Stranded after driving out of cellphone range in app-powered smart car | Hacker News Reader

Stranded after driving out of cellphone range in app-powered smart car

cbc.ca

142 pointspseudolus125 comments

Remarkable how the designers did not conceive that cell coverage doesn't actually cover every inch of the planet or is 100% reliable. What will we have next? A heart-lung machine that depends on 24x7 internet access?

We already have a ton of apps which assume that everyone has a decent internet connection at all times.

I frequently land in places where my connection is but a trickle(with an absurd ping of 20s at that), and because of that a large part of apps simply refuse to work.

One notable exception is Facebook Messenger - if it doesn't work then you really don't have internet.

And this is infuriating. I would expect mobile apps to be able to deal better with complete/spotty loss of Internet connection than PC programs, not worse !

I roadtrip and camp alot. It's amusing how many campground/boondocking locator apps require cell service. They often have a ton of other features, but downloading a dataset is not one of them. They want people to add, rate, and comment on campsites and yet, again, have no offline abilities. Doh!

Facebook Messenger was (is still?) based on the MQTT protocol https://mqtt.org/2011/08/mqtt-used-by-facebook-messenger that is specifically designed to be forgiving of low bandwidth or intermittent connectivity. It's a great example of a company picking the right tool for the job instead of falling victim to not-invented-here syndrome.

I love Twitter this way, which is built "offline first". Twitter will let you read everything in your timeline that you have previously downloaded, let you reply to and like as many tweets as you want, and never complain about lack of connectivity. It'll just dutifully queue your requests and act on them once you're back online. It's one of the only connected apps properly usable on the subway.

WhatsApp is another one of those, it was designed from the ground up for 2G and terrible signal. Whenever I had absurd ping or a 1-2KB/s connection, WhatsApp would still pull through and function as if my network was perfect (except for media download/upload of course).

I found that the slack desktop application works WORSE than the browser app in limited connection scenarios.

The browser will attempt to slowly load while the application outright refuses to attempt, and claims it has no connection, even the the browser is loading

My experience is the Slack website works better than the app in all circumstances.

30 years ago Lotus Notes offered an application development platform designed to work well with slow or intermittent network connections. It's a shame how far the industry has regressed since then.

Or in my case, a bank that assumes I have mobile phone coverage at home. When I try to order anything on the internet these days it wants to send me a 6 digit SMS code, so now I can't order anything on the internet (although Amazon and Paypal still work, touch wood).

Get a Google Voice account and use that number for SMS. Works great over wifi.

I'm trying to reduce any dependence on Google. Nevertheless I just tried it out and it says it's not available in my country.

Skype numbers support this (in some countries), too. I live outside the US but have a US Skype number for this very purpose.

While I like the spirit of this thread of work-around suggestions, I can't help but think that using $RandomService to verify access to someone's bank account is a terrible idea.

It's bad enough having banks rely on a phone system where most carriers are perfectly happy to let anyone who knows your Address, DOB and Mother's Maiden name to port your phone number to a new SIM.

It probably requires less effort (and certainly less risk of discovery) to take over a Skype, Google Voice or other VOIP/SMS service.

It's a terrible idea, but until banks and other websites quit weaponizing 2FA in the name of security theater, workarounds like this are sometimes the only option.

In fact California has perhaps more blind spots than live. Ok, it is an overstatement, but we had several days of no cell service on our last roadtrip. We had only cell based navigation because the 'GPS' they suggested at the car rental was just a smartphone, so why not using ours instead. We had quite a bit of a challenge finding room in the night when firefighters took all rooms in a perhaps 100 mi radius in the period of wildfires, we had to rearrange plans in the dark without local knowledge on a remote hilly road leading who knows where and how long with tank getting empty and with no light or people in sight for almost 60 minutes except some shady figures started to follow us after passing them standing in a parking lot discussing something over their car.

Yeah, cell service is not something to rely upon in California!

That sounds like incredibly poor planning on your part and a series of bad decisions.

Vacationing in wildfire regions during wildfire season.

You let your fuel tank get low without knowing when or where your next fillup would be.

You didn't have hotel reservations in advance.

You waited until nightfall to find a room.

You're relying on a smartphone for navigation.

You didn't make offline maps of the whole region on everyone's devices. All of California is only around 2gb in Google Maps. That functionality has existied for a decade.

