9 ms·

Berlin car sharing startup Miles demands €13k from customer whose car was stolen

89 points by camillomiller 6y ago

camillomiller 6y ago
Here's a tale of how you don't run a mobility startup, unless you don't care about the safety of your customers and your public image. Berlin car sharing startup Miles is demanding thousands of Euros from customers whose car was stolen, claiming that damages caused by thieves while driving the vehicles should be covered by their users. Turns out, Miles has always been leasing their entire car fleet, while renting it through a white-label platform they had no control over at least until recently. As a result, they failed to implement basic industry-standard safety mechanism, such as an immobilizer, that all of their competitors have been using for years. This, despite their telematics providers all offer the immobilizer as a feature. In one case they're threatening to sue a customer for 13,000€, during a pandemic. The customer is a bar owner, and faces bankruptcy as a result. In that specific case, Miles Mobility admitted that the car could be opened and turned on hours after the user had ended the rent. Edit, to add some elements: - don't miss the part about how customer support suggested not to call the police. Twice. - it's totally unclear how they are not covered by their insurance, and how can their investors be fine with all this (lead investor is Lukasz Gadowski of Delivery Hero fame, and TeamEurope Ventures founder).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- markdown 6y ago
  > Here's a tale of how you don't run a mobility startup You forgot the very first lesson: pick a usable, recognisable name. "Miles" for a business like this is a terrible choice.
  - shwoopdiwoop 6y ago
    Since they are based in Berlin I guess it’s not much of a problem?
    - ThePadawan 6y ago
      Also highly ironic, seeing as Uber just* means "above". * leaving aside the fact that the english usage of the term changed meaning, away from being a literal translation
      - cafard 6y ago
        Yes, in German, with an umlaut--but maybe they didn't want to be mixed up with a metal band. It has a couple of meanings in Latin, one of which coincides with Kalanick's expressed interests.
  - javajosh 6y ago
    Their first name was worse: "Drive By".
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      Given that it's a German company I'm going to guess it was supposed to be an unlucky mixture of German and English given that drive by, in German "vorbeifahren" just has the literal meaning of "passing by".
- javajosh 6y ago
  And if they go through with the lawsuit, win or lose, the man will be out thousands of euros in attorney fees, plus months of stress.
  - rad_gruchalski 6y ago
    But in Germany you don’t pay to the lawyers until you settle or lose in court.
    - kugelblitz 6y ago
      Not necessarily, under certain conditions, the lawyers can get an advance on the money.
    - ant6n 6y ago
      The months of stress are worse than the lawyer fees.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  The good news is that unlike in many other financial service disasters (e.g. with financial services), he isn't actually out the money, nor blocked from something particularly critical (I'm sure there are other carsharing services he can use). So he can at least ignore them until they actually sue.
mkl95 6y ago
That headline sums up the European startup scene (I say this having worked for a shady German startup myself, that has owed me and other former employees money for ages)
- gregoriol 6y ago
  What do you mean exactly?
  - mkl95 6y ago
    Working for a small European startup sucks. The company will ALWAYS find a way to shift the blame when something like this happens, not to mention every EU startup I've worked for gets away with late payments and shady financial moves (the worst offender was a German company I worked for early in my career).
    - viraptor 6y ago
      > Working for a small European startup sucks. The company will ALWAYS find a way to shift the blame Start-ups across ~50 countries? Always doing the same thing? I think you may be generalising quite a bit... It's not like an SV company would ever shift blame on the customer, right? :-)
    - HatchedLake721 6y ago
      Yes, “European Startup” is one big homogenous thing, and not 30+ countries and half a billion people in population.
      - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
        The EU makes a big effort to harmonize law across countries, so there might be some sense to talk about European startup scene. Though, of course German-speaking countries scene would have its own different as Germany itself.
      - helmholtz 6y ago
orange_tee 6y ago
Why is a car for hire company called a startup?
- cinntaile 6y ago
  Because they have a cool app that you use to unlock the car with. That makes them a hip new company or in other words a startup.
  - camillomiller 6y ago
    The app is not even cool. Is a React Native contraption developed externally. They switched to it last summer, exactly around the time when most of the vehicles got stolen, by the way. Before that they were using a different app connected to a white label solution provided by WunderMobility.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- onion2k 6y ago
  They have an app.
  - camillomiller 6y ago
    *They have a React Native contraption struggling to scroll on an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Fixed that for you. :)
  - orange_tee 6y ago
    I know it's a joke, but so do other car for hire companies. Ex: https://www.europcar.com/europcar-mobile https://www.europcar.com/europcar-mobile
