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.
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).
The parking lot had no cell service.
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.
Zipcar probably realized they were losing money due to these issues, and banned me from using Zipcar forever.
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...
Honestly, the ban sounds justified to me. If you know that parking in the garage will lead to a 50% probability of them having to tow the car, repeating this is just unnecessary. It would obviously be better if they could handle such scenarios but ignoring a known limitation to incur cost to others (since you have no advantage as you also can't use the car in this scenario) sounds wrong to me.
Interesting. So it caches the authorized zipcards offline for this case, right? Why did it fail to unlock 50% of the time? If it failed, could you just retry, or did it fail 100% of the time in specific bad locations?
The bit about the cell phone discharge seems pretty unlikely. A charged car battery has at least 2MJ of stored energy. GSM in its highest-power mobile station state draws 800mW. Add maybe another 150mW for the GPS, call it 1W total. The battery should power such a phone for weeks.
You should be able to smell-test this fact by considering that your mobile weighs nothing and runs all day whereas a car battery weighs 20kg.
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'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).
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 / Sharenow (mercedes / smart), and limepod (fiat, for now) have limit the car type for better integration.
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.
Zipcar has RFID-based card access now. Sounds like they just need to cache an auth token locally when there is cell service saying how long the car may be used for. Although there's still an edge case that parking out of cell service range when the token expires will disable the car even if you extend the contract since there's no way to refresh the token.
Perhaps they could create an RFID token in their app and let the RFID-capable phones bear that to the car since it's much easier to move a phone than a car, not to mention potentially get wifi service where there is no cell service.
I haven't used any of the services you mention, but an on-line rental service I have used has a simple system: they unlock the car remotely when you start your rental, and the key is in the glove compartment. You may run into issues starting your rental, but lack of connectivity won't stand you in the middle of nowhere.
Is there a particular reason these services can't just leave the keys in the car? Theft?
This sounds like a pretty common scenario for zipcar and certainly cell phone coverage coming in and out is something that they should be planning and designing for! Maybe a series of one-use pass codes or something like that could help. I always make sure there is a failsafe when I have two microcontrollers talking on the same circuit board! Never fully trust anything external.
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?
Sounds like it would have been easier to just rent another, closer car at that point, assuming you took your stuff with you since you couldn't lock it.
I've rented Zipcars here in the UK many times and never encountered this.
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/fob.
> 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.
OK so this situation is plausible when the car doesn'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've ever rented, once you'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't need a mobile signal to lock and unlock the car wherever you go, the key fob does that.
Of course, in one of the scenarios the article addresses - car battery failure in the middle of a wilderness - it doesn't matter whether it's a Zipcar or not, that's a serious problem for any car.
In the US the keys that are in the car are physically tied to the car with a string. You are expected to use the card to lock and unlock during your reservation
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'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't have to be very precise. Like most drugs warn about possible death due to its use, there's no reason that we couldn'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&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.”
Did he mean that there is a solved and known way to get uniform national cell phone coverage without blackspots? If so, do you know more about what his solution was.
It's a solved issue, in that the cell company "simply" has to spend enough on infrastructure to cover the desired area.
Justifying the business case to cover the low value (i.e. few customers) areas is another story. However, even here, it might be possible to justify it if the rest of the customer base sufficiently values wide coverage to pay a premium. Particularly if the competitors don't have the same level of coverage.
> 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
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.
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. "If I just had my trusty horse, this would never happen!" 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.
Jumper cables and spare gas cans have been a thing for quite some time; and Li-Ion battery boosters which can start a car multiple times are small enough to carry in a pocket. Everyone driving in the wilderness should have these things in the trunk in addition to a spare tire and some water. The majority of problems which strand people are flat tires / dead batteries / overheating / no gas; which are all trivial to fix on one's own with preparedness appropriate to the environment.
Furthermore, mechanics are readily available in rural areas; and when horse transportation was common, farriers and vets were also common. These people drive out to your location and fix stuff, although you might need to walk to them without a phone. And any rural mechanic can hack a fix to the mechanical components of an internal combustion engine well enough to get it home.
So, if you accept Zipcar's terms of service ("don't remove our interlock / hack the ECU"), this is fundamentally different because it's a failure mode which only Zipcar can fix.
It'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's arrogance and incompetence at addressing them will mean they will be found criminally negligent.
> making sure that the cars work when out of reception is a “mission-critical success factor” for the company
I guess mission failed then...
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.
If the car has a big yellow sticker on the dash saying, "if you drive this vehicle to a location without cellular coverage, you may become stranded", would you rent it?
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:
> But the problem with using services dependent on a network is that you are then dependent on the network.
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).
> many privacy issues would go away if devices were designed to operate without needing to regularly “phone home”
This is the sole reason why I do not buy IoT devices. I would love to have a resource which lists devices that do not try to contact the manufacturer over the internet
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.
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'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't so catchy. i digress.
> A tow truck took us to a lot with reception, where the rental failed to start... Still, cars without reception become vulnerable in a few scenarios... when the vehicle battery dies.
