or locked yard). The customer service assured me that they were working on fixing both. The software bug should be relatively easy to take care of but I wonder how they will go about dishonest users. After more than six months in business, the issue had still not been resolved. I don’t know if it ever will be solved completely, but due to the increased number of scooters this is not as annoying as it used to be. Chances are, even if you encounter a phantom scooter, there will be a real one nearby.

On one occasion when I walked up to the scooter I wanted to ride, I discovered that it was broken. I read in an article that the typical lifespan of a scooter in service is only a couple of months after which it is in such bad shape that it has to be decommissioned. Voi advertise their service as being environmentally friendly, but scraping thousands of scooters per year certainly reduces their positive effect on the environment. The fossil fuel vans that collect discharged and then redistribute recharged scooters are not environmentally friendly either.

The scooters are easy to ride, just make sure to kick-off before pressing the throttle, since pressing the throttle while stationary will not do anything – this is a battery optimization technique as the energy consumption is much smaller when the scooter is already in motion. On flat terrain they are decently fast (their speed is limited to 20 km/h) but they do lose a lot of speed going uphill. They are relatively stable but watch out for pot holes and bumps. Also, be very careful when the surface is wet – I lost grip on several occasions on a wet road. I recommend using a helmet while riding, regardless of the weather conditions.

The original scooter model was Ninebot by Segway ES2. In September 2019 Voi added a new, custom built model to their fleet. It looked and felt much sturdier than the Ninebot. Since spring 2020 there is a third version in operation. Hopefully, these new scooters will have a longer lifespan than a couple of months, and this should mitigate some of the environmental concerns mentioned above.

The tricky thing is to decide where they should be ridden as they are much faster than pedestrians but often slower than cyclists. I usually decide this dynamically during my rides and go there where I feel safest and where I will not annoy or endanger other traffic participants. Legally, they are treated as bicycles and should be ridden in bike lanes. They are allowed on sidewalks only if riding at walking speed. The service definitely does trigger the question of traffic safety as it introduces a new type of vehicle to the already crowded streets. Thus far my observation has been that scooter riders are much less careful and considerate than cyclists, unfortunately. There is also a philosophical question – as this is a private company, how should we feel about the fact that their scooters occupy public space? For car pools this is easy – they pay for parking spaces (or actually, the users of car pools pay for parking spaces through service fees), but the scooters are parked on the sidewalks. To make matters worse, they are often left without any decency or respect for public space.

Another aspect that bugs me is that the customer service is not available over the phone, only over e-mail. If you get an urgent problem, you want to call and not send an e-mail. In the beginning they were quite speedy in replying to my e-mails, but since then I have reported several problems with scooters to which I never received a reply.

All in all, I am positive about the service, but not as excited about it as I was in the beginning. They did mitigate some of the early problems with the service (like the phantom scooters), but there are still unresolved issues – the most obvious ones being careless riding and scooters littering the pavements making them less accessible to handicapped people. I have to give the company credit, though – they are aware of these problems and they often run social media campaigns with the purpose of educating their customers.

The competition

In November 2018, Voi got competition from Lime, a service backed by Uber. 2019 was a fruitful year with ten new actors appearing: TIER, Glyde, MOOW, blinkee.city, Circ, Bird, aimo, Vosh, Wind and Wheels. Most of them offered a similar experience and price, but in my opinion two of them stood out  – blinkee.city and Wheels.

What set blinkee.city apart from the rest of the pack was that instead of kick bikes, their vehicle of choice was an electric moped. I tried it on several occasions and it was more stable and fun to ride than the scooters. At 3.9 SEK per minute with no start fee I again found it to be on the expensive side, but it offered better value for money than the scooters. And as far as I know, this was the only service where you were allowed to have a passenger. Unfortunately, in September 2019 they left Stockholm. They claimed that they would be back in the spring 2020, but they never reappeared.

Wheels also offered a different vehicle – something in between blinkee.city’s mopeds and the usual scooters – a kind of a beefy scooter where you ride sitting down. I tried it twice, and it felt very stable. Could they have found the sweet spot between stability and agility? On the other hand, at 4 SEK per minute I still considered it to be more of a gimmick rather than a go to transport solution. It cost me 80 SEK from my home in Hornsberg to the business center of Stockholm, which is twice as much as a public transport ticket. Unfortunately, similarly to blinkee.city, Wheels pulled out of Stockholm. This was in September 2020. Even they promised to be back. We shall see if they deliver on the promise.

Some time ago I had read that there were ten to fifteen different enterprises ready to offer their shared electric vehicles of different types to the people of Stockholm. Time will tell how many can stick around in the long run. The competition is fierce, and now even the Corona pandemic is interfering with the development.

By November 2019 there were ten operational companies (Voi, Lime, TIER, MOOW, Circ, Bird, aimo, Vosh, Wind and Wheels), one was paused (blinkee.city) and one had closed down (Glyde). During winter 2019-2020 I only saw Voi, TIER and Wheels scooters out on the streets. By late May 2020 I saw scooters belonging to Voi, TIER, Wheels, aimo, Lime, MOOW and Bird. Additionally Bolt appeared as a new actor (they had been present in Stockholm with their taxis, but this was the first time they offered electric scooters). In July Vosh restarted their service, while aimo closed it down (they are still present as a car pool provider, though). As mentioned, Wheels are also on pause since September 2020. This means that we currently have seven operational businesses. In my opinion a market of Stockholm’s size can not support so many actors, especially now that the number of tourists has dropped considerably due to the Corona pandemic.