    - camillomiller 6y ago
      Miles claims to be a startup in shared-mobility whose mission is to bring transparency to the market. It's not a joke, it's on their website.
OneGuy123 6y ago
How can you be so bad at PR & Customer Support in 2021? The person in charge of this should really go on Facebook every once in a while to see what can happen...
- camillomiller 6y ago
  The don't have any PR person, so I guess their thought process is "if we don't have a PR person, we won't have PR problems".
  - jandrese 6y ago
    Insert Eddie Murphy meme image here.
jarym 6y ago
Startup must be... cash strapped and just discovered their own insurers refused to cover the claim?
- camillomiller 6y ago
  Sounds very probable. Last investment was a 5m round led by Lukas Gadowski back in late 2019. Talk of the town is that they've already been kept alive multiple times by cash injections as private loans. Still, they're alive enough to mess their customers life and impose lawyers fees on them.
jonplackett 6y ago
Why isn't the car insured anyway?
- camillomiller 6y ago
  If you're an insurer, and you find out your client has never implemented basic safety measures that have been industry standard for 30 years (i.e. an immobilizer), I guess denying the claim takes probably minutes.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    Regardless it's their responsibility to insure it, they'd just have to pay higher premiums. They would know if the cars are insured or not before making a claim.
pkaye 6y ago
Shouldn't their name be in metric units?
- camillomiller 6y ago
  best comment so far. Fun thing is, before rebranding into this ungooglable name, they were called "Driveby", which was way more memorable and easily googlable. They had to add "mobility" to everything to be found. Even on twitter they're "Miles Mobility".
  - pkaye 6y ago
    Driveby would be a terrible name in the US also. It means an incident in which a person, building, or vehicle is shot at by someone in a moving vehicle.
- lm28469 6y ago
  "Kilometers" doesn't roll of the tongue as nicely
  - ficklepickle 6y ago
    Clicks can be short for KM in some locales. Equally ungoogleable though.
    - rad_gruchalski 6y ago
      km, not KM. KM is a Polish SI unit for hp (German PS).
- jeofken 6y ago
  At least in Scandinavia a mile means 10km, just a shorthand. Not sure if it’s the same in Germany
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    A few seconds ago while looking up the various definitions I found out that a German mile is apparently about 7500 meters (with three different definitions existing, all around that length). There are about 60 other definitions in Europe. I would have expected it to be most closely associated with the roman mile, which is around 1.5 km. Given that this is the very first time I've heard about the German mile, I would assume that <1% of the population knows about it, and they'd probably consider a "mile" either the US thing if they are familiar with it due to travel, or most likely with "some archaic unit that's somewhere around 1.5 or 2 kilometers long, no idea, why would you use that". The first association that I (as a native German speaker) when I read "Miles" in the German context wasn't distance units - I interpreted it as a given name of English origin.
dna_polymerase 6y ago
There are absolutely no words to describe the stupidity exhibited here. What drove the founders in this market? Too stupid, lazy or incompetent to implement basic safety measures, but want to play in the ride sharing market, that is already saturated by bigger and better providers? What did they bring to the table in the first place? I have yet to encounter a German startup that really amazes me. This isn't it.
- camillomiller 6y ago
  Connections.
gojomo 6y ago
Reminds a bit of the massive theft of Mercedes from Car2Go in the US last year: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a27192115/thieves-car2go-steal-100-cars/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a27192115/thieves-car2go-s... Criminals will find your weak spots & exploit them until closed.
- paxys 6y ago
  Sounds like free penetration testing!
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    Wouldn't exactly call it free.
preya2k 6y ago
Hate to be the devil’s advocate here, but aside from shitty PR I don’t see a lot of things that went wrong: - As a Customer you need to make sure that your “Park” request goes through to the car and wait for the doors to lock. This might take a couple of seconds, but you can’t just press the button and run inside of a building where you might not have cell coverage at all. It’s not a RF key fob. I thing legally this would constitute negligence (Fahrlässigkeit). - Immobilizing the car once the phone is not close to the car seems like a bad idea. It’s a privacy nightmare, b/c you’re constantly being tracked. What about tunnels or parking garages? What if the battery dies? Seems like a whole lot of problems if they were to implement this. Do any of their competitors really do this (Share Now, Sixt Share, etc.)?
- ficklepickle 6y ago
  Use Bluetooth. Vulog (white label provider) supports this. They also support a physical RFID card so you can still get in/lock up if your phone dies.
- camillomiller 6y ago
