When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

I got banned from using Zipcar last year.<p>I lived in a condo building with an under ground parking lot in SF. A few times I rented a Zipcar and left it parked in the parking lot at my condo building.<p>About 50% of the time, the car would not unlock. In all cases, I successfully contacted Zipcar who informed me the only thing they could do is tow the car (usually 24+ hours later).<p>The parking lot had no cell service.<p>Other times I extended the car’s reservation on the iPhone app, but because there was no cell service, the internal Zipcar rfid didn’t get the updated reservation time; and the car locked me out after the original expiration time.<p>Zipcar probably realized they were losing money due to these issues, and banned me from using Zipcar forever.<p>Also: Never leave your Zipcar parked very long without cell service... the cellular unit will drain the car’s battery very quickly when it’s constantly searching for a signal...

Friend in Seattle had this experience when trying to use a zipcar truck out of a garage while moving (i.e. Limited time window to get stuff out of one area to another). Ended up calling support, dealing with multiple hours of delays. Despite the issues which has led him to avoid Zipcar these days, he uses ReachNow (now defunct) and car2go (now called ShareNow) regularly and AFAIK ReachNow didn&#x27;t have these limitations when on long out-of-range trips - they solved the problem by doing sortof a two-factor of having an RFID card (to unlock, on window) and a pin code (entered via the BMW iDrive system to start engine).<p>I could argue Zipcar has a deep integration problem needed to solve the out-of-comms scenario. They try to support several car vendors in order to have different car types (toyotas, mercedes, ford vans) which limits them to having this cellular-dependent setup. Whereas Reachnow (BMW), car2go &#x2F; Sharenow (mercedes &#x2F; smart), and limepod (fiat, for now) have limit the car type for better integration.<p>In a related front, a friend moved into an apartment building with some bluetooth-based laundry vending machines. The machine requires blootooth, and the payment is done via phone which requires a cellular connection. The laundry room (like any basement area) has a spotty cell connecition, so the friend does some weird positioning exercise to find the area where he can have a cellular connection while still being connected over bluetooth to the laundry machine. Strange future.

i had a similar experience with Turo. The car would lock and unlock with a bluetooth connection and would not start unless the bluetooth connection was made. I went on a fifteen minute hike about an hour off the main road to see a redwood grove and when I got back the app had logged itself out with no action taken on my part. We had to hitchhike for 4 hours back to a hotel so that I could log in using my Google account, then hitch hike back to the car. The car itself was unlocked the entire time because we could not lock it. I wonder if anyone else has had an experience with Turo being logged out. Could a certificate or token have expired?

I&#x27;ve rented Zipcars here in the UK many times and never encountered this.<p>The cars have a key in the glove compartment. After you initially unlock it at the beginning of your reservation you take that key with you. You put it back in at the end of the reservation. In between you use it to unlock like a regular car key&#x2F;fob.<p>Am I missing something here?<p>Edit:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.zipcar.co.uk&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;articles&#x2F;360001460928-Arriving-at-my-Zipcar-" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.zipcar.co.uk&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;articles&#x2F;360001460928-...</a><p>&gt; The key is in the glovebox in ALL vehicles. Throughout your reservation you should use the key to lock and unlock the doors. For a vehicle that has a start button instead of a key, the Zipcard or app can be used throughout the reservation to lock and unlock the doors.<p>OK so this situation is plausible when the car doesn&#x27;t have an actual key.

If this article is true, Zipcar in the US must work in a fundamentally different way from how it does here in Europe. Every Zipcar I&#x27;ve ever rented, once you&#x27;ve gained access with your card or the app the first time, you have the actual keys in your hand until the end of the rental. You don&#x27;t need a mobile signal to lock and unlock the car wherever you go, the key fob does that.<p>Of course, in one of the scenarios the article addresses - car battery failure in the middle of a wilderness - it doesn&#x27;t matter whether it&#x27;s a Zipcar or not, that&#x27;s a serious problem for any car.

I can imagine that a law could be made to mandate car manufacturers or dealers or rental companies to list all the possible failure scenarios that cars might not work properly, and present the drivers some warning labels or sort. It shouldn&#x27;t take that much effort to list all the possible cases by hierarchically inspect smaller modules (just like checked exceptions in Java), and it doesn&#x27;t have to be very precise. Like most drugs warn about possible death due to its use, there&#x27;s no reason that we couldn&#x27;t expect cars and other safety related industry to follow a similar standard. Just like drugs, scaring potential customers away is a part of its cost (and benefit).

