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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Car2Go didn't work out because keeping their cars well-distributed throughout the city was an impossible problem to solve. Because of the "park anywhere" feature they would all naturally cluster at a few hotspots very early in the day and stay there. A by-the-minute car service is pointless if I have to take a taxi to get to the car.

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In Vancouver we have a local service (evo) that was competing with car2go, but since car2go pulled out they seem to be doing quite well. I suspect the reason car2go "failed" was that it was more about pushing the smartcar into the north american market that was fairly reluctant to buy smaller cars, than it was about actually providing that service. When smartcars showed they weren't going to take off here, they had no reason to keep it going.

Yeah, I've heard the theory car2go was all an attempt to advertise Smart cars, which I thought was weird... I liked the car2go service but I would never want to buy one of those cars, they drove like crap. For the purpose of getting around they were fine, but nothing more.

Are Smart cars always that crappy, or were the models used for Car2go particularly inferior? I'm not sure what the transmission was, but it wasn't a normal automatic - you could feel it go into neutral (losing power) and then engage at a higher gear.

It was an automated manual transmission. You described exactly what it was happening. The car was disengaging the clutch, changing gears, after witch it would reengage the clutch.

It was crap.

Amusingly enough, when they do it with _two_ manual transmissions, angels start to sing their praises - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-clutch_transmission

(Not kidding, that's what Porsche uses, also F1 cars etc, last time I looked)

Dual clutch transmissions are not uncommon in production cars today. VW calls them DSG (direct shift gearbox), Audi S-Tronic.

I drove a Smart for a few years. One feature of the computer controlling the transmission was that it's supposed to "learn" your driving and adjust its shifting accordingly. Mine always ran pretty darn good. I could also put the gear shifter into manual mode where it would only shift when I told it to, and it was much faster on the shifts.

The mother-in-law also had one. Hers drove like crap, much like you're describing. It's annoying to ride with her no matter what she drives. We'd do the reset procedure on hers and it would behave a bit better for a couple weeks.

I suspect the computer would have a helluva time guessing what to do next if there's a different driver every day.

It shifts like crap. We also have this transmission on an older Civic and I find myself giving up and switching to manual whenever I need to overtake or drive up a hill. Just give me a stick and a clutch or at least a sequential manual like the older convertible Smart has. My partner has developed bad urban driving practices such as accelerating and then immediately braking at a red light that could be clearley seen in order to compensate for the gearboxes' crappy behaviour. DSG double clutch is a dream to drive in compared to an automatic manual. I haven't used CVT but other drivers seem to have issues with that too.

It's basically a manual transmission that's automatically controlled. More efficient than a classic auto with a torque converter, but the shifts won't ever be as smooth (nor the acceleration from standstill.)

I heard the diesel’s were better, but I can’t confirm that firsthand since all the car2go ones were gas. They rolled out some all-electric ones towards the end and those drove quite well with none of the jerking and rocking

Assuming that a large part of the reason they 'stay there' early in the day is because people are at work, doesn't that mean that they'll naturally be distributed back to where they were when people return home?

Traditional rental car services seem to have figured out how to make it work, why can't pay-by-the-minute places do the same? Something like demand-based pricing seems like it would work well for this.

Most of these cars were used exactly for this purpose. In Seattle they would drive people from all over the city to Amazon's offices (in South Lake Union) in the morning, and back in the evening. However, the cars being used twice a day for 10-20 mins isn't exactly a winning business model for the company.

Evo in Vancouver&Victoria (https://evo.ca/) has the same model, but seems to work out. Up to now I was always able to find a car in 10min walking distance. But obviously there's some clusters of them at more frequent visited destinations.

> A by-the-minute car service is pointless if I have to take a taxi to get to the car.

I had the same problem when I was considering using Zipcar to visit Santa Cruz from San Francisco. I had no problem paying Zipcar's rate for the time it would take to travel. But Zipcar charges you for the time between when you take the car out of its designated parking spot and when you return it to the same designated parking spot, which completely defeats the purpose.

It would be better if you could return it to any empty Zipcar stall, the same way rental bike work. The app could let you claim a spot ahead of time, so that it's not taken by someone else by the time you get there.

I used zipcar when I was in college, super convenient to have in providence without having to buy or take a car to school (esp for international students). Was much better to lock it in for days rather than by the interval they had (i think it was 30 min, but this was over a decade ago for me).

Though I can see how it would be less so if you only need to go from point a to b and not back to a.

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