“All I really had was Twitter for company, so I’m there narrativizing the thing, writing jokes. “The entertaining element was that I was stuck in this bizarre environment with nobody there,” he told me, describing the faux-Mediterranean estate and its priceless works of art. 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. He used a Zipcar to get to the Getty Villa, part of the J. We were like: How is this failing?”Ī similar thing happened to Tom Coates, another Californian and, as luck would have it, an expert in the internet of things. “We actually got really into figuring out what was going on,” she said. It’s the car that needs service.” They ended up using the Wi-Fi at a fire station while Zipcar sent them a tow truck from the East Bay. We realized it’s not us who need service. “We were super wiped,” the Bay Area technologist told me. Tess Rinearson had finished a 17-mile hike to the top of Mount Tamalpais with her boyfriend and some friends, only to return to a Zipcar that would not start. Zipcars abandoned for days Zipcars stuck in the woods Zipcars stuck on the seashore Zipcars stuck in garages Zipcar users resorting to hitchhiking. Such issues might be rare-Prus declined to give any hard numbers to quantify how rare-but online, tales of the dreaded “out-of-comms scenario” abound. That last scenario was the one my family and I found ourselves in, though we did not know it at the time. 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. Indeed, making sure that the cars work when out of reception is a “mission-critical success factor” for the company, he said. 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. 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.
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