  Thanks for the comment. - If you're closing a rental car with a key fob you check the doors twice? The app said closed, it's closed. Even if this was the case, how could you possibly ask for the entire damages caused by a third party? The ToS only talk about the user letting someone else drive the car for negligence, but how can that encompass thieves? They're not asking for a negligence fee or a deductible, they want customers to pay for damages caused by thieves. - Nope, an immobilizer is an industry-standard for keyfobs and digital keys alike. All competitors have it. They don't track anything. They only check the idle state of the car. I you are driving, turn off the engine on a Share Now and We Share, then open a door, the immobilizer kicks in. That means that you need to open the app and "unlock the engine" to keep driving. Simple, extremely effective. In two cases reported, Miles said the cars were stolen up to 4hrs after the users left them. Even if they forgot to close them (which users deny, with witnesses) they're admitting that the car was open and available to anyone for hours. How is that not a public safety issue and a farlässigkeit of the company?
- krona 6y ago
ficklepickle 6y ago
Anybody here work for vulog? They are another European white-label car share platform provider. I'm nearing the end of reverse engineering one of their clients android apps. Lots of weak obfuscation, like calling certain endpoints multiple times (2-5x), which is totally useless against a MITM that can decrypt the traffic. Didn't even slow me down. Oh, and if you miss a certain header, it will respond with invalid JSON prefixed with "[]". Now I'm curious if they have immobilizers. The keys are kept in the car, so they must. Not that I want to do anything shady, I just want to use the service without being spied on. Decompiling the app found a bunch of baidu libs, Facebook and retargeting shite. The state of commercial software, yikes.
- camillomiller 6y ago
  Share Now (car2go + drive now) cars have an immobilizer regardless of the fact that they're keyless or not. Immobilizers are a trivial tech from the 90s, the fact that these company even struggle to cover this basic safety measure is astounding
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  > respond with invalid JSON prefixed with "[]". This is a common security measure against some ancient trick that could be used to get outdated browsers to divulge the content of the JSON contrary to the same origin policy.
lrossi 6y ago
I had a similar problem with a rented bike. Once I reached the destination station I tried to hook it into the parking thingy, but it didn’t lock. Luckily I noticed. However, the bike computer didn’t think it was rented anymore, so it didn’t let me attempt to lock it again. I had to spend half an hour on the phone with their support, until they redirected me to somebody who could login to the parking thingy remotely and manually control it. Cherry on top: I found out later that their tech support phone number is taxed. The call cost me something like 5x the ride cost. That’s when I decided to buy a bike and be done with these crappy services.
javajosh 6y ago
On a related note, they changed their name from "Drive By" last year. Apparently its still in the DNA though.
virtualritz 6y ago
I had an accident with a vehicle from one of these car sharing companies in Berlin. The company demanded 11,000€. I think that was 2017 or 2018. Supposedly I broke my contract by not following protocol after the accident and therefore my insurance was nil. Suffice to say I did. I had four witnesses, date & time & incident number of the police report, yadayadayada. I got a lawyer[1]. The whole thing went nowhere. I.e. I didn't pay, except for the lawyer who wrote exactly one letter to them. But I was blocked to use their vehicles until that company and another joined into a new enterprise. Upon which my record was magically wiped clean – I could use the part of the new fleet belonging to the vendor whose car I had had the accident with again. Ah, the merits of database mergers ... The issue all these car sharing companies have is their insurance. When these businesses started they needed insurance. What happened was that all the car insurance companies declined. Because how do you calculate the insurance if the driver changes all the time? So what these companies did was open their own insurance companies. While these are separate business entities it boils down to any damages coming out of their pockets. They have a vested interest in finding you in breach of their TOS so you are not covered by (their) insurance any more. How do I know? The lawyer I got was an expert in those cases. I was not the first of his clients with this issue. I can suggest him to anyone in Berlin who runs into such an issue. [1] https://www.ra-samimi.de/ https://www.ra-samimi.de/ P.S.: A Canadian friend of mine had exactly the same happen to them there. Accident with car2go. Car2go purports breach of contract and demands full damages. He gets a lawyer. The thing goes nowhere. But he is since blocked from using car2go. Go figure.
- tiltrus 6y ago
  I had a similar problem with a car rental agency 2 years back in Netherlands. A small scratch and they were coming after me with 2k euros in damages. I had their CDW, but they refused to acknowledge it stating some TOS nonsense. Took me several months of constantly calling their office (they never reply to emails) to settle for a tenth of the cost. Took me another month to get a the receipt and written confirmation that the case is now closed & settled. The lesson I learned here is to use my Credit Cards CDW and deny the rentals insurance always. Tbh, I feel that most car rental agencies make their profits through these crazy insurance schemes.
unixhero 6y ago
To be fair EUR13K is not unheard of. But he should sue, might as well pile on some risk and mitigate the damage.