Along with all of the above, AAA still has free paper maps. If you're traveling anywhere outside the major cities, always bring a paper map with you. It doesn't need to be your primary method of navigation, but when your phone battery is dying, or your navigation app refuses to load because of spotty signal, the paper map will still work.

That's an excellent suggestion, especially if you're trying to disconnect and go electronics free. Sadly a lot of people can't even read a map anymore.

Until you mentioned, I didn't even consider that someone might actually have trouble with reading a paper map. I guess these days with location services on your phone, you never need to really find where you are in the first place. You just tap the button to zoom to your location, and go from there.

I don't like the navigation feature in most Apps because I like to know my next couple moves. Google Maps has a tendency to tell you "turn now" or "turn back there".

I have discovered by driving with others as navigators, that a lot of people cannot read a map and are literally just doing what the App says.

If you miss a turn, people are incapable of looking at the map and saying "go one more block and take a left to get back on course". They have to wait for a reroute.

You know, we had a road trip in California, not only in that problematic part of it where the fire developed while being on the road (2 days out of 13). Which forced us dropping previous plans, revising plans due to parts of our destinations became unreachable. And the alternates becoming occupied making us searching for new accommodation extended beyond nightfall and destinations anticipated. The rest is on us, yes, not buying our own offline navigation just for this trip intending to use the one from car rental assuming they provide one that is adequate for the area they operate in. Or not spending extended time on building up the offline map to the desired resolution for much more than we intended to go to. Well, we knew about the blind spots but planed for it except the consequences of the newly developed wildfire.

Probably next time you should only express opinion in topics you not only see from the idealistic viewpoint of an outsider.

Or simply not deviate from the topic of bad cell coverage just to criticize someone in something you cannot comprehend fully.

If I'd be the creator of Black Mirror this would be a fun idea to bounce around in the writers room.

Exactly what I was thinking! This had black mirror written all over it

Make it happen in Death Valley, for increased drama.

Let’s hope they don’t do Ambulances and fireengines.

That would be absolutely frustrating. I have no idea how they can keep the confidence of their customers. It’s such an egregious non-starter.

ah come on, don't give anyone ideas :)

btw, testing is very important and i think most companies don't exhaust enough test cases. had google maps gone bonkers in the country especially during very bad weather. i don't think there is a map app out there that takes the weather into account...

How would weather affect a map ??

At a guess I suspect they mean more the route finding than the map part e.g. maybe don't send me on that nice shortcut across a mountain range if there is a blizzard up there. Part of me suspects google maps would figure this out by proxy in the same way it magically knows about traffic jams before you get to them but there are probably pathological cases where because no one is stupid enough to try it google don't have enough information to not recommend it.

Are there any nav/driving apps that show current weather overlaid on the map?

Seems like a useful thing but I don’t see it in Waze, gMaps, or aMaps. Why is that?

Weather maps are expensive - IBM has acquired the cheap providers in the space in the last few years. Free data providers don't provide less than zip-code-level resolution, much less something good enough for a live overlay.

Funny thing is that I don't need the 10-day forecast when driving across the state, I just need to know if there's rain/snow/winds ahead on my particular section of the highway.

Seems like that's available from NOAA for cheap, isn't it?

Google maps needs internet connectivity. Bad weather could affect internet connectivity.

It hopefully doesn't - at least for the mobile app ! I'm pretty sur it can download maps and work offline ?

Does everything has to be 100% reliable though? That has a cost and it may be not be worth it to pay that cost. A heart-lung machine does need to be 100% reliable though, which is as a matter of fact, is actually quite expensive, to be 100% reliable.

Sure, each reliability nine increases the cost 10x. However, this doesn't even look like 90%...

> However, this doesn't even look like 90%...

Are you saying that 90% of rental through phone are made in area without data service?

I'm a big user of Communauto in Quebec, which is a similar car sharing service but does have a key inside (I'm pretty sure they do have the same issue of unlocking the car though, but you take and release the car at the same spot, so the unlock will work at first for sure, and afterward you should keep the key). 99% of my usage with them has been done with data coverage. I only used it once without cell coverage and funnily enough I may have stressed them a bit because I was close to the border and it lasted 48 hours ;).

Fair point.

I guarantee on the first day, at the first meeting, someone said "well what happens if they drive a car out of cell range?" and they were immediately shut down.

