17 ms·

When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

227 points by curtis 7y ago

alwaysanagenda 7y ago
Professor Ted is LAUGHING in his cell, I'm sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Socie...
JohnClark1337 7y ago
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain" -Scotty
minutillo 7y ago
TL;DR: the car battery was dead
- jpindar 7y ago
  Can you tell me exactly where you saw that? I don't see it.
  - code_devil 7y ago
    “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.”
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- braythwayt 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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
    - ebg13 7y ago
      > If the battery is flat on the car then you are still pretty much out of luck even if you can get in. With an EV yes, but not with an ICE. Just keep a jump box in your trunk.
      - williamstein 7y ago
        These "jump boxes" are amazing! I used to keep big jumper cables and have AAA in case of a dead battery. Last time AAA came (after I waited hours...), they just pulled out a little "jump box" and instantly started my car. I found and bought a random one on Amazon (there are dozens -- https://www.amazon.com/s?k=car+jumpstart https://www.amazon.com/s?k=car+jumpstart). It's very small, can also be used to charge a cell phone, as a flashlight, etc., and really works. Every ICE should have one of these in the trunk.
        pdkl95 7y ago
        Note that the battery in a "jump box" is probably capable of discharging a dangerous amounts of energy at very high current. BigClive measured[1] over >500A when he tried to discharge one of these batteries, which didn't actually work. The internal Li plates probably separated, breaking the circuit before fully discharging. After starting to disassemble the battery and realizing the that the plates had separated he attached a voltmeter and measured a full 3.6V across the supposedly-discharged, partially disassembled battery (squeezing the battery with his hands, "This still is fully charged, but it's just puffed up... that's a bit scary." Later, after the Li plates start changing color (!) - probably metallic Li starting to rapidly oxidize - they spontaneously ignited (pyrophoric). The benefits of having a spare "jump box" in the trunk are obvious, but it's important to remember that this means carrying a dangerous amount of energy in form that is a very serious fire risk if anything damaged the battery. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tGK1nqXr28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tGK1nqXr28
alphabettsy 7y ago
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?
awake 7y ago
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 7y ago
  I hope you’ve reported that to the app developer. That’s a potentially fatal problem.
- jotm 7y ago
  Bluetooth? Holy shit, it can barely keep an audio connection, why would anyone use it for something important?
- stronglikedan 7y ago
  > then hitch hike back to the car. 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.
droithomme 7y ago
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.
myrandomcomment 7y ago
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.”
- Frqy3 7y ago
  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.
- SimonPStevens 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- Jonnax 7y ago
  Sounds like he was talking about something specifically to their network. 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.
cj 7y ago
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...
- sqs 7y ago
  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?
- bt848 7y ago
  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.
  - PetahNZ 7y ago
    Anecdotal, but if I leave a USB charger plugged into the cigarette socket, without even anything plugged into the usb, it drains my battery overnight.
    - oh_sigh 7y ago
      If it's not a car from the 80s there may be a fuse you can add/remove which converts your cigarette lighter from always on to only when engine is on. Check the back of your car manual.
euske 7y ago
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 7y ago
  The car manufacturers probably already do a FMECA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode,_effects,_and_criticality_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode,_effects,_and_cri...) analysis.
seltzered_ 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    If the car has no signal, how is it unlocked?
    - oh_sigh 7y ago
      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.
aloknnikhil 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Based on my experience, this is not true, I could always open the car via the application.
  - aloknnikhil 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      This has actually been relaxed of late, though I agree it used to be a requirement earlier in Zipcar history.
    - loriverkutya 7y ago
      Ok, so you say I just imagined it.
FearNotDaniel 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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
    - paggle 7y ago
      It has a warning. Something like “leave these keys here! It seems weird but don’t worry about it.”
boomlinde 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    > 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.
- rocqua 7y ago
  I believe the issue was that, after losing both reception and battery, the car needed reception before being unlocked.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Looks like it. They got a tow to somewhere with reception but the car wouldn't start. That implies they did get into it, but were still stuck due to the dead battery. So presumably the door unlock system has it's own backup battery?
xchip 7y ago
The title is misleading
greggyb 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Sure would. Not for every trip, though.
ricardobeat 7y ago
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...
Anthony-G 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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
surfmike 7y ago
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?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wilgertvelinga 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
anewguy9000 7y ago
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.
- elicash 7y ago
  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."
  - anewguy9000 7y ago
    yes if you want to get pedantic the subheadline could more aptly read, "i was unable to open or start a car with a dead battery". or for the main headline, "when i took my non-zipcar into the wilderness (and its battery died and i was stranded)", would anybody read it? no.
    - elicash 7y ago
      ZipCar seems to be unique (at least among cars I've used) in that you can't open the doors with a dead battery and it seems there's no mechanical backup. As a result the car needed to be towed. Additionally, you seem to be ignoring that the battery may have died because it couldn't find a cellular signal. And yes, I would have read it if the subheadline was instead something about modern cars that weren't zipcars that causes this to happen, because it's never been possible with a car I've owned and is pretty interesting.
      - Bartweiss 7y ago
        > the battery may have died because it couldn't find a cellular signal. I had totally overlooked this myself, thanks. If Zipcars without service are constantly phoning home and running down the battery, that could make the issue way more common, and explain why regularly-serviced cars still die on people pretty often. It would also escalate ZipCar's role from locking the car when the battery dies to actually killing the battery. Beyond that, I do wish the social tie-in hadn't just been a line about networks failing us, but a more substantial look at the limitations of relying on power and data access. It's not just a sharing-economy issue; wholly-owned IoT devices, keyless-start cars, iPhones earbuds, etc. increasingly lack analog fallbacks. They're not just neglected when designing cheap IoT goods, they're being stripped out of existing products like phones and keyfobs for sleeker design. It's a topic that's been on my mind a lot; whenever I travel abroad or to remote bits of the US, I notice that an increasing fraction of both services and products aren't viable. Beyond my inconvenience, it makes me wonder what will happen in 10 or 20 years. It's not uncommon to go somewhere remote and see everyone using the previous generation of products, either bought used or sold off cheap as they aged. But that's going to be increasingly impractical as those things demand nonstop data access.
wooptoo 7y ago
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-Arriving-at-my-Zipcar- 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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    You're supposed to put it back _at the end of the reservation_. Not every time you lock the car.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Given human nature, I'd assume you would be missing the key frequently. Many of the reported issues seem to involve renewing an expired reservation. Also, how's your cell coverage there?
  - wooptoo 7y ago
    You will be charged quite a bit if the key is missing at the end of your reservation. They do have your ID, driving license, and credit card on file after all.
nneonneo 7y ago
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.
_pmf_ 7y ago
Allowing people into the wilderness with a car that by design has these issues is very close to negligent homicide.
- slang800 7y ago
  What exactly do you propose? A zipcar that doesn't allow allow you to drive outside of the city?
  - mcguire 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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?
noego 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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.
mcast 7y ago
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.