89 points by camillomiller 6y ago

Here's a tale of how you don't run a mobility startup, unless you don't care about the safety of your customers and your public image. Berlin car sharing startup Miles is demanding thousands of Euros from customers whose car was stolen, claiming that damages caused by thieves while driving the vehicles should be covered by their users. Turns out, Miles has always been leasing their entire car fleet, while renting it through a white-label platform they had no control over at least until recently. As a result, they failed to implement basic industry-standard safety mechanism, such as an immobilizer, that all of their competitors have been using for years. This, despite their telematics providers all offer the immobilizer as a feature. In one case they're threatening to sue a customer for 13,000€, during a pandemic. The customer is a bar owner, and faces bankruptcy as a result. In that specific case, Miles Mobility admitted that the car could be opened and turned on hours after the user had ended the rent. Edit, to add some elements: - don't miss the part about how customer support suggested not to call the police. Twice. - it's totally unclear how they are not covered by their insurance, and how can their investors be fine with all this (lead investor is Lukasz Gadowski of Delivery Hero fame, and TeamEurope Ventures founder).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
markdown 6y ago
> Here's a tale of how you don't run a mobility startup You forgot the very first lesson: pick a usable, recognisable name. "Miles" for a business like this is a terrible choice.
- shwoopdiwoop 6y ago
  Since they are based in Berlin I guess it’s not much of a problem?
  - ThePadawan 6y ago
    Also highly ironic, seeing as Uber just* means "above". * leaving aside the fact that the english usage of the term changed meaning, away from being a literal translation
    - cafard 6y ago
      Yes, in German, with an umlaut--but maybe they didn't want to be mixed up with a metal band. It has a couple of meanings in Latin, one of which coincides with Kalanick's expressed interests.
- javajosh 6y ago
  Their first name was worse: "Drive By".
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    Given that it's a German company I'm going to guess it was supposed to be an unlucky mixture of German and English given that drive by, in German "vorbeifahren" just has the literal meaning of "passing by".
javajosh 6y ago
And if they go through with the lawsuit, win or lose, the man will be out thousands of euros in attorney fees, plus months of stress.
- rad_gruchalski 6y ago
  But in Germany you don’t pay to the lawyers until you settle or lose in court.
  - kugelblitz 6y ago
    Not necessarily, under certain conditions, the lawyers can get an advance on the money.
  - ant6n 6y ago
    The months of stress are worse than the lawyer fees.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
The good news is that unlike in many other financial service disasters (e.g. with financial services), he isn't actually out the money, nor blocked from something particularly critical (I'm sure there are other carsharing services he can use). So he can at least ignore them until they actually sue.