They probably used too much YAGNI,TDD,MVP and similar fancy named cool techniques and less good old thinking.

I mean in principle TDD could actually prevent this kind of thing because it actually encourages you to think of failure scenarios.

There are many benefits to TDD but sometimes actual QA is replaced with basic/trivial unit tests.

How agile of them!

Right! They'll be iterating on the design and correct bugs during next sprint, while their users are stuck in the middle of nowhere. The system works!

That Agile Mindset becomes literal at the point one is reduced to the Mark-1 Foot for transportation.

We’re much closer to 100% cell coverage than you might think... https://lynk.world/ developed a way to connect to totally unmodified phones (using LTE) using LEO satellites. Some very clever scheme for dealing the assumed latency.

Satellites don't work well when you're 3 stories down in a parking garage

Very true.

Solar powered. After all, the sun has been shining for billions of years.

Looks like a case of great app developed without testing the usecase scenarios.

It's not just bad cellphone service, but sometimes server issues could have the same effect. Hyundai ran a car sharing service here in Amsterdam that used a combination of Bluetooth and cellular connectivity to remotely unlock cars and provision software keys for phones. Every once in a while, though, the app would crash and lose the software key, meaning that the car would end up back again on the map exactly where you picked it up without leaving you with a way to unlock the car. I am not sure what exactly was the issue as the app just errored out.

I'd have to call the customer service line, where they wouldn't know what to do as the car was already in use according to the backend. After a few times getting stuck, I came up with a solution which was to literally beg them to cancel the checkout so that the car was available again. They were trained to not do that as their information was that a car could not be left parked outside their service area, which was definitely not the case as I was able to start a new reservation and unlock the car. This happened quite a few times, so much so that I would already know the solution but had to spend an awful amount of time explaining it to the reps -- starting with uninstalling and reinstalling the app as told by them.

Then, some other company took over the system and started a new system with the same infrastructure and the app codebase. When it happened again a couple times, I was finally able to get hold of a systems programmer who debugged the issue with me while I was out in the wind. It hasn't recurred since.

Just wanted to share this story

Well, but that is not an issue of cell phone connectivity, it's just the app being crappy.

Sounds like the new management is less clueless than the previous one, if no one had heard about the problem (and if the cars were - they should be - gps-tracked then the backend should just use that as a position, obviously).

> I would already know the solution but had to spend an awful amount of time explaining it to the reps -- starting with uninstalling and reinstalling the app as told by them.

Really need Shibboleet for tech support.

https://xkcd.com/806/

I would like to compare with a "normal" rent:

1) you are given (by a human) the keys of the car in exchange of providing your driver license and credit card

2) you do (within limits) whatever you want with the car

3) after the agreed upon rent period you bring back the car and keys (giving them to a human) and then the rental company checks how many miles you did (and if you exceeded the included amount you are charged, unless you got an all inclusive/unlimited mmileage contract)

I.e. the renting company actually "trusts" you (backed financially by your credit card).

And this formula worked seemigly just fine for the last 60 years or more.

A "natural" evolution would IMHO be:

1) you get pre-approved (i.e. you provide your driving license and credit card before and outside the actual rent) when you start the rent your smartphone is somehow allowed to open and start the car

2) you do (within limits) whatever you want with the car

3) after the agreed upon rent period you bring back the car in a designed area, you notify the renter of it and somehow your smartphone cannot open or start the car anymore (and at that time the mileage is checked remotely, etc.)

If this was the case the need for coverage would only be needed in the designed pick and leave area.

I fail to see any practical advantage for the renting company to collect data "realtime" (and thus need the anytime coverage).

I.e. it seems to me more like a "because I can" reason than anything else.

It’s less about collecting data (not saying they don’t do it, but data collection failing shouldn’t prevent the car from starting) and more about not having the skill to make a offline authentication system and a way for the phone to talk to the car via Bluetooth without relying on the internet.

Who wants to bet all their engineering talent was instead spent on playing with big toys like Kubernetes and chasing the latest JS framework?

Make it a keypad to unlock the door and have a key inside to start the car. Rental company texts or emails you the code that will either work immediately or at a certain time in the future. This would require you to have internet or cell service at some point prior to the rental (not unreasonable). The code would be good for the entire time you have the rental in case you lock the key in the car. The car would only need internet at the beginning of the rental to get the new door code and the expiration date of the rental and could run unencumbered from then on. You could take this one step further and have the code be what starts the car too.

