I had a few bulky items to move. Not enough to justify hiring a lorry and two uncles, but definitely too much to stuff into the back seat of a sedan. So I did what any reasonable Singaporean with a GetGo account does: I opened the app and looked for a GetGo van.

This GetGo review is a little different from my usual ones. I’ve already written a complete GetGo guide covering booking, insurance and the basics. This time it’s about one specific trip, the things that went wrong, and the shortcuts I wish someone had told me about beforehand.

New to GetGo? Use my referral code WNWUNLJX when you sign up and you’ll get S$8 off your first drive.

The Car: Toyota Pixis Van

The GetGo van I went with was a Toyota Pixis, parked not too far from my place. It’s a small, boxy kei-style van: nothing glamorous, but that tall, flat cargo area is exactly what you want when you’re moving awkwardly shaped things.

Two things worth knowing before you book. GetGo lists it as a 2-seater (the decal on the door says “PAX: 1 driver, 1 other”), so this isn’t the van for bringing two friends along to help. And a sticker on the back puts the maximum load at 350 kg.

Finding it was easy. The car was where the app said it would be, in the lot it said it would be in. So far, so good.

Then I tried to unlock it.

The Problem: Horrendous Mobile Reception

GetGo works by connecting your phone to the car through the app. That’s great when you have signal. It’s less great when you’re in a car park where the reception hovers between one bar and nothing at all.

At best, and this was rare, I had two bars. Most of the time I had one bar or less. The app would try to connect, think about it for a while, then fail. Retry. Fail. Walk around the car hoping a different angle would help (it didn’t). Retry.

All in, I wasted somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes just trying to connect to the car and unlock it. On an hourly booking, that’s not just time. That’s money ticking away while you stand next to a locked van holding your phone up like you’re trying to catch rain.

Why does signal matter so much? From what I could tell, the unlock itself happens over Bluetooth. GetGo’s own troubleshooting steps are basically “turn Bluetooth off and on again.” But when I turned to Live Chat for help, GetGo’s digital assistant kept sending “wake-up commands” to the car remotely, and those presumably need the car to have signal too. In a dead zone, I suspect both my phone and the van were struggling.

Is this GetGo’s fault? Not entirely. They can’t control the reception in every car park. But it’s worth knowing before you book a GetGo van (or any GetGo car) parked deep in a basement or a poorly covered multi-storey.

As for this particular car park, I’ll be avoiding it like the plague from now on. Thank goodness GetGo’s network is vast, both across Singapore and around my area, so crossing one location off my list barely dents the lineup of cars I can choose from.