mkl95 6y ago

That headline sums up the European startup scene (I say this having worked for a shady German startup myself, that has owed me and other former employees money for ages)

gregoriol 6y ago
What do you mean exactly?
- mkl95 6y ago
  Working for a small European startup sucks. The company will ALWAYS find a way to shift the blame when something like this happens, not to mention every EU startup I've worked for gets away with late payments and shady financial moves (the worst offender was a German company I worked for early in my career).
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > Working for a small European startup sucks. The company will ALWAYS find a way to shift the blame Start-ups across ~50 countries? Always doing the same thing? I think you may be generalising quite a bit... It's not like an SV company would ever shift blame on the customer, right? :-)
  - HatchedLake721 6y ago
    Yes, “European Startup” is one big homogenous thing, and not 30+ countries and half a billion people in population.
    - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
      The EU makes a big effort to harmonize law across countries, so there might be some sense to talk about European startup scene. Though, of course German-speaking countries scene would have its own different as Germany itself.
    - helmholtz 6y ago

orange_tee 6y ago

Why is a car for hire company called a startup?

cinntaile 6y ago
Because they have a cool app that you use to unlock the car with. That makes them a hip new company or in other words a startup.
- camillomiller 6y ago
  The app is not even cool. Is a React Native contraption developed externally. They switched to it last summer, exactly around the time when most of the vehicles got stolen, by the way. Before that they were using a different app connected to a white label solution provided by WunderMobility.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
onion2k 6y ago
They have an app.
- camillomiller 6y ago
  *They have a React Native contraption struggling to scroll on an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Fixed that for you. :)
- orange_tee 6y ago
  I know it's a joke, but so do other car for hire companies. Ex: https://www.europcar.com/europcar-mobile https://www.europcar.com/europcar-mobile
  - camillomiller 6y ago
    Miles claims to be a startup in shared-mobility whose mission is to bring transparency to the market. It's not a joke, it's on their website.

OneGuy123 6y ago

How can you be so bad at PR & Customer Support in 2021? The person in charge of this should really go on Facebook every once in a while to see what can happen...

camillomiller 6y ago
The don't have any PR person, so I guess their thought process is "if we don't have a PR person, we won't have PR problems".
- jandrese 6y ago
  Insert Eddie Murphy meme image here.

jarym 6y ago

Startup must be... cash strapped and just discovered their own insurers refused to cover the claim?

camillomiller 6y ago
Sounds very probable. Last investment was a 5m round led by Lukas Gadowski back in late 2019. Talk of the town is that they've already been kept alive multiple times by cash injections as private loans. Still, they're alive enough to mess their customers life and impose lawyers fees on them.

jonplackett 6y ago

Why isn't the car insured anyway?

camillomiller 6y ago
If you're an insurer, and you find out your client has never implemented basic safety measures that have been industry standard for 30 years (i.e. an immobilizer), I guess denying the claim takes probably minutes.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Regardless it's their responsibility to insure it, they'd just have to pay higher premiums. They would know if the cars are insured or not before making a claim.

pkaye 6y ago

Shouldn't their name be in metric units?

