
When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness - curtis
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/zipcar-into-the-wilderness/597217/
======
cj
I got banned from using Zipcar last year.

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
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.

~~~
Nextgrid
Disagreed about the ban. Since when is shitty technology (which any engineer
worth their salt should’ve predicted - this is not rocket science) the fault
of the customer? Unless they say in bold in their marketing statements “Only
drive within cell coverage” the customer isn’t at fault for trying to use it
as a normal car (in fact it’s crazy to think that parking in a place with no
reception is no longer normal, at least according to ZipCar).

~~~
Shorel
I do agree it is not his fault.

But the ban also prevents that particular customer from receiving bad service.
Some things are not meant to be.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
ZipCar should have formally requested that the customer not park cars in that
lot, or what have you.

Since the customer needs to use that lot, they would probably stop using
ZipCar at that point—but that's better than being banned _forever_ if their
life situation changes.

------
seltzered_
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.

~~~
rebuilder
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?

~~~
isostatic
If the car has no signal, how is it unlocked?

~~~
oh_sigh
They could give your phone a signed token indicating your rental times, and
then let your phone directly connect to the car to hand it off.

Presumably it is easier for a human with a phone to move to a location with
service than moving a locked car, usually just out of the cave you're in.

~~~
rebuilder
I just don't see why that complexity is necessary, when you could just give
the user the key to the car.

~~~
oh_sigh
The whole point of zip car is that you aren't reserving it a week in advance
and want to wait for a key to be mailed to you.

~~~
rebuilder
Why can't they just leave the key in the glove compartment? That way, Zipcar
only needs to unlock the car remotely when the user starts the rental, and
lock the car remotely when the rental ends. In between, the user can use the
key. like with every other car.

~~~
technofiend
Probably to prevent accidentally taking the key. If you've ever used a zipcar,
the key is affixed to the steering column. I assume they have an ignition
interrupter that requires a proper unlock signal because otherwise stealing
one would be matter of jimmying a lock or breaking a window.

------
awake
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?

~~~
macintux
I hope you’ve reported that to the app developer. That’s a potentially fatal
problem.

------
wooptoo
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.

Am I missing something here?

Edit:

[https://support.zipcar.co.uk/hc/en-
gb/articles/360001460928-...](https://support.zipcar.co.uk/hc/en-
gb/articles/360001460928-Arriving-at-my-Zipcar-)

> 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
Technically, according to their rules, you are supposed to leave the key in
the car. I didn't think anyone actually paid attention to that rule.

~~~
wooptoo
You're supposed to put it back _at the end of the reservation_. Not every time
you lock the car.

------
FearNotDaniel
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.

~~~
paggle
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

~~~
Marsymars
Wow, if I came across that without some prominent warnings, I'd probably
assume some kind of key setup mistake and cut the string.

~~~
squeaky-clean
I use a zipcar occasionally and this is exactly what happens when I'm driving
with a friend. Once they actually did manage to yank on and snap the string.
They said something like "Wow, the previous driver tied the keys to the center
console, what an asshole" _pull, snap_

------
euske
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).

~~~
pkaye
The car manufacturers probably already do a FMECA
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode,_effects,_and_cri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode,_effects,_and_criticality_analysis))
analysis.

------
myrandomcomment
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.”

~~~
SimonPStevens
I'd love to hear more about this.

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.

~~~
myrandomcomment
No magic here. The gist of what he said was that they did a design that had
100% coverage but the company pulled back from doing that.

------
noego
> _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.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
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.

------
droithomme
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.

------
greggyb
> 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.

~~~
mcguire
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?

~~~
greggyb
Sure would. Not for every trip, though.

------
Anthony-G
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).

~~~
jb3689
> 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

------
nneonneo
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.

------
anewguy9000
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.

~~~
Bartweiss
> _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.

------
ricardobeat
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...

------
aloknnikhil
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.

~~~
loriverkutya
Based on my experience, this is not true, I could always open the car via the
application.

~~~
aloknnikhil
The first time you unlock the car, it always has to be using a physical card.
I learnt this the hard way.

[https://www.quora.com/Can-I-use-a-Zipcar-without-my-
Zipcard](https://www.quora.com/Can-I-use-a-Zipcar-without-my-Zipcard)

~~~
ejstronge
This has actually been relaxed of late, though I agree it used to be a
requirement earlier in Zipcar history.

------
wilgertvelinga
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

~~~
mcguire
Doesn't the key go missing often?

I'm reminded of European hotels that want you to leave the room key at the
front desk.

~~~
jermy
They plug in to a socket in the glove compartment, and I don't think the
rental is counted as completed until they are returned there. I'd naively
assumed this was standard across the globe, but clearly there must be other
factors to warrant not allowing you to remove the key.

On the other hand, the fuel payment card does missing - but at least Zipcar in
the UK are efficient at refunding your own payment when provided with a
receipt.

------
alphabettsy
In basis of this case, vehicle battery was actual problem, as well as the
Tesla outage there was a backup.

That people choose not to have it available isn’t completely the manufacturer
or providers fault is it?

------
mcast
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.

------
surfmike
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?

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

~~~
slang800
What exactly do you propose? A zipcar that doesn't allow allow you to drive
outside of the city?

~~~
mcguire
Sure. Shut down the engine when it loses cell signal, with some warning so you
could turn around. It'd be inconvenient, but not more than the alternative.

~~~
slang800
Shut down the engine when someone is still driving? That's not just
inconvenient, that's suicidal. What if you're not able to get back to a place
with cell coverage in time? Is the car just going to stop in the middle of the
highway or the middle of a tunnel?

------
xchip
The title is misleading

------
boomlinde
_> 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?

~~~
ivanhoe
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." ??

~~~
boomlinde
_> How then do you explain this part_

All we know from that anecdote is that the car left him stranded in the garage
and that he had no cell phone reception. Nothing of what is presented suggest
that there is a directly causal relationship between those two circumstances.
In fact, to the extent that it's described it's consistent with the situation
referred to in the title of this post.

To make an uninformed guess, maybe the car battery drains quicker when cell
reception is poor, but that's conjecture based on little information.

------
minutillo
TL;DR: the car battery was dead

~~~
braythwayt
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.

~~~
baroffoos
If the battery is flat on the car then you are still pretty much out of luck
even if you can get in. The only advantage to being able to open it is to use
it as shelter in a emergency situation

~~~
mirimir
That depends on the vehicle. If it's an ICE with a manual transmission, and
you can get it moving fast enough, you can pop the clutch to start it. Back in
the day, with a ~dead battery, I'd park on a hill. Even without a hill, 2-3
people can generally just push.

~~~
mwilliaams
And what percentage are manual transmission vehicles these days? Probably less
than 1

~~~
nraynaud
90% of southern Europe?

~~~
rocqua
Why just southern Europe? Here in West Europe there is still a vast majority
of manual transmission.

