Why is Beam so bad at this?

I’m an e-scooter aficionado out of necessity (plus they’re fun). A couple of years back I broke my leg in two places and it’s never been the same, plus due to the joyous thing called joint hyper-mobility syndrome, my joints don’t particularly want to work the way they should.

Autonomy, speed, fun — e-scooters are great if you’re willing to pay the price of looking a bit like a dick.

There’s three companies littered across Wellington, and they all have their positives. Flamingo has a lovely comms team, sweet deals and also branded socks — yes, I do own two pairs of the socks, no I’m not being paid by Flamingo to say they’re cool — Lime has the Hutt covered in a sort of bumpy, very expensive way, and Beam has…

Well.

Beam unfortunately has the strongest scooters in Wellington. They’re the only ones that can make it up our hills, they’re the safest in the rain and…

They’ve seemingly got no customer service team,

an absolutely dogshit app,

scooters that appear to be actively unmaintained,

and the new scooters speak to you if you’re in a no parking zone! Some might call that a benefit, but if your no-parking zone is about 2km long it’s several minutes of being told off repeatably by a non-sentient metal being. If I was that into being chastised, I’d become a cuck.

“You’re in a no parking zone. Please park your scooter outside the zone!” I know. I am aware. It shows on your app. Y’know, the thing I have to click on to end my scooter ride? Yeah. That.

While we’re here, let’s talk about the app itself. Are you a masochist? If you are, you really should get into riding Beam scooters, cause I put in approximately 40 bucks per week to this company and get nothing back except bruises and pain.

This app = terrible! Not sure why this dainty lil scooter app is slower to load and harder to use than the professional video editing software that I have on my phone, but we all love surprises when we’re paying $1.00+65 cents per minute. Surprises like:

• the app throwing up “sorry there’s been an error” messages, without the errors being defined.
• GPS triangulation being all over the show in areas where it should be working well (I’ve been geocaching for nine years, I know when a GPS works well, and this one doesn’t)

And most unfortunately:

• The app sometimes doesn’t recognise that you’re riding a scooter using it. This isn’t a unique error, I’ve had it a few times. Sometimes restarting the app works, usually it requires a full phone reset. Imagine being on a schedule and having to restart your entire phone to end a scooter ride that is charging you $1.00+65 cents per minute. That shit adds up! If I was a worse person, I’d think it’s a conspiracy to get you to pay Beam more money, but that can’t be the case, right?

Beam is an incompetent company with a distinct lack of care for their customer base. Up until very recently they had a deal in Wellington where you could pay $79.95 a month to get 120 minutes of free riding a day. This was an excellent deal and saved me a ton on transport.

Then without warning, they just got rid of it. Why? Who knows. It can’t have been costing them money. So now, dutifully, like the lamest person in the world, I’m paying $39.95 a week for a product that is fairly unsafe to use in the rain and is stroppy at best.

While we’re here, let’s talk about the safety of some of their scooters. Now, to Beam’s credit, they’ve gotten better recently. They’ve updated the vast majority of their scooters to a heftier model that’s better at dealing with Wellington’s many hills as of late, but they sure weren’t keen on maintaining their old ones!

Multiple times I’ve reported maintenance on these scooters and come back the next day and they’ve still been there, still accessible via the app to ride. Let me be clear, I’m not just reporting “Oh I had a bad time scootering”, I’m reporting maintenance like “HEY THE BRAKES DON’T WORK.” It’s abhorrent behavior and truly unsafe, and one day someone’s going to get on one of these and seriously injure themselves due to lack of maintenance. But, like I said, they’ve got new scooters now so hopefully things will be a bit less shit going forward.

Beam is a company (like most companies) that clearly puts profit before their customers. This might be manageable if their product wasn’t quite so people focussed, but these scooters are directly used by their customers and include an incredible degree of risk so it’s important that they work always and they work effectively.

Currently, that’s not the case.