camillomiller 6y ago
best comment so far. Fun thing is, before rebranding into this ungooglable name, they were called "Driveby", which was way more memorable and easily googlable. They had to add "mobility" to everything to be found. Even on twitter they're "Miles Mobility".
- pkaye 6y ago
  Driveby would be a terrible name in the US also. It means an incident in which a person, building, or vehicle is shot at by someone in a moving vehicle.
lm28469 6y ago
"Kilometers" doesn't roll of the tongue as nicely
- ficklepickle 6y ago
  Clicks can be short for KM in some locales. Equally ungoogleable though.
  - rad_gruchalski 6y ago
    km, not KM. KM is a Polish SI unit for hp (German PS).
jeofken 6y ago
At least in Scandinavia a mile means 10km, just a shorthand. Not sure if it’s the same in Germany
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  A few seconds ago while looking up the various definitions I found out that a German mile is apparently about 7500 meters (with three different definitions existing, all around that length). There are about 60 other definitions in Europe. I would have expected it to be most closely associated with the roman mile, which is around 1.5 km. Given that this is the very first time I've heard about the German mile, I would assume that <1% of the population knows about it, and they'd probably consider a "mile" either the US thing if they are familiar with it due to travel, or most likely with "some archaic unit that's somewhere around 1.5 or 2 kilometers long, no idea, why would you use that". The first association that I (as a native German speaker) when I read "Miles" in the German context wasn't distance units - I interpreted it as a given name of English origin.

dna_polymerase 6y ago

There are absolutely no words to describe the stupidity exhibited here. What drove the founders in this market? Too stupid, lazy or incompetent to implement basic safety measures, but want to play in the ride sharing market, that is already saturated by bigger and better providers? What did they bring to the table in the first place? I have yet to encounter a German startup that really amazes me. This isn't it.

camillomiller 6y ago
Connections.

gojomo 6y ago

Reminds a bit of the massive theft of Mercedes from Car2Go in the US last year: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a27192115/thieves-car2go-steal-100-cars/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a27192115/thieves-car2go-s... Criminals will find your weak spots & exploit them until closed.

paxys 6y ago
Sounds like free penetration testing!
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  Wouldn't exactly call it free.

preya2k 6y ago

Hate to be the devil’s advocate here, but aside from shitty PR I don’t see a lot of things that went wrong: - As a Customer you need to make sure that your “Park” request goes through to the car and wait for the doors to lock. This might take a couple of seconds, but you can’t just press the button and run inside of a building where you might not have cell coverage at all. It’s not a RF key fob. I thing legally this would constitute negligence (Fahrlässigkeit). - Immobilizing the car once the phone is not close to the car seems like a bad idea. It’s a privacy nightmare, b/c you’re constantly being tracked. What about tunnels or parking garages? What if the battery dies? Seems like a whole lot of problems if they were to implement this. Do any of their competitors really do this (Share Now, Sixt Share, etc.)?

ficklepickle 6y ago
Use Bluetooth. Vulog (white label provider) supports this. They also support a physical RFID card so you can still get in/lock up if your phone dies.
camillomiller 6y ago
Thanks for the comment. - If you're closing a rental car with a key fob you check the doors twice? The app said closed, it's closed. Even if this was the case, how could you possibly ask for the entire damages caused by a third party? The ToS only talk about the user letting someone else drive the car for negligence, but how can that encompass thieves? They're not asking for a negligence fee or a deductible, they want customers to pay for damages caused by thieves. - Nope, an immobilizer is an industry-standard for keyfobs and digital keys alike. All competitors have it. They don't track anything. They only check the idle state of the car. I you are driving, turn off the engine on a Share Now and We Share, then open a door, the immobilizer kicks in. That means that you need to open the app and "unlock the engine" to keep driving. Simple, extremely effective. In two cases reported, Miles said the cars were stolen up to 4hrs after the users left them. Even if they forgot to close them (which users deny, with witnesses) they're admitting that the car was open and available to anyone for hours. How is that not a public safety issue and a farlässigkeit of the company?
krona 6y ago

