Bird Monthly Electric Scooter Review: Much Worse Than A Bike

While walking down Market Street with my Bird scooter last month, wearing AirPods and staying away from the much faster cycling that was sneaking around me as I was spinning to a sad, painful 12 miles at night. hour, I started to think that I was maybe the problem.

I ride a bike to work. I do it almost every day in San Francisco in the last six years or so, and I know what all these cyclists think: "Who is this technological doofus, who rolls unconsciously in the bike lane on a low-powered scooter? braking? I hope that he will face the plants. I often thought about aggressive Boosted Board runners, OneWheel Balance Balance adventurers, and real-life daredevils who dared to use these InMotion electric unicycles. I thought everyone was making an extreme effort to avoid using a good old-fashioned bike.

Still, my fellow cyclists do not know much that, if the AirPods are mine (and that I take full responsibility for it), the scooter is not there. It's a rental, monthly to be precise. This is San Francisco, which has banned Bird until he pbades all the necessary regulatory steps. This scooter was not recovered in the street. He was caught in the elevator of my building where I am tidying up and charging him.

The rental is part of a new program that the scooter company is experimenting in San Francisco, Barcelona and Miami. (The city of Florida was added to the list earlier this month.) What sets San Francisco apart, in particular, is that it's a city where Bird did not invade the streets with electric vehicles without a dock because he is legally unable to do so. In June of this year, Bird owns the Scoot scooter company, which is licensed here. However, Scoot's presence remains relatively limited compared to the only other city license holder, Skip, who has accounted for 90% of all rides in the city in the last six months.

For Bird, this monthly program has a dual purpose. It's an experience with a different business model, as its current model is starting to look pretty suspicious. The company continues to bleed money – it has lost $ 100 million in three months this year – trying to expand into new markets and reduce the costs it pays on every release. This monthly program is also a way for Bird to reinforce his image in the home town of Silicon Valley, the cradle of the horse movement, from which he draws inspiration, while preparing Scoot for speed and persuading San Francisco to let him in as well. .

As a person who found the scooters very useful, even if they were a little chaotic, in destinations like Los Angeles and Austin, I thought it would be a good experience to see how much Bird's monthly monthly magazine was a means of daily transportation. After all, San Francisco is a city small enough and dense enough for scooters to make all the difference, potentially encouraging a growing base of technology industry commuters to abandon their cars for transportation. cleaner.

Unfortunately, after using this Bird scooter for about 30 days, I can confidently say that my suspicions of cycling were more or less on the nose. I should simply use a bike because it is, in most cases, less boring and faster than this particular model of Bird scooter. In addition, a bike never runs out of batteries.

But the fundamental problem is deeper. Bird and his other electric scooter suppliers have seen a meteoric rise thanks to a simple principle: a scooter that you rent spontaneously for a short time and you will not have to worry about not using it. A monthly program like this one, where I am encouraged to use it every day and responsible for its well-being, introduces all sorts of complications. It betrays the light and carefree pillar of the "micromobility" trend which is in fact Bird's core business.

I would sing a different tune if the scooter was better. In fact, if these scooters improved, the monthly rental program could become a central part of its growth. Bird offers low priced rentals of $ 24.99 per month, but it offers you a slow and slow scooter with around 50% of the battery capacity of its standard model without docking station. It is also limited to about 5 mph less than those I was driving to LA last month. These LA scooters really sailed well and strongly advocated for Bird's presence in dense metropolitan areas where public transit is lacking and where you often have to walk two or three miles to reach your destination.

If you want the best scooter Bird offers, called Bird One, you will soon be able to buy one for $ 1,299. This gives you a premium e-scooter with a top speed of 19 mph, 30 miles of autonomy and a maximum weight of 220 pounds. If I could rent this scooter, even for as much as $ 40 or $ 50 a month, I would like in a heartbeat. (The company is also developing its own moped.) Bird tells me that she currently offers "several personal rental models," but the one I have is the one that is advertised on the monthly program website, and I have not yet different around the city.

In most cases, scooters are very practical and less tiring than riding a bicycle. They will also drive you where you need to be for less than a Uber or Lyft ride – and at about the same cost as public transit. After all, scooters have come a long way because many people just like to drive them and find them useful.

The monthly rental scooter Bird checks many of these boxes before you start to compromise. I found that the delivery process was relatively transparent: a Bird employee had locked it in front of my apartment for four hours during a pre-designated delivery day. From there, you control the vehicle via the Bird app, scanning its barcode to activate it and using a built-in locking mechanism to free it from anything related to it.

These activation and locking mechanisms are separated. You can choose to tell the app that the scooter is not locked, if you keep it in your apartment or garage and you can still activate it. This sometimes led to strange application problems in which Bird thought my scooter was running when it was not unlocked or unlocked when it was attached to a bike rack. But most of the problems were solved when resetting an application, even though it could take a frustrating time when you had to go somewhere quickly. Sometimes a bug in the Bird application prevented me from unlocking the scooter, but that was relatively rare.

When it comes to driving, Bird behaves like a standard e-scooter, but more slowly. This has done terribly on the hills (as expected), and on the slopes, it seems to be wisely engaging the electric brake to prevent you from losing control, which is a nice touch of safety that I would sometimes like to be not there to be able to fight my way.

The worst aspects of the rental were the capacity of her battery and the fact of lugging her physically while I could not drive her. For example, to get him into my apartment, I often have to keep the scooter on. If you turn it off and try to push it on the ground, the scooter will beeping constantly as part of its anti-theft measures. The reason this feature is deployed on these monthly scooters is unclear.

As a result, I push an activated scooter into an elevator while waiting to receive it in my apartment, then I turn it off. (Fortunately, the throttle is only active when you push with your feet.) Only then can I plug it in to charge. Taking the scooter out of my apartment, taking stairs or climbing the hill next to my building (which it can not physically climb because its engine is too weak) was just as frustrating.

The deal-breaker, however, is the battery. It takes me on average about 7.5 to 8 miles on a charge. This means that I could go back and forth 3.5 km to get to my office and return two days a week, which would require a full night charge. If I decided to take it anywhere – at a friend's house or to do a race – there would be about 30% left after a day.

It's not that bad if you have a place to put it in your apartment every night, but I have a cluttered living room and it was not easy to make room for it. My garage was also not an ideal environment to keep it every night, loaded and unlocked (our bike rack is not near a point of sale), because I was afraid it was stolen. We've had stolen bikes in the past, and Bird says you're on the hook for the full price of the scooter if it gets stuck or suffers serious damage.

The company has reported some of its rental FAQs stating that it would charge users up to US $ 500 for a lost or stolen scooter. Knowing that you are renting a scooter that Bird considers a value of 500 USD is a good indication of the level of quality of the device: solid but not great and maybe the same level as any of those that you can buy on Amazon with Amazon a lot more range and a top top speed.

Is Bird's program worth it? At $ 25 a month, he seems cheerfully concerned about his budget. And for those who do not plan to ride a bike and are just looking for a good alternative to public transit, it's better than relying on Uber or Lyft and surely faster than walking. But Bird has not done enough to justify why this scooter is needed. You can not pick it up on the street or drop it off wherever you want, and there are many other options, from bike to public transit, that can better solve the problem of needing to travel a short distance quickly and easily. lower cost.

When I recently found myself in the garage of my building, running a little late at work and thinking about the risky battery level of almost 40% of my Bird rental, I decided to take my bike. It would make me work faster and not get stuck in the office at the end of the day. If Bird can start offering a monthly rental scooter that will solve these problems, I will be the first to register.