> I shudder to think about limping back to a trailhead with no more water in my backpack, only to find a car that would not start. Or getting locked out and marooned in Death Valley, perhaps with medicine trapped in the car.
Yep, "car died at the trailhead" is hardly a novel or Zipcar-specific problem. I've known plenty of people who camped for few days, packed up at dusk, and found themselves with a dead battery and no one around to jump it. Taking a Zipcar with essential medicine into Death Valley is a scary thought, but it's recklessness in a dangerous place rather than some esoteric flaw of Zipcar.
It's a shame, because there are real issues here. Lacking a physical carkey is a real drawback that means you can't wait in your dead car or open the hood to jump it. Having your car die in the woods because you exceeded your reservation time is bad for the user, the next user, and the company. But the article spins those narrow issues as life-or-death flaws, conflates "dead car" with "Zipcar broke", and puts "Zipcars normally work without service" down in paragraph seven after implying in paragraph two that this is a consistent problem.
The headline was "When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness." It's a pretty underwhelming headline and I have no idea why anybody would possibly object to it.
How is that clickbait? Even the subheadline is a pretty fair description of events: "In an area without cellphone reception, I was unable to open the car."
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.
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're allowed to use the app to lock/unlock the car. The whole point of using the app is so that I don't have to carry a physical card with me.
All car sharing platforms* I have used in Amsterdam/The Netherlands/Europe have a key in the glove compartment that you can take out when you park the car. Why doesn't Zipcar do the same?
* i.e. Car2Go, ConnectCar, MyWheels, Fetch, SnappCar
I've used LimePod in Seattle, you can't lock your car without cell service, which guarantees you'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'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?
> 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.
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?
How then do you explain this part: "A similar thing happened to Tom Coates, another Californian and, as luck would have it, an expert in the internet of things. He used a Zipcar to get to the Getty Villa, part of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. His mistake was to park in a garage, where his bars went to zero and he found himself stranded as the sun went down and the museum closed and the on-staff security guards started to circle in annoyance." ??
That's actually a problem with all modern cars: If the battery dies, the key fob won't open the door. In fact, if the battery dies in the car or the fob, you can't open the door.
But, there is a mechanical backup with an ordinary car. In my 2012 Volvo, I can open the driver's door with the mechanical key. If the fob is ded, I can physically insert it and start the car. If the car is also dead, I have to sort that out to drive it, obviously.
I like to MTB and I used to climb, so I carry a backup battery that can start the engine if need be. But I appreciate that with a ZipCar, the whole point is that you don't need to go somewhere and pick up a mechanical key. So it's really the same risk profile as if I were to drive around with the key fob, but leave the mechanical key at home.
The other worrisome thing is if a car is designed that it needs the Internet to start. If you drive it somewhere remote, you have a problem. Or if there is a service outage, you have a problem.
If I buy another car, it will probably brag thatI can use my phone as my key. I will still want to carry the mechanical key, but my phone will then become a single point of failure.
With my fob, and my 2012 car, I can start the car even if the fob battery dies. But if my phone dies, I will be SOL.
Luckily, said backup battery that I carry in my car has a USB port to recharge my phone. But even then, what if the network is down? Am I to trust Bluetooth to do its thing?
These failure modes require some thinking through before going anywhere remote. I'd want to work all this out before taking another driving holiday with my family.
cj|6 years ago
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.
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).
The parking lot had no cell service.
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.
Zipcar probably realized they were losing money due to these issues, and banned me from using Zipcar forever.
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...
dx034|6 years ago
sqs|6 years ago
Kneecaps07|6 years ago
hexo|6 years ago
bt848|6 years ago
You should be able to smell-test this fact by considering that your mobile weighs nothing and runs all day whereas a car battery weighs 20kg.
seltzered_|6 years ago
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 / Sharenow (mercedes / smart), and limepod (fiat, for now) have limit the car type for better integration.
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.
technofiend|6 years ago
Perhaps they could create an RFID token in their app and let the RFID-capable phones bear that to the car since it's much easier to move a phone than a car, not to mention potentially get wifi service where there is no cell service.
rebuilder|6 years ago
Is there a particular reason these services can't just leave the keys in the car? Theft?
roland35|6 years ago
mcguire|6 years ago
awake|6 years ago
macintux|6 years ago
jotm|6 years ago
stronglikedan|6 years ago
Sounds like it would have been easier to just rent another, closer car at that point, assuming you took your stuff with you since you couldn't lock it.
wooptoo|6 years ago
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/fob.
Am I missing something here?
Edit:
https://support.zipcar.co.uk/hc/en-gb/articles/360001460928-...
> 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.
OK so this situation is plausible when the car doesn't have an actual key.
Kneecaps07|6 years ago
mcguire|6 years ago
Many of the reported issues seem to involve renewing an expired reservation. Also, how's your cell coverage there?
FearNotDaniel|6 years ago
Of course, in one of the scenarios the article addresses - car battery failure in the middle of a wilderness - it doesn't matter whether it's a Zipcar or not, that's a serious problem for any car.
paggle|6 years ago
euske|6 years ago
pkaye|6 years ago
myrandomcomment|6 years ago
SimonPStevens|6 years ago
Did he mean that there is a solved and known way to get uniform national cell phone coverage without blackspots? If so, do you know more about what his solution was.