Seems to me that it is probably some inadvised anti-theft thing.

Yep, but is it theft an actual "real world" problem?

How has (say) Herz, Avis or Budget managed to survive all these years (and still do)?

Surely rental car theft must be something rare enough to not be of concern (statistically).

Besides, a car is not something designed (by the manufacturer) to be easily accessible, and if professional car thieves are going to target a vehicle, allow me to doubt that the whatever the smart peeps at GigCarShare devised is more effective than the manufacturer's and or additional third party [1] anti-theft devices.

BTW, should the whatever device/system actually be much better than competing systems, they would most probably have much more imcome/profit by selling the devices/systems instead of renting cars.

[1] possibly specialized since a couple decades or more in the anti-theft technology

Yes, it’s actually a serious problem. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/chicago-rental-c...

The problem is when your authentication is an app and a digital photo it’s a lot easier to fake who you are. At least if someone tries to go on a crime spree with traditional rentals they’re gonna be on dozens of office security cams, have to repeatedly show a physical license and have their identity checked, and so on.

I meant for "traditional" rental service, where the theft is performed by someone else, not by the person that rented the car.

They somehow either solved it or it doesn't represent an issue.

What you linked to is possibly yet another kind of crime, the whatever app was seemingly hacked.

This is exactly how it works for a Polish minute car rental service Traficar.

You can even drive through the whole country to another Traficar service zone, leave the car there and get back by train.

Same here in Baltic's, you can take a car in Vilnius, Lithuania, and drive through Latvia and into Estonia and leave the car in Tallinn.

The internet of shit is alive and well.

Live tweet at https://twitter.com/kari_paul/status/1229428892802392064

"after @GIGCarShare told us to sleep in our car on the side of the road and try again in the morning we called a tow truck..."

Ugh.

I would abandon the car at that point.

>The internet of shit is alive and well.

IoS

It has a nice ring to it. However, I fear for its wider adoption:

https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

"IOS is a trademark or registered trademark of Cisco in the U.S. and other countries and is used under license."

Uh-oh.

Can see the headline now: Cisco sues budding Internet of Shit (IoS) startup claiming trademark infringement. Plaintiff filings also allege numerous instances of patent infringement, as well as theft of trade secrets.

I never heard of Internetwork Operating System till now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_IOS

The term "IOS" is sadly quite overloaded. There's Cisco IOS, and Apple's iOS, and Wii IOS…

Any in vehicle device that has the power to control whether the car starts or not should have a fail safe mode that ensures that it will never be less safe than the vehicle without the addition. Telling users to 'overnight in their car' could be very unsafe depending on the conditions. This company deserves to go out of business rapidly.

Had the same experience in Spain. Turned off the car in a location with bad phone signal and the car wouldn't start anymore. Not even creating a wifi Hotspot with the phone (funnily enough our phones did have a weak signal. Ludicrous how a big car can have a weaker antenna than a weight-size-optimised phone).

After hours of talking with support, they finally sent someone to tow us to the nearest city. The car then had reception and finally started again.

I'm just surprised they have to tow the vehicle. A better design would be to have a hardwired or bluetooth number pad in the car. The app can generate emergency start codes 2-3 times which can be entered in the number pad. Lots of ways to prevent abuse including working only when there isn't a signal present.

> So we initially had it towed to our AirBnb because we had Wi-Fi there and thought that would be enough to start the car, having our phones securely connected to Wi-Fi.

> But it turned out it actually needed to be towed ... to the nearest town with cell service.

> I'm a tech reporter. I'm pretty tech savvy.

It’s not inconceivable that the car could use a BLE connection with the app to be unlocked and started, at least as a backup when it can’t reach a cell tower.

Having no mitigation at all for the car not reaching the Internet on its cell connection is negligent. Even a hidden screen that lets you put in a one-time use startup code in the case of emergencies would have helped.

My understanding of the situation is the following:

1. The car must connect to home via cellular to authenticate/receive updates over some regular cadence (days? hours?) 2. Once that is complete, the user can authenticate over phone to the service via any connection (ie airbnb wifi), then unlock the car with bluetooth 3. The situation here occurred after going beyond cell service range for the car. It tried to connect home, failed, and as a result, refused to honor the phone's unlock the car itself had connected to home over cellular

All while they were on the phone w/ Gig Car customer support. I'm pretty confused about the sequence of events here.

