I also loved going green. Sure, I occasionally felt smug about it, but mostly it just felt like the right thing to do, especially considering that Washington state where I live is majority hydroelectric.
I kept up my usage, doing my regular Costco and MacPherson’s runs, noticing a few things as I went. Most notable was how I almost completely stopped using my car. I got into the driver’s seat at one point and realized it was my first time behind the wheel in about a month. I hadn’t filled the car up with gas, hadn’t washed it either. One good and funny thing was how the cargo bike kept me from overdoing it at Costco. Once, I bought too much and was unable to Tetris everything into the racks, forcing me to return something before even leaving the store, which was enough of a pain that it kept me from doing it again.
Closer to home, I got in a discussion with my butcher about his ebike. “It’s like a cheat code for getting around in the city,” he said. That rang true for me. Seattle tries to present itself as transportation forward, but the city has only a single subway-esque light-rail line, and the buses often feel sketchy. Cars are king here. Leasing a bike for me was a way break through that a bit.
The lease-(or subscribe)-to-own model is intriguing, and while final pricing if you choose to buy the bike depends on usage and overall time leased, the Wombi representative shared an example. The $135-per-month Quick Haul has a retail price of $2,900. Tax and accessories aside, after a year you’ll have paid $1,620 for the subscription and have the option to buy for a little over $2,200, making lease-to-own a bit more than $3,600. (It’s a bit more complicated than that, but these are decent ballpark numbers.) So you’re paying a few hundred extra bucks to be able to try it out and getting a lot of subscription benefits during that year. It’s hard to quantify, but that feels like decent math. A setup like this would make for an wonderful corporate perk.
It wasn’t all perfect. Wombi’s bikes have alarms that, as a condition of your lease, you are required to use outside of your home. Mine immediately started going off at random times, and Wombi had to come out and replace it. There is a leash lock that’s stowed in a bag that needs relocating as it’s mounted right where you want to pass your foot through to get on the bike.
Something that bugged me a bit was the cost of the accessory racks, panniers, and kid seats, which add to the monthly price. Most people opt for two accessories, and having those built into the price, even if that makes the base fee a little more expensive, makes more sense in my head. However, if you lease for a year, you can buy the accessories for half off. If you lease for two years, they’re yours.
It would also be good to see Wombi offer more options for hauling stuff around in wet weather. Tern sells a dry bag that would be perfect, but it’s not among Wombi’s accessory offerings. Maybe it’ll just take Wombi’s first Seattle winter to figure out that people need that stuff.
I also think that at 6 feet, I was a little too tall for the bike. You can adjust the handlebar height and angle along with the seat height, but for as much fussing as I did, it still felt like I was always trying to correct my posture out of a bike-induced hunch.
All that said, Wombi’s subscription model helped me break the ebike barrier, allowing me to do things I couldn’t do on my regular bicycle and would prefer not to do in my car. Leasing and its perks allowed me to give it a full tryout for three months. Buying the bike outright still feels like too high a barrier, too much financial risk. A subscription gave me more information with less risk and could help me make the leap.
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