Jonnax|6 years ago
There's not some magic thing that everyone should be doing that will give 100% cell coverage.
It's a two way radio. The transmitter needs to talk to the phone. But the phone also needs to talk back.
Also carriers have different frequency spectrums allocated to them.
A carrier using 900MHz has to have fewer base stations than one operating using 1800MHz because lower frequencies transmit further.
They also are able to go underground and through walls better.
Frqy3|6 years ago
Justifying the business case to cover the low value (i.e. few customers) areas is another story. However, even here, it might be possible to justify it if the rest of the customer base sufficiently values wide coverage to pay a premium. Particularly if the competitors don't have the same level of coverage.
noego|6 years ago
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.
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. "If I just had my trusty horse, this would never happen!" 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.
xkcd-sucks|6 years ago
Furthermore, mechanics are readily available in rural areas; and when horse transportation was common, farriers and vets were also common. These people drive out to your location and fix stuff, although you might need to walk to them without a phone. And any rural mechanic can hack a fix to the mechanical components of an internal combustion engine well enough to get it home.
So, if you accept Zipcar's terms of service ("don't remove our interlock / hack the ECU"), this is fundamentally different because it's a failure mode which only Zipcar can fix.
droithomme|6 years ago
greggyb|6 years ago
I guess mission failed then...
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.
mcguire|6 years ago
Anthony-G|6 years ago
> But the problem with using services dependent on a network is that you are then dependent on the network.
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).
jb3689|6 years ago
This is the sole reason why I do not buy IoT devices. I would love to have a resource which lists devices that do not try to contact the manufacturer over the internet
nneonneo|6 years ago
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.
anewguy9000|6 years ago
Bartweiss|6 years ago
> I shudder to think about limping back to a trailhead with no more water in my backpack, only to find a car that would not start. Or getting locked out and marooned in Death Valley, perhaps with medicine trapped in the car.
Yep, "car died at the trailhead" is hardly a novel or Zipcar-specific problem. I've known plenty of people who camped for few days, packed up at dusk, and found themselves with a dead battery and no one around to jump it. Taking a Zipcar with essential medicine into Death Valley is a scary thought, but it's recklessness in a dangerous place rather than some esoteric flaw of Zipcar.
It's a shame, because there are real issues here. Lacking a physical carkey is a real drawback that means you can't wait in your dead car or open the hood to jump it. Having your car die in the woods because you exceeded your reservation time is bad for the user, the next user, and the company. But the article spins those narrow issues as life-or-death flaws, conflates "dead car" with "Zipcar broke", and puts "Zipcars normally work without service" down in paragraph seven after implying in paragraph two that this is a consistent problem.
elicash|6 years ago
How is that clickbait? Even the subheadline is a pretty fair description of events: "In an area without cellphone reception, I was unable to open the car."
pmccarren|6 years ago
ricardobeat|6 years ago
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...
aloknnikhil|6 years ago
loriverkutya|6 years ago
wilgertvelinga|6 years ago
* i.e. Car2Go, ConnectCar, MyWheels, Fetch, SnappCar
mcguire|6 years ago
I'm reminded of European hotels that want you to leave the room key at the front desk.
alphabettsy|6 years ago
That people choose not to have it available isn’t completely the manufacturer or providers fault is it?
mcast|6 years ago
surfmike|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
_pmf_|6 years ago
slang800|6 years ago
xchip|6 years ago
boomlinde|6 years ago
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?
ivanhoe|6 years ago
ricardobeat|6 years ago
rocqua|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
minutillo|6 years ago
braythwayt|6 years ago
But, there is a mechanical backup with an ordinary car. In my 2012 Volvo, I can open the driver's door with the mechanical key. If the fob is ded, I can physically insert it and start the car. If the car is also dead, I have to sort that out to drive it, obviously.
I like to MTB and I used to climb, so I carry a backup battery that can start the engine if need be. But I appreciate that with a ZipCar, the whole point is that you don't need to go somewhere and pick up a mechanical key. So it's really the same risk profile as if I were to drive around with the key fob, but leave the mechanical key at home.
The other worrisome thing is if a car is designed that it needs the Internet to start. If you drive it somewhere remote, you have a problem. Or if there is a service outage, you have a problem.
If I buy another car, it will probably brag thatI can use my phone as my key. I will still want to carry the mechanical key, but my phone will then become a single point of failure. With my fob, and my 2012 car, I can start the car even if the fob battery dies. But if my phone dies, I will be SOL.
Luckily, said backup battery that I carry in my car has a USB port to recharge my phone. But even then, what if the network is down? Am I to trust Bluetooth to do its thing?
These failure modes require some thinking through before going anywhere remote. I'd want to work all this out before taking another driving holiday with my family.
jpindar|6 years ago
alwaysanagenda|6 years ago
[deleted]
JohnClark1337|6 years ago
[deleted]