i can also confirm wemo works for international licenses. i registered it last weekend with no trouble. the app is in english and everything went though quickly. which kind of blew me away.
i tried it out today and its pretty amazing. very fun, easy and nice to ride. i can go to places i couldn’t get to before which is ace. now i just have to think of some cool places to go to.
I wonder if it will end up like O Bikes…
You know, people leave it wherever they felt like and the government ends up having to clean up after them.
you can only leave them in legal parking spaces, and i’m not 100% sure about what that is. i put it in one of the marked ones to be sure but i did find it in an unmarked place.
and currently you can only leave them in the official area covered by wemo. which is most of taipei and a little bit of xinbei. so they have that sliiiiight fault of O bikes design covered, which is nice.
I’m pretty sure the government will require a fixed kiosk or return point in order to allow any of these companies to operate at all…
O Bike was a huge mess. There are still a bunch of them abandoned.
those companies were basically just a cash grab. the bikes were cheap and crap, and there was no plan to maintain them. youbike got it right first time.
Yea those bikes felt like someone had added some kind of resistance device to it. I needed twice as much effort to ride them than U Bikes. No idea what they did to the bikes.
U bikes are successful I think because of massive government subsidies. Also, I suspect the government planned and ran them too, since you can call 1999 to report problems with them (which is a government line). That also means they conform to government requirement so they don’t end up being a mess.
i read an article that said youbike was running successfully as company before it was handed over to the government.
the main points it needed to cover for its success were a sturdy bike design that can handle the very frequent use and handle the attack from the elements. lots of bike stations and a low cost. its pretty much written the book on how to do bike sharing. other countries need to follow the template and any obike type schemes need to be out right banned.
I wondered how was u bike able to offer rental at such low cost and remain successful? And not charge a hefty deposit like o bikes?
Ubike is actually Giant.
https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?post=14178&unit=8,8,29,29,32,32,45
i think this was the article i read… which said how they operated as a company before being handed over to the govt and how they are successful with it. seems quite an old article though.
Anyone have any experiences to share?
Renting the scooters or using the app?
Can pay a few ways including in advance at CVS (convenience store). And some optional payment plans.
Can they compete with GoShare?
It’s more a problem of cities not supporting electric mobility enough. Kymcos main competitor…Is itself.
I saw a wemo scooter parked right on a sidewalk blocking access. So what stops someone from parking a wemo scooter right in the middle of the road?
I think it’s going to go like o bike.
You have to take a picture of the scooter when you’re done renting it to prove to WeMo that you’ve parked it legally. If it gets a ticket for being parked improperly or illegally, WeMo can check this against the photo that was taken when it was returned. They can pass that fine on to you.
I don’t know how often this actually happens, that’s just the mechanism they have for it.
So what if the scooter was moved to an illegal spot after parking?
If it was ticketed for illegal parking but the photo shows the last person to rent it parked it legally, then they can’t pass that fine on to the renter. It would mean someone else moved it.
It’s up to WeMo to either fight the ticket or pay it.
WeMo Scooter will adjust the basic rate from 2023/02/20 (Mon). The original rate of 2.5 yuan per minute will be adjusted to 3 yuan per minute.
How the fuck do you switch them on? I rented successfully on the app, switched it on in the app, pressed the P button on the scooter but it won’t move when I use the accelerator.
