I booked a Ford Ecosport on Zoomcar on a Saturday about a month ago for the following Tuesday. I chose to have the car delivered at home, and booked the trip from 09:00 A. M. to 07:00 P. M. I chose to experiment with Zoomcar as our car would be away for the day for its 6-monthly checkup.
I got the following confirmation SMS immediately on booking, telling me that the driver would be allocated 1.5 hours before the time at which the trip was to commence.
The car did not show up at 09:00 A. M. At about 09:20 A. M., 20 minutes after the trip should have started, the app gave me a notification that a delivery agent was allocated. The notification said the car would arrive at 09:44 A. M. I thought, “something is better than nothing,” and simply waited. At about 09:35 A. M., I found from inside the app that there was no delivery agent allocated at all. I then called customer care.
Here is a screenshot of the app showing that position (no delivery agent named). The screenshot was taken at exactly the instant at which the delivery agent was allocated for a second time, as can be seen from the push notification.
Customer care said they’d give me the agent’s number and told me that I could follow up with the delivery agent. Although I took the number, I explained that it was their job to send the car to me and not mine to follow up, and politely refused to do so. At 09:35 A.M., as you can see from the screenshot above, I got a notification that the delivery agent of the same was allocated again. This time, the promised delivery time was 09:54 A. M.
Here is a screenshot of my notifications screen showing the allocation of a delivery agent at 09:23 A. M., and again at 09:35 A. M.
I then spoke to the delivery agent at about 09:40 A. M. He first asked which car I was talking about and I gave him the number. He then gave me the number of the driver. I am not sure if Zoomcar contemplates the driver being somebody different from the delivery agent. The driver told me on the phone that the car was supposed to be at BTM Layout, but was in or near the Airport instead. He said he would reach in twenty minutes.
At 09:56 A. M., since the car was nowhere in sight, I thought I had extended enough of a long rope to Zoomcar and decided to cancel the booking. However, the app didn’t permit me to cancel the booking on the ground that the trip had already commenced! This, a little under an hour after the scheduled start of the trip, while the car had not yet reached me. Here’s a screenshot of that error message.
The car finally reached me at 10:20 A. M. Yet another issue, which I discovered at this stage, was that the car had a white board.
The car was in relatively good condition. The interiors were extremely clean and well kept. There were some small scratches on the exterior, and one of the fog lamps had come partially out of its slot, but overall the car was in good shape. The EcoSport was a great pleasure to drive. Sadly, I was rather busy at work on that day and couldn’t drive it as much as I’d have liked. I drive a 2017 pre-facelift 1.3L DDIS S-Cross. I found that the EcoSport handled very well and didn’t have as much body roll as I would have expected for the relatively higher and more upright posture it has when compared to the S-Cross. The only failing was that the clutch was heavy. As somebody who likes manual transmissions but drives in traffic everyday, that alone would be a deal-breaker if the car was still on the market.
The woes do not end here. The Zoomcar app recommends (nags) that you fill up the tank to the full to get a 5-star rating as a user. I, naively reposing faith in the robustness of Zoomcar's systems and processes, filled the tank up. I spent more than ₹4,000 as the car came to me with less than 10% in the tank. After the trip, multiple promises were made on telephone by customer care (for so long as I could reach them) for remitting the refund within various periods of time. However, after much follow up through multiple avenues (customer care on the phone, email and twitter both by tweets and DMs), the money was refunded to me only about three weeks after the trip.
Beware that customer care on the telephone is not accessible to you for these purposes a few days after the trip, as the IVR will not permit you to speak to an actual human being unless you have a trip pending or recently concluded. The options available on the IVR at this stage also do not contemplate this. I was able to reach a human being for roughly 10-15 days after the booking. But once that period expired, the options on the IVR changed.
The apparent human being who handles their twitter account seems to be nice, although somewhat helpless. There was no point losing my cool with him/ her, or indeed losing my cool in life in general. So I patiently persisted and sent the apparent human being a message every time the period within which s/he promised redressal had expired. I suspected that their in-house systems would eventually have to compel them to close this case/ complaint if I persisted for long enough. I played it like an endurance game; a test match, never losing either my cool or my persistence. That strategy seemed to work. Many unkept promises later, the refund was finally processed. Once the refund was processed from their end, the actual remittance was pretty quick. A link was sent to me, and the refund came to my credit in 2-5 minutes after I filled my remittance details in the webpage the link led to.
There are some other tiny complaints too. Although the trip is complete in all respects now and I have received my refund, against that trip, the app continues to show an error message “image upload error,” although within the app all the images are clearly uploaded without difficulty. I hope this is only a bona fide technical issue. Here's a screenshot taken today showing this.
I should also point out that a cousin of mine booked a Renault Kwid from the IGI Airport in Delhi a couple of weeks ago. When he arrived in Delhi, no Kwid was available, and he was given a Datsun Go+ in what he describes as “terrible” condition. This car too was a white-board. He sent me a video of the blower of the AC making a noise which was so loud that I initially thought it was the car’s engine. He also had a puncture which resulted in the whole tyre ripping off.
Anyway, while, based on these experiences, I have no hesitation in recommending against Zoomcar, I do see that some people have had rather a pleasant time with them.