227 points by curtis 7y ago

Professor Ted is LAUGHING in his cell, I'm sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Socie...

JohnClark1337 7y ago

"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain" -Scotty

minutillo 7y ago

TL;DR: the car battery was dead

jpindar 7y ago
Can you tell me exactly where you saw that? I don't see it.
- code_devil 7y ago
  “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.”
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
braythwayt 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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
  - ebg13 7y ago
    > If the battery is flat on the car then you are still pretty much out of luck even if you can get in. With an EV yes, but not with an ICE. Just keep a jump box in your trunk.
    - williamstein 7y ago
      These "jump boxes" are amazing! I used to keep big jumper cables and have AAA in case of a dead battery. Last time AAA came (after I waited hours...), they just pulled out a little "jump box" and instantly started my car. I found and bought a random one on Amazon (there are dozens -- https://www.amazon.com/s?k=car+jumpstart https://www.amazon.com/s?k=car+jumpstart). It's very small, can also be used to charge a cell phone, as a flashlight, etc., and really works. Every ICE should have one of these in the trunk.
      - pdkl95 7y ago
        Note that the battery in a "jump box" is probably capable of discharging a dangerous amounts of energy at very high current. BigClive measured[1] over >500A when he tried to discharge one of these batteries, which didn't actually work. The internal Li plates probably separated, breaking the circuit before fully discharging. After starting to disassemble the battery and realizing the that the plates had separated he attached a voltmeter and measured a full 3.6V across the supposedly-discharged, partially disassembled battery (squeezing the battery with his hands, "This still is fully charged, but it's just puffed up... that's a bit scary." Later, after the Li plates start changing color (!) - probably metallic Li starting to rapidly oxidize - they spontaneously ignited (pyrophoric). The benefits of having a spare "jump box" in the trunk are obvious, but it's important to remember that this means carrying a dangerous amount of energy in form that is a very serious fire risk if anything damaged the battery. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tGK1nqXr28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tGK1nqXr28

alphabettsy 7y ago

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?

awake 7y ago

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 7y ago
I hope you’ve reported that to the app developer. That’s a potentially fatal problem.
jotm 7y ago
Bluetooth? Holy shit, it can barely keep an audio connection, why would anyone use it for something important?
stronglikedan 7y ago
> then hitch hike back to the car. 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.

droithomme 7y ago

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.

myrandomcomment 7y ago

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.”

