It's a real scourge that has grown in recent years in the Paris region: the theft of the famous sky blue and black Véligo bikes. Properties of the Île-de-France region, which rents these electric bikes for a period of 6 or 9 months, these electric bikes, of good quality and rather resistant, are sold on platforms, such as on the Facebook Marketplace, where their price varies between 70 and 450 euros, with or without battery. Except that these bikes - whose unique model was designed for Île-de-France Mobilités (IDFM) - are only intended to be rented, over a very short time, to Ile-de-France residents who would hesitate to afford an electric bike, and should not be sold under any circumstances. Agnès Presberg, the deputy general manager in charge of development at Véligo Location, has to deal with this ridiculous situation, explaining that she noticed these illegal sales two years ago.
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Above all, it's a bad customer experience that we're fighting against, and I would say that it's neither a marginal phenomenon, nor that it'svery serious," she admits today, refusing to tell us how many bikes are affected. What is certain is that Véligo Location is not sitting idly by: for the past few months, the region's service has been working hand in hand with online platforms for the resale of second-hand objects. Le Bon Coin, for example, "was immediately very responsive, by setting up an algorithm that systematically deletes Véligo's sales ads," says the deputy CEO, who concedes that the discussion was more complicated with Facebook: "Things are better. Since this summer, they have been deleting ads every time they are reported (...) It's a stopgap measure, because we'd prefer them not to be put online."
Except that you only have to go to the famous American social network to understand that the situation is far from settled. A phenomenon that was still on the fringes a few years ago, when the service launched in 2019 was a great success, but is slowly starting to become a real thorn in the side of this service that meets with the approval of Ile-de-France residents. "The figures speak for themselves: 94% of our users are satisfied with the service and 68% continue the experience by bike," says Véligo, while more than 90,000 Ile-de-France residents have been able to benefit from the service to date.
Repeated flights
But it is clear that, despite Véligo Location's warnings, theft can happen anywhere and at any time. Violette, a young woman in her thirties from Paris, recently paid the price. While she had parked her bike in the heart of Paris, at the foot of her building, she was surprised to discover that it had been stolen, even though it had no battery. Far from resigning herself to accepting to reimburse her stolen bike - at a price of 1200 euros for a classic model without insurance - she then began to carry out her investigation on her own. With the help of the geolocation of her two-wheeler available on the official Véligo app, she found it just a few kilometres from her home in Barbès. There, tied with a padlock that doesn't belong to her, she decides to wait for the thief to show up. Which he will never do. It was finally with the help of a local shopkeeper that she sawed and cut the padlock to be able to recover the Véligo.
A story with a happy ending, but which demonstrates the attraction that thieves have in seizing these electric bikes, even without keys, batteries or chargers, and therefore, unusable as they are. And that's just to sell them on the black market. In May 2022, IDFM had already drawn the attention of users of the service, about battery theft, which is becoming more and more common in Paris and the region. In an email sent to all subscribers, Véligo called on all users "to be extremely vigilant by adopting the right reflexes", explaining that "the only way to avoid theft and damage" was to "systematically remove the battery from the bike when it is parked".
But one of the most complicated points to manage for Véligo Location is the immobilization of the fleet of electric bikes by the delivery people, who are absolutely not the target of users desired when the service was launched. "Today, there are still delivery drivers, but we can see that there are fewer of them," says the deputy general manager in charge of development at Véligo Location. But the problem is such that since 2021, Véligo had taken the decision to cap the use of these two-wheelers, with a limitation on the distance and duration of use of each bike. From then on, it is no longer possible to exceed 600 kilometres per fortnight, nor to make more than 10 daily trips with the same bike, to have an average of less than 5 kilometres per trip and to use your Véligo more than 5 days a week. Otherwise, your subscription will be cancelled immediately. A new service regulation that was aimed at home delivery drivers, without explicitly mentioning it.
Again, this is a failure. Two years later, not only are there still so many delivery people, sometimes up to a dozen Véligos are parked in front of the address of a dark store for example, or in front of a restaurant, waiting for the order to be ready to deliver it. But they also participate in the marketing of second-hand Véligos, as evidenced by a recent investigation by Le Parisien, in which a journalist explains that he tried to buy a bike from the region sold illegally on Facebook. On the spot, the journalist, presented as a simple buyer, talks to the seller who explains that he himself bought this bike a few months earlier to make deliveries, and even offers to sell him an extra battery. When contacted, the Meta group did not take the time to respond to our requests.