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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

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...

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Honestly, the ban sounds justified to me. If you know that parking in the garage will lead to a 50% probability of them having to tow the car, repeating this is just unnecessary. It would obviously be better if they could handle such scenarios but ignoring a known limitation to incur cost to others (since you have no advantage as you also can't use the car in this scenario) sounds wrong to me.

> Honestly, the ban sounds justified to me

based on the story above I agree, knowingly (and after a few occurrences you should understand there's a problem) damaging the service should lead to a ban or at least a warning.

No, it should lead to someone fixing the problem. The customer centric thinking in this thread is amazing.

One facet of the problem (the cell coverage) is largely out of Zipcars control, no? I suppose they could add some functionality to their app so that you're alerted when you park at a location without cell coverage?

Lack of cell coverage is out of their control, but that doesn't excuse them from designing around the problem.

It appears they're aware of the problem, but certain known issues prevent access (cellular unit draining car battery seems to be the common one and sounds like something that should be fixable).

Add a keypad like Ford has had on their vehicles for like 20 years. Have the computer keep a short list of one time pass codes (and maybe some sort of super long master code) that can be updated whenever the car is in cell service. So in the event that you get into the car, Zipcar can provide one of the one time use codes to get you in the door.

My imagined internal security review to this issue Hard "no", closing WONTFIX. This change would significantly increase the attack surface, risking a lot for very little upside. See "Epic 769 (Offline Support - roadmap Q3 2020)" for blocking & related issues

> If you know that parking in the garage will lead to a 50% probability of..

50% is GP's after-the-fact description of how often the car failed to start. It's not an actual failure rate that GP knew about before they parked.

Anyone can make an error once. Commenter talks about how they repeatedly parked the car in an underground garage that they knew had no cell signal, despite multiple towings being required.

What's the appropriate number of towings for one customer due to that customer's intentional actions before you kick them off the service?

I'm the original poster. I misspoke in the original comment (too late to edit it).

Now that I think about it, I believe unlocking does work regardless of cell service (as long as you don't extend the reservation, and try to unlock it after the original reservation time ends).

I had the car towed twice:

1) First time, the car wouldn't start because the battery was dead while parked underground with no cell service.

2) Second time, the reservation was about to expire while parked without cell service, and I extended it on the app, but the car couldn't know that since the cellular unit couldn't phone home.

EDIT: For what it's worth, I don't blame Zipcar for banning an unprofitable customer. I acknowledge that i was definitely pushing my luck by parking there a 2nd time after the first incident.

Disagreed about the ban. Since when is shitty technology (which any engineer worth their salt should’ve predicted - this is not rocket science) the fault of the customer? Unless they say in bold in their marketing statements “Only drive within cell coverage” the customer isn’t at fault for trying to use it as a normal car (in fact it’s crazy to think that parking in a place with no reception is no longer normal, at least according to ZipCar).

I do agree it is not his fault.

But the ban also prevents that particular customer from receiving bad service. Some things are not meant to be.

ZipCar should have formally requested that the customer not park cars in that lot, or what have you.

Since the customer needs to use that lot, they would probably stop using ZipCar at that point—but that's better than being banned forever if their life situation changes.

Do you see declining to serve a customer whom you could not serve well as different to banning a customer?

Because companies routinely do the former.

Never play the "who's dumber" game with private companies you'll always lose. If it happens twice you should switch on your common sense and stop using the service, or at the very least change your behaviour/don't be surprised if you get banned.

> which any engineer worth their salt should’ve predicted - this is not rocket science

There are probably tons of other issues you don't know about. Making it work offline would probably increase the attack surface, &c.

Any engineer worth their salt knows that they have 100 things to work on and this guy's corner case didn't make the cut. Easier for them to ban him and work on a new feature that generates revenue for thousands of users.

My point is that this isn’t some minor bug that you can leave in the backlog because it’s just a minor inconvenience. This is a major dealbreaker that should’ve been thought of when designing the service in the first place.

The common man would think a company would try the fix with the utmost priority a mission critical issue...

“I ordered the tuna salad every time I ate at the restaurant. About half of the time, the manager informed me that they were out of tuna, and had to send a truck to fetch more.

After a while of this, they banned me from the restaurant for ordering the tuna salad.”

Actually, that analogy would only make sense if "you" refused to order anything but tuna salad and expected them to send the truck out without fail when they were out. And they had to comply with your request for some reason.

In that case, yeah, they should ban "you".

A better analogy would be that ZipCar has a known failure mode that will leave you stranded. And they don't feel the urge to fix it.

The fellow is parking the car in his own garage, and ZipCar claims to be in the car business, and it is normal to park cars in garages.

I say they have tuna salad on the menu, but they apparently can't always serve it to everyone.

Your suggestion that he order something else to eat is like telling a ZipCar customer to move to a different condominium or whatever.