In my younger years I worked at a startup that had an advisor that was one of the original technical architects at Air Touch Cellular. For those that do not know they were one of the original cell phone companies in California and the west (now AT&amp;T). He did not own a cell phone, a fact which I found strange. I asked him why and his answer was “they screwed it all up..the deployments and coverage, it’s a solved issued but they screwed it up anyway. I will not own a cell until it works everywhere.”

&gt; <i>Still, cars without reception become vulnerable in a few scenarios: ... when the vehicle battery dies. That last scenario was the one my family and I found ourselves in</i><p>This seems like a major detail that should have been mentioned near the headline. Even if they got into the car, they would still have been stuck because the car battery was dead.<p>Every new technology comes with its own unique foibles and failure scenarios. One can easily imagine the very first automobile drivers getting frustrated by how their car becomes a useless lump of metal within minutes as soon as they run out of gas. &quot;<i>If I just had my trusty horse, this would never happen!&quot;</i> Fear mongering around these new failure modes makes for a fun pastime, but fundamentally pointless, unless we also consider the benefits they bring to the table.

It&#x27;s inevitable that someone will die because of this design at some point, and the various articles and online discussions about these problems and the company&#x27;s arrogance and incompetence at addressing them will mean they will be found criminally negligent.

&gt; making sure that the cars work when out of reception is a “mission-critical success factor” for the company<p>I guess mission failed then...<p>It is so easy to call something mission-critical. I am always tempted to ignore it when I hear it, because most of the time it is a red herring. Instead I use it as a launching off point for a conversation with clients about priorities for a given solution.

A lot of comments are focussing on a Zipcar not starting due to insufficient battery power. However, that’s only one aspect of the article (a personal anecdote of the writer). The other scenarios highlighted the key take-away from the piece:<p>&gt; But the problem with using services dependent on a network is that you are then dependent on the network.<p>This – for me – is the main problem with IoT devices, e.g., many privacy issues would go away if devices were designed to operate without needing to regularly “phone home” (excepting explicit, intentional data-mining by the manufacturer).

Both car2go and Evo here in Vancouver appear to have the right idea - when you rent a car, cell access is only needed for starting and ending the rental (which must be done within city limits). For a stopover (stopping the car without ending the rental), you just take the physical key with you.<p>They’re also quite convenient since you can pick up and drop off the cars at almost any street or parking garage. Because Vancouver doesn’t (yet?) have Uber or Lyft, they serve a really important role here.

well um, the car&#x27;s battery was dead. so how exactly would it open via RFID? of course if you put that piece of information first, the headline isn&#x27;t so catchy. i digress.

I recently went into a parking garage in Amsterdam, where they have a partnership with a parking app; you press a button in the app to open the garage doors.<p>The reception underground is nil, so it took me quite a while fiddling with phone position, with my arm through the entrance gate, to be able to get out...

Zipcar also has a dumb system in-place where you need to use the card first to start the reservation following which you&#x27;re allowed to use the app to lock&#x2F;unlock the car. The whole point of using the app is so that I don&#x27;t have to carry a physical card with me.

All car sharing platforms* I have used in Amsterdam&#x2F;The Netherlands&#x2F;Europe have a key in the glove compartment that you can take out when you park the car. Why doesn&#x27;t Zipcar do the same?<p>* i.e. Car2Go, ConnectCar, MyWheels, Fetch, SnappCar

In basis of this case, vehicle battery was actual problem, as well as the Tesla outage there was a backup.<p>That people choose not to have it available isn’t completely the manufacturer or providers fault is it?

I&#x27;ve used LimePod in Seattle, you can&#x27;t lock your car without cell service, which guarantees you&#x27;ll only be able to unlock your car if you had service prior. The key is permanently attached to the ignition, so you could leave your car unlocked and start it later if you were in the wilderness. I wouldn&#x27;t recommend taking any of these free-floating cars outside of the city because of problems like this, though.

Whenever I used Zipcar, I only used the car at pickup, and then always take the key out for any stops during my rental. Would that have prevented this?

Allowing people into the wilderness with a car that by design has these issues is very close to negligent homicide.

The title is misleading

<i>&gt; Still, cars without reception become vulnerable in a few scenarios: when members lose or do not have their physical Zipcard with them, when they exceed their reservation time or want to extend their Zipcar reservation, or when the vehicle battery dies. That last scenario was the one my family and I found ourselves in, though we did not know it at the time.</i><p>Can someone change the title to reflect that cell phone reception had nothing to do with the inability to open the car in this case?

TL;DR: the car battery was dead