Zipcars in general work just fine when they do not have cell service, he said, as they have some internal memory that lets them function even when out of touch with the company servers. The “out-of-comms scenario when a member is unable to access a vehicle is extremely rare,” Jeff Prus, Zipcar’s vice president of product and experience, told me in an interview. Or getting locked out and marooned in Death Valley, perhaps with medicine trapped in the car. I shudder to think about limping back to a trailhead with no more water in my backpack, only to find a car that would not start. We needed another tow to a town where we at last abandoned the Zipcar and made our way home.Īnnie Lowrey: The next recession will destroy Millennials A tow truck took us to a lot with reception, where the rental failed to start. Unable to get a cab to come to us, we waited. We could abandon the car, they said, and they would waive the normal fee. We used a landline to call Zipcar, whose representatives told us about the reception issue. One morning, after waving the card over the reader what felt like a thousand times, we realized the thing was no longer working. I had gone to a remote part of the California coast with my brother, sister, husband, and baby, with our car and a Zipcar. Not too nightmarish of a nightmare, thankfully. It means turning your weekend of hiking and forest-bathing into a logistical nightmare. It means a multiday extraction operation requiring a flatbed tow truck. Sometimes it means you are stranded in the middle of nowhere, a fussy baby in one hand and a useless cellphone in the other. Sometimes that means you don’t get your cup of coffee, or you need to call a cab the old-fashioned way. But it also means that things can go very wrong. All this connection means easier access, faster service, cheaper prices, better features. The same is true for your Uber ride, or your cup of coffee made by a Wi-Fi–connected machine, or your Peloton workout. With services like Zipcar, your rental car becomes not just a car, but a node in a complex, connected system. It is a particularly vexing part of the give-and-take of attaching everything to everything. And because you will be in an area with no cell reception, it might be impossible for you to call for help. The doors won’t open, and even if they do, the engine will not start.
#Zipcar customer care drivers
Here is the Public Service Announcement part of the story: If you take a vehicle loaned out by Zipcar-a rental service where drivers use RFID cards or a mobile app to open up the car-to an area without cell reception, there’s a chance the car will not work. I held the card over the reader and tried to do the same. My brother and then my sister held the card over the reader and waited for it to unlock.
0 kommentar(er)