They don't "have" to do anything, provided they aren't discriminating against him on the basis of a prohibited factor like race or gender. Just as a restaurant doesn't have to serve you (subject to the same caveat).

But the important thing here to note is that the hypothetical restaurant has organized their business in such a way that some customers cannot get what they claim to serve, just as ZipCar has organized their business such that some customers cannot enjoy the service they claim to offer.

They don't have to do anything, but I object to blaming the customer for their choice to run their business in such a way that a very ordinary thing that some customers can do, others cannot.

Don’t pretty much all phones have Bluetooth now? Couldn’t it backup the authorisation and allow him to connect via Bluetooth and verify and unlock? How is this absolutely his fault?

There's at least two ways of handling serious product failings: "Oh, shit, we have to fix that!" or getting rid of the customer exposing the problem and trying to conceal the issue. One is the action of a healthy company, especially one that is trying to grow, while the other maximizes current profit levels.

Doesn't parking in same place twice, knowing full well the likely cost to the person they're doing business with, seem unethical? Would you want to do business with someone who carelessly took advantage of you?

I'm not sure I would do that, but I would expect them to fix their service it if it is costing them noticeably.

AFAIK they did not say you shouldn't park underground nor did they explain their various failure modes and how to avoid them.

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?

That's why I always took the key with me, despite the fact that they tell you not to.

Interesting. If that really works, perhaps they should add a special asterisk that you should always leave the key in the car unless you're parking in an area with poor or nonexistent cell reception.

Zipcar should get banned from such stupid practices and almost liquidating fine for customer deception.

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.

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.

Get a refund.

I leave a phone plugged into my car's USB port 24x7 and the car has its own GSM modem too and obviously it starts right up every time.

The difference is that you're using a USB port directly built into the car (which is "smart" about not draining the battery) while the other user is using a cigarette lighter to USB adapter (the cigarette lighter is a "dumb" circuit).

getting your battery tested might be useful too.

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.

Your smell test is a bit misleading in that most car batteries have a drastically lower energy density than Lithium Ion cells. There’s still a lot more energy in the car battery, of course, but not by nearly as much as a naive comparison of the weights would suggest. If it had the energy density of your cell phone, the lead acid battery in your car would only weigh 5 or so kgs.

Your cellphone will also last a lot less than “all day” if you take it somewhere where it has to run the radio at full power to try to maintain a connection. I’ve seen otherwise reliable and long lasting phones easily end up burning 1% a minute in areas of really bad signal.

OK, here's another test. A common way to end up with a dead battery is to leave the lights on overnight. The lights on a car draw over 100W (standard halogen headlights and incandescent tail and marker lights). But you can leave your lights on for hours and still start the car. Therefore it stands to reason that the same battery could power a GSM radio for hundreds of hours.

This assumes the battery is fully charged, if it's cold or if the battery is slightly defective, it could be a lot less than full charge.

That assumes the battery behaves the same for low and high current (they don't).

Even lithium cells already don't; high currents causes them to warm up, reducing capacity. So a device that draws 1 Watt will last longer than one that draws 10 Watts from a small lithium cell.

Lead Acid responds even worse, especially starter batteries, less so on deep cycle, and it's capacity rapidly changes, without temperature influence. A 1 Watt device might only last a day while it's fine starting up an engine with 10 times the total power consumption

Searching for signal uses some kind of exponential backoff algorithm (somekind because of patent wars between Qualcomm Broadcom and others), the phone doesn't simply sends the maximum power every fraction of a second. 1% per minute means something is wrong with your phone, or a weird edge case.

GSM phones don’t send anything at all in the first phase of registration.

I also seem to recall that standard car batteries respond poorly and inefficiently to trickle-discharge, being designed mainly for providing a lot of amps over a short period. Providing long term off-grid power is what deep cycle marine batteries are for, and they are a separate product.

As far as I know standard car batteries are fine with this kind of trickle discharge. Where they fall short compared to deep cycle batteries is providing a more substantial current (think tens of amps) over a prolonged period of time.

Trickle discharge up to a few dozen milliwatts is generally fine for car batteries. They don't like being closed circuit in general but if you draw more than about half a watt for a longer time period, the battery plates will start to desintegrate.

Car batteries are generally a starter battery (minus EV ones). They don't like being closed circuit for extended periods of time.

A low current is usually allowed (200mW is the top end in my experience), but anything over will, over time, sulfinate the plates in the battery and cause it too loose charge and capacity rapidly.

Generally if you want to run a low current device on a lead acid battery, you should use a deep cycle battery with plates designed for it. Starter battery have large, flat plates to carry a lot of current for only a few seconds tops, then be charged up again.

It looks like Zipcar should have a separate smartphone-like battery to power GSM and GPS.

How long does it take to damage the car battery?

How long does it take to discharge the car battery?

Depends on the load.

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