ficklepickle 6y ago

Anybody here work for vulog? They are another European white-label car share platform provider. I'm nearing the end of reverse engineering one of their clients android apps. Lots of weak obfuscation, like calling certain endpoints multiple times (2-5x), which is totally useless against a MITM that can decrypt the traffic. Didn't even slow me down. Oh, and if you miss a certain header, it will respond with invalid JSON prefixed with "[]". Now I'm curious if they have immobilizers. The keys are kept in the car, so they must. Not that I want to do anything shady, I just want to use the service without being spied on. Decompiling the app found a bunch of baidu libs, Facebook and retargeting shite. The state of commercial software, yikes.

camillomiller 6y ago
Share Now (car2go + drive now) cars have an immobilizer regardless of the fact that they're keyless or not. Immobilizers are a trivial tech from the 90s, the fact that these company even struggle to cover this basic safety measure is astounding
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
> respond with invalid JSON prefixed with "[]". This is a common security measure against some ancient trick that could be used to get outdated browsers to divulge the content of the JSON contrary to the same origin policy.

lrossi 6y ago

I had a similar problem with a rented bike. Once I reached the destination station I tried to hook it into the parking thingy, but it didn’t lock. Luckily I noticed. However, the bike computer didn’t think it was rented anymore, so it didn’t let me attempt to lock it again. I had to spend half an hour on the phone with their support, until they redirected me to somebody who could login to the parking thingy remotely and manually control it. Cherry on top: I found out later that their tech support phone number is taxed. The call cost me something like 5x the ride cost. That’s when I decided to buy a bike and be done with these crappy services.

javajosh 6y ago

On a related note, they changed their name from "Drive By" last year. Apparently its still in the DNA though.

virtualritz 6y ago

I had an accident with a vehicle from one of these car sharing companies in Berlin. The company demanded 11,000€. I think that was 2017 or 2018. Supposedly I broke my contract by not following protocol after the accident and therefore my insurance was nil. Suffice to say I did. I had four witnesses, date & time & incident number of the police report, yadayadayada. I got a lawyer[1]. The whole thing went nowhere. I.e. I didn't pay, except for the lawyer who wrote exactly one letter to them. But I was blocked to use their vehicles until that company and another joined into a new enterprise. Upon which my record was magically wiped clean – I could use the part of the new fleet belonging to the vendor whose car I had had the accident with again. Ah, the merits of database mergers ... The issue all these car sharing companies have is their insurance. When these businesses started they needed insurance. What happened was that all the car insurance companies declined. Because how do you calculate the insurance if the driver changes all the time? So what these companies did was open their own insurance companies. While these are separate business entities it boils down to any damages coming out of their pockets. They have a vested interest in finding you in breach of their TOS so you are not covered by (their) insurance any more. How do I know? The lawyer I got was an expert in those cases. I was not the first of his clients with this issue. I can suggest him to anyone in Berlin who runs into such an issue. [1] https://www.ra-samimi.de/ https://www.ra-samimi.de/ P.S.: A Canadian friend of mine had exactly the same happen to them there. Accident with car2go. Car2go purports breach of contract and demands full damages. He gets a lawyer. The thing goes nowhere. But he is since blocked from using car2go. Go figure.

tiltrus 6y ago
I had a similar problem with a car rental agency 2 years back in Netherlands. A small scratch and they were coming after me with 2k euros in damages. I had their CDW, but they refused to acknowledge it stating some TOS nonsense. Took me several months of constantly calling their office (they never reply to emails) to settle for a tenth of the cost. Took me another month to get a the receipt and written confirmation that the case is now closed & settled. The lesson I learned here is to use my Credit Cards CDW and deny the rentals insurance always. Tbh, I feel that most car rental agencies make their profits through these crazy insurance schemes.

unixhero 6y ago

To be fair EUR13K is not unheard of. But he should sue, might as well pile on some risk and mitigate the damage.