I use Mint Mobile here which is a MVNO that uses T-Mobile. I don't get cell reception at my house. But my sister uses AT&T and gets full bars here while my phone is dead. And by dead I mean it doesn't even connect.

So maybe went Gig went cheap when choosing a cell partner.

Having a good enough signal to make a call is not the same as having good enough signal to push data, and if the car expected to move a megabyte of json over LTE to get started, it would explain the behavior just fine.

>@GIGCarShare told us to sleep in our car on the side of the road and try again in the morning

...i...what...but why...that doesn't even make sense?...

>Gig told us we used our “allotted restarts” of the car

why is this a thing? if i rent a car from enterprise etc, they don't care how many times i start the car up, it's paid by time...just seems like yet another needless over-complication

also i wonder if these cars have similar issues in parking garages where cell reception is less than ideal.

I've had this issue multiple times with Car2Go inside buildings with little to no service

Multiple times? Why didn't you stop using Car2Go after the first time?

> ...i...what...but why...that doesn't even make sense?...

From the article

> Basically, a phone unlocks the car using a combination of cell service and Bluetooth. So when you're out of cell range it can be difficult to unlock the car.

> They were unable to ping the car because, I don't know, they hadn't updated, or synced, the software in 24 hours.

My understanding is that it works like scooter and bike sharing services, where you have to have an active connection to their servers to use the vehicle. Of course, while it works in the city where there is 3G/4G coverage, it's not going to be efficient in the middle of nowhere where coverage is unlikely... so sometimes convenience (AKA it's just an app) becomes a hindrance. Who's fault is it? (rhetorical question)

> Who's fault is it?

The developer's fault. How this is even debatable is beyond me. Completely failed on the UX level.

Someone probably told the developer to implement it that way.

How is that the developer's fault?

You unlock the car with your phone over your data connection and not with a key. Losing the data connection is the equivalent of losing the key. You may not like it, I know I don't, but that's the downside of doing it this way (just like it's a downside to have a physical key because you can lose it too).

I have no doubt that the developers warned management of the risk of doing it this way, they accepted the risk.

Whether the restriction is reasonable or not is up for debate. The issue is that they created a vehicle that only works within a specific geographic area, then failed to document that area or warn users that it existed.

Devs just do whatever they're told. It's likely the PO's responsibility to think through how this should work.

Rarely are developers in charge of UX

Who is downvoting this guy and why are you downvoting him? This makes perfect sense. This isn't Reddit where you upvote/downvote based on your opinion, you downvote if the information isn't factual.

I get that part, but why would sleeping overnight and trying again in 8 hours be a solution?

Based on the cars and how it is described, it sounds like the same system as Evo[0] in Vancouver. It is run by our automobile association, BCAA. Their platform vendor is called Vulog[1].

The big difference with Evo is it sounds like these don't have the keys in the glovebox. The app is hot garbage, so it comes in handy. Also the RFID cards are standard issue here. I have taken them well out of service for over 24 hours without issue. All this to say, I don't believe it is an inherent limit of the platform. That said, my experience poking around exposed endpoints does not inspire confidence. The back end is some Microsoft abomination. I'd love to know what runs on the in-car embedded device, but it's probably WinCE. Anybody here worked for vulog?

The article seems to imply they are smart cars, but the picture is clearly of a Prius C. I guess they mean smart as in internet-connected rather than the brand from Mercedes.

[0] https://evo.ca [1] https://www.vulog.com/en/

I cringe when a "pure software" business gets into an area where health and safety are potentially at play. This kind of stuff is going to only get worse. Hi, we're from a startup, and we're here to burn your house down.

I think that something like "engineering fundamentals" should be a course requirement for computer science majors in case they aren't headed for careers in CS research. Back in my day, at the start of the first day of physics class, the professor showed a video of the famous footage from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Then we got down to business.

Based on the stack, I'd wager that the vendor (vulog) is not an engineering-driven organization.

Remember the Freeman's Mind joke about guided missiles that fly out of range of the authentication servers?

Next in Internet of Shit: "smart" car ransomware. Coupled with autopilot, because why not.

Gilfoyle did it to Dinesh !

Some comments read to me as if they were trying to say, >I want to benefit from the latest technology >I want to enjoy the bleeding edge tech >bugs? Why are there bugs in the bleeding edge technology? >misfeatures? Why are there misfeatures in the bleeding edge tech?