Frqy3 7y ago
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.
SimonPStevens 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
Jonnax 7y ago
Sounds like he was talking about something specifically to their network. 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.

cj 7y ago

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...

sqs 7y ago
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?
bt848 7y ago
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.
- PetahNZ 7y ago
  Anecdotal, but if I leave a USB charger plugged into the cigarette socket, without even anything plugged into the usb, it drains my battery overnight.
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    If it's not a car from the 80s there may be a fuse you can add/remove which converts your cigarette lighter from always on to only when engine is on. Check the back of your car manual.

euske 7y ago

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 7y ago
The car manufacturers probably already do a FMECA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode,_effects,_and_criticality_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode,_effects,_and_cri...) analysis.

seltzered_ 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  If the car has no signal, how is it unlocked?
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    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.

aloknnikhil 7y ago

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 7y ago
Based on my experience, this is not true, I could always open the car via the application.
- aloknnikhil 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    This has actually been relaxed of late, though I agree it used to be a requirement earlier in Zipcar history.
  - loriverkutya 7y ago
    Ok, so you say I just imagined it.

FearNotDaniel 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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
  - paggle 7y ago
    It has a warning. Something like “leave these keys here! It seems weird but don’t worry about it.”

boomlinde 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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.
rocqua 7y ago
I believe the issue was that, after losing both reception and battery, the car needed reception before being unlocked.
- simonh 7y ago
  Looks like it. They got a tow to somewhere with reception but the car wouldn't start. That implies they did get into it, but were still stuck due to the dead battery. So presumably the door unlock system has it's own backup battery?

xchip 7y ago

The title is misleading

greggyb 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Sure would. Not for every trip, though.

ricardobeat 7y ago

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...

Anthony-G 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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

surfmike 7y ago

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?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

wilgertvelinga 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

anewguy9000 7y ago

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.

elicash 7y ago
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."
- anewguy9000 7y ago
  yes if you want to get pedantic the subheadline could more aptly read, "i was unable to open or start a car with a dead battery". or for the main headline, "when i took my non-zipcar into the wilderness (and its battery died and i was stranded)", would anybody read it? no.
  - elicash 7y ago
    ZipCar seems to be unique (at least among cars I've used) in that you can't open the doors with a dead battery and it seems there's no mechanical backup. As a result the car needed to be towed. Additionally, you seem to be ignoring that the battery may have died because it couldn't find a cellular signal. And yes, I would have read it if the subheadline was instead something about modern cars that weren't zipcars that causes this to happen, because it's never been possible with a car I've owned and is pretty interesting.
    - Bartweiss 7y ago
      > the battery may have died because it couldn't find a cellular signal. I had totally overlooked this myself, thanks. If Zipcars without service are constantly phoning home and running down the battery, that could make the issue way more common, and explain why regularly-serviced cars still die on people pretty often. It would also escalate ZipCar's role from locking the car when the battery dies to actually killing the battery. Beyond that, I do wish the social tie-in hadn't just been a line about networks failing us, but a more substantial look at the limitations of relying on power and data access. It's not just a sharing-economy issue; wholly-owned IoT devices, keyless-start cars, iPhones earbuds, etc. increasingly lack analog fallbacks. They're not just neglected when designing cheap IoT goods, they're being stripped out of existing products like phones and keyfobs for sleeker design. It's a topic that's been on my mind a lot; whenever I travel abroad or to remote bits of the US, I notice that an increasing fraction of both services and products aren't viable. Beyond my inconvenience, it makes me wonder what will happen in 10 or 20 years. It's not uncommon to go somewhere remote and see everyone using the previous generation of products, either bought used or sold off cheap as they aged. But that's going to be increasingly impractical as those things demand nonstop data access.

wooptoo 7y ago

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-Arriving-at-my-Zipcar- 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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  You're supposed to put it back _at the end of the reservation_. Not every time you lock the car.
mcguire 7y ago
Given human nature, I'd assume you would be missing the key frequently. Many of the reported issues seem to involve renewing an expired reservation. Also, how's your cell coverage there?
- wooptoo 7y ago
  You will be charged quite a bit if the key is missing at the end of your reservation. They do have your ID, driving license, and credit card on file after all.

nneonneo 7y ago

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.

_pmf_ 7y ago

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

slang800 7y ago
What exactly do you propose? A zipcar that doesn't allow allow you to drive outside of the city?
- mcguire 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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?

noego 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
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.

mcast 7y ago

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.