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> 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
by 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 agoHow 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 agoI believe the issue was that, after losing both reception and battery, the car needed reception before being unlocked.
- simonh 7y agoLooks 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?
- undecisive 7y agoNo, the power required to unlock the door (a small motor) is usually a lot less than the power required to ignite the fuel. You'll probably find that the radio and internal lights still worked too (though likely not for long).
- huffmsa 7y agoTo turn the engine. Lighting the fuel is easy enough. But overcoming the pressure inside the engine and getting ~50lbs of metal reciprocating and spinning from 0 to 1500rpm in a few seconds takes a bit of a kick.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ricardobeat 7y agoSomeone mentioned above that the battery most likely died quickly due to constant hunting for cell signal, so it’s 100% related.
- boomlinde 7y agoEven my cell phone can handle no reception for a few hours—no problem. It seems strange to me then to assume that it is 100% related based on what "someone" said was most likely.