Some people are okay with occasional tech hiccups as the price of pushing the frontier forward. I hereby thank the brave beta-testers, and hold them above the people who expect perfection the first time out of the gate.

Now if they went for a Death Valley trip in the car that'd have been entirely different story - one of irresponsibility and needless risk taking. But as things were, they suffered only a major inconvenience and no appreciable risk to life and limb, due to maintaining sensible proximity to civilization.

On a lighter note, please consider the histories of Alice Ramsey[1] - first woman to drive cross USA, and Bertha Benz[2] - first woman to drive cross a country, having financed the development of the car. Both encountered malfunctions and other mishaps, solved problems & persevered, and earned fame and appreciation. Both also added to the popularization & development of the technology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Huyler_Ramsey

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-countr...

I thought you opened with quotes from the article, but it seems like you made them up? There's no indication that the people here were expecting to go on a pioneering expedition.

You are right, and thank you for pointing it out.

My intent was to satirize the incredulity or even outrage conveyed in certain comments; should've chosen a better format for that.

encountered malfunctions and other mishaps, solved problems & persevered

The big difference is, cars back then were far simpler, and more importantly could actually be fixed by anyone with a bit of mechanical skill, which wasn't in short supply at the time.

Modern cars are so complex and computerised that even if you own it, you are still mostly powerless to do anything if something goes wrong, and it could even be deliberately designed to thwart repair by anyone other than the original manufacturer.

We live in the future now... and it's horrible.

Worse, it's stupid.

Yep. All good old dystopic sci-fi of yesteryear was at least evil but cool. This is just sad.

Last time this story was posted (less than 48 hours ago) someone pointed out that you're supposed to get a nfc card to open/start the car when you're out of town.

Also, there are plenty of old school rental companies that are cheaper and more convenient than these shitty services for these kind of road trips.

This has to be satire right? How is it even legal to produce a car that only works with an internet connection?

It's a rent car, they probably use the internet to order the car to stop working if you exceed the renting time, and we are seeing the anti-circumvention algorithm.

Honestly, I don't know what to think. It is surely a bad thing to prohibit people form having cars that stop working when there is no internet available. I am tempted to say I would sue the company with all my might, but rent-a-car companies often sell to helpless people that have a limited time available on a country and can't spare a fight.

Maybe the best option would be to cancel the credit card expense, get another transportation somewhere else, and if the country laws side with the company too badly, mark it off on the no-visit list.

What law would it be breaking? The "cars have to work all the time" law?

Roadworthiness of vehicle definitions - I heard apparently the Autobahn has fines for running out of fuel or breaking down on it without a collision but that is a very different place and legal context.

I'm trying to say this should be explicitly illegal.

Unregulated capitalism in the US.

So the company that did this - Gig Car - can remotely shut off a vehicle in their fleet? How is this legal?

It’s sounds so dangerous! What if they lost internet on a bridge? People could really get hurt.

> It’s sounds so dangerous! What if they lost internet on a bridge? People could really get hurt.

There's actually system to do this, and I'm also amazed that this is legal. In this case though it's not that, it's simply that to unlock the car it go through a data connection. It won't shut itself, you just won't be able to unlock it without a data connection.

It's unclear but the article mentions they went for a hike and when they came back, the car wouldn't start. I don't think they can shut down the car while it's running.

Wow, this is DRM taken to a whole new level!

Technically speaking if you rent a car you don't actually own it, so I don't think this goes in the same category as other DRM-fails.

DRM doesn't have to require ownership. See Amazon's ebooks or Netflix. Not owned, but still under DRM.

ZipCar seems to have gottwn this right, probably because it was developed years ago. You have a card, and it works for your car even without cell service afaik.

Unfortunately zipcar is declining where I live so I canceled my membership. They removed the zip cars in my neighborhood and I see zip cars around less often in general.

“Gig also told me is that they offer RFID card where you kind of scan the card to get into the car. So in the case that you don't have cell service or Bluetooth, you can still get into your car.”

- From the article.

Sounds like an undocumented feature, plus you have to order it and it takes 2 weeks to arrive, so, per the article,

>it's a bit at odds with their 'hop in and go' advertising language. So, I think maybe that's why it's not stressed so much on their website.

"Get into the